Back to Brazil: Florianopolis

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The trip slowed down a bit after leaving Argentina. We spent a day in Porto Alegre, which is in southern Brazil, but didn't do much other than go to a samba club and speak English and broken Spanish to a bunch of Brazilians that usually had no idea what we were saying. In Brazil, we have been banking off the fact that the Brazilians know enough Spanish to communicate.

We then took a flight to our next stop, Florianopolis. This spot was one I was really looking forward to because its an island off the coast of Brazil with really awesome beaches and good surf, which would be a nice change of pace from all of the big cities we've been traveling through. The only problem is that its winter in Brazil. This wasn't at all a problem in Rio, it was 90 degrees at times, but Florianopolis is further south so the weather was in the mid 60s. Not exactly beach weather, plus it was raining at times and the wind made the surf horrible. It still would have been a cool place to hang out for a couple days, despite the bad weather, but no one was in the town. During the winder, the population drop to 1/4 of what it is in the summer. In fact, our hotel was 4 stories but only had 4 rooms filled.

We ended up sticking it out for a day and a half and taking a drive around the island. Every beach we went to you could see that the place would be great in the summer but was cold in the winter and most places were closed. After checking out the island, I decided to cancel my surf trip that I had organized for the next day, since it was going to rain anyways, and we decided to head to Sao Paulo to see if we could catch an early flight to Amsterdam. Amsterdam is our connection to Egypt, but we were scheduled to have a long layover so we decided to extend it to an overnight stay.

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