Not so scary Sao Paulo

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Sao Paulo has a pretty frightening reputation. Currently there are approximately 2700 homicides a year and this has halved since the year 2000.

The Department of State rates the crime rate for Sao Paulo as CRITICAL. Despite various organisations and state government entities reporting decreases in crime levels throughout Sao Paulo state, crime is still widespread with various degrees of severity. Violent crimes such as murder, rape, kidnappings, armed assaults and burglaries have become a part of normal everyday life.

We decided to give it a whirl.

We´d been recommended by some friends to stay in a neighbourhood called Villa Madelena. An arty, bohemian and above all safer part of town. We also took their advice on the hostel and stayed at Casa Club, a party hostel with only dorm rooms. The earplugs came in very handy due to the nightly chorus of snores. Lil was the only girl in our 8 bed room.

We went for a wander on our first night and found the area quite safe. The bars seemed to attract a lot of yuppies from the nearby banking district.

The next day, with map in hand, we made our way to the Subway to head Downtown to visit the city's huge daily food market and some of the other sites. Once downtown our walk from the station to the market was rather eye opening, one of the first things we saw was a man with no feet, he still managed to hobble around on his stumps though. It was quite clear that this was not a place you´d want to find yourself at night. It was very dirty, there were many homeless people and the smog stung our eyes and throat after a few minutes. It made us feel a little uneasy for the first time on our trip.

The market was fun, it had every food type you could imagine. Lots of meat and every part of the animal was available. With all this choice we went wild and bought ourselves some pasta and sauce for our tea. After this we made our way to the Cathedral in an area called Se. Again the area wouldn´t have been safe at night, but the Cathedral was stunning and felt very peaceful inside, a complete contrast to the chaos outside.

That night we went to the club under our hostel to check out the live music and have some drinks. After a few cocktails we had made friends with two guys from our room. One was German, his name was Valentine Hessler, no joke. The other was an ex Wall Street stockbroker called Chet, who´d been on the road for 18 months and had some awesome tales. The live music soon turned into a free for all karaoke session and the highlight was a Brazilian Portuguese version of Bon Jovi´s Living on a Prayer.

Some time later we found ourselves dancing on the stage with our new friends, the hostel owner and some frighteningly tall Brazilian sisters, one of whom took a shine to Luke, probably because by this stage the boys had their tops off and Luke´s rippling torso was on display!! A blur later it was 3.30am and we were clattering around our dorm trying to roll a man over to stop his incessant snoring, waking everyone up in the process.

The next morning we nursed our hangover with a Bobs Burger and got on the bus to Curitiba.

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Photos

Lil at the food market
We tried to take this descretly because we didnt want people to see our camera!