in Brazil

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We landed in Rio around noon and had to go thru passport control and customs. My bag was already on the luggage conveyor when we got there. We waited and waited and waited for Shelly’s. She finally went over to talk with the Delta guy and hum there was a pile of luggage there that had been pulled off early. Her 2 bags were there. We then went thru customs and met our driver. He spoke no English but that wasn’t a problem. We thought the drive to Paraty was 3 hours. Wrong, it took us 4.5 hours. It was a beautiful drive. 90% of the time we were driving in or at the base of mountains, 75 % of the time we were driving along the coast and 15% of the time we were in the Rio (industrial region).

I know Susan this adds up to more than 100% but not if they all overlap at times. Most of the drive was in the mountains along the coast. I would think we are driving away from the coast and when we crested the hill, there was more coast. Often times though we followed all the bays and peninsulas. If we could have driven a straight line it would have probably taken a little over an hour. I wish I could have gotten some pictures.

Outside of Rio, the traffic was stop and go for an hour. It was crazy. People were selling stuff (water, food,…) on the side of the road or even in the road (walking between lanes). I think that was part of the slow down but another major part was the tunnel that was a single lane in both directions. So, multiple lanes of traffic had to get into single file.

There is an odd driving habit here, if you are on the highway and want to turn left, what do you do? You get in the right lane (breakdown lane). This allows other cars to pass, but to me, it seems idiotic as now you have to watch traffic in 2 directions in order to turn. They also had some temporary left turn offs that were interesting (hard to describe but I’ll try). The real road goes straight but it is temporarily blocked and the traffic is sent to the right in 2 lanes that semi circle back to the straight road. In the middle the left lane peals off to the left and crosses all the lanes of traffic. I know is temporary because I saw places that had the same set up but the road wasn’t blocked and blocked roads that looked like they were paved yesterday. I guess it’s some kind of traffic control

We passed a couple of buses that I can’t imagine anyone else fitting in. There were 5 people just in the front area by the driver. They were packed.

We stopped once at a Shell station and used the restrooms and grabbed a snack. Luckily I had some reals from the last time I was here about 8 years ago. We still need to get a lot more but it was nice to be able to get snacks.

We finally made it to Paraty and in town there are cobblestone streets. Major bumpy. Shelly said we sure off the beaten path, I told her no, this path was beaten and was beating us. The driver couldn’t get us all the way to the hotel as many of the roads don’t allow traffic but he got us close and we carried our bags about 2 blocks. The room is nice with a balcony onto the street. The hotel is probably at least 100 years old. I think it was an old house that was converted. It is located in a great area, central to everything.

We cleaned up and then got ready to go out on the town. Boy those cobblestone streets are hard on my knee. We found a nice corner café and had a beer. Tim they have Chirros here. We then headed back to our hotel to find out if we got the reservations for dinner, nope so we ate at the hotel as it was one of the restaurants we were told was very good. The had “see food” loved it and took a picture of the menu but I had the beef. We had a Malebec we have had in the states for wine. We had several of the waiters tell us some of the Portuguese words and we had the electricity come on and off about 5 times. All in all it was great. After that we headed to bed. Internet here is well, very bad so you’re just getting Saturday’s run down. I’ll try to get todays activities down after dinner.

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