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So Brazil (pronounced something like the title in Portuguese). Turns out the Spanish and the Portuguese dreamt up some line of longitude to separate their New World empires. Then they discovered Brazil. Or something like that. Long and short of that is they don't even bother speaking Spanish here. Well that's no bloody good, is it?!

BRA-ZEEOO!!!

Graham Perkins
2006-08-21 13:07:04

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So Brazil (pronounced something like the title in Portuguese). Turns out the Spanish and the Portuguese dreamt up some line of longitude to separate their New World empires. Then they discovered Brazil. Or something like that. Long and short of that is they don't even bother speaking Spanish here. Well that's no bloody good, is it?!

Anyways, four months of lazily travelling far too slowly meant so far I'd cut short my stay in Costa Rica from three weeks to two days, scrubbed around Panama altogether and put Cuba off until later. So far so good.

Flying into Sao Paulo late January was a bit of a shock really. My biggest problems were assuming I'd be fine with Spanish - which I guess now is getting pretty OK - and not having a guidebook. English language books in Rio are surprisingly thin on the ground and it wasn't until the fourth day of looking that I found one I was happy with. Meanwhile I was in a rather dull hostel in the district of Botofogo; a nice residential part of town but with fuck-all for tourists. Oh, and it was raining every day 'cos I'd rocked up in the wet season.

So in 1502 some Portuguese fella found Brazil. In short, he sailed into Guanabara Bay: thought it was a river, noted it was January and called the whole place Rio de Janeiro.

After a week there I decided to leave and give the weather a chance to clear up. Stretching 170 miles west from Rio is the rather tasty Costa Verde with the cute little colonial town of Paraty at one end of it, six hours away by bus. Lovely little place even if the cobbled streets really were a pain in the arse. I mean, there's quaint and then plain backwardness. They have been warned that one morning they're gonna wake up to find that, with the help of a lorry full of tar, I'll have dragged their sorry little town into the 21st century. After three nights there I made my way back towards Rio, attempting to stop off at Isla Grande ...