Brazil

I have spent a fair amount of time in Brazil but have yet to write about it so I decided it was time to post some impressions.

I spent a couple months living in Sao Paulo in 2002. I traveled around the country some at that time, and then traveled around again in 2007 – I spent a total of a few weeks in Rio de Janeiro, a few days in Iguacu Falls (at the border of Argentina, Paraguay and Brazil) and another week in the Northeast, primarily in a chilled out beach town called Jericoacoara. I also spent another week of work in Sao Paulo in December 2008.

Overall, I am a big fan of Brazil.

It has a very unique, fun vibe. It feels quite different to me than the rest of South America – the Spanish speaking portions of the continent have much more in common with each other than Brazil for sure.

The culture of Rio is amazing. The beach culture was fun and the festive atmosphere was contagious. The physical beauty of Rio is spectacular as well. Rio is a dense city intertwined with crazy mountains, rock formations in the ocean, and stunning white sands beaches. The views from the top of the Sugarloaf Mountain just off the shore (Pao de Acucar) and the Christo statue overlooking downtown are amazing.

I loved the juice shops on every corner (crushing lots of crazy fruits I had never even heard of into amazing juices). The ubiquitous cheesy bread (Pao de Queijo) is amazing. The coffee is world’s better (and stronger) than American coffee. I’ve also had a ton of fantastic (and fun) meals at churrascarias where the meat is served on swords by waiters who season and serve their own cuts of beef (quite similar to the Fogo de Chao chain here in the US).

Soccer in Brazil is worth an entire post in itself, but suffice it to say that seeing a game at Maracana stadium in Rio (which holds 100,000+ screaming dancing firework shooting fans) is an experience in itself. While I went to two relatively unimportant games, both had more than 50,000 people I’d guess, and the fans of each team were separated from each other by big fences and from the field by a huge moat surrounding the playing area.

The few off-the-beaten-path places that I have visited have also been great. Jericoacoara is as remote feeling of a place as I have ever been. You access the town by taking a 4x4 until the highway ends, then drive literally along the beach for an hour until you reach the little town. From there, you can walk the sandy “streets” from restaurant to bar to surf shop or explore the surrounding area by dune buggy. (Locals are happy to ferry you and your dune buggy across various little streams and rivers). There are also great dunes for hiking up, hanging out on, and sand boarding down. Amazing.

Iguacu Falls can also be very cool. I went during a good rainy season and it was fantastic. The falls are set right in the middle of the jungle and have these rickety metal catwalks that you can climb on right over these massive crashing falls. You would never be allowed to get this close to Niagara Falls, and in my opinion the falls are more spectacular than Victoria Falls in Zimbabwe. I do think the experience is very weather dependent though – I have heard that in a very dry season things can slow to a trickle.

There are also a ton of other places I want to go to which I have not made it to. Salvador – an Afro-Brazilian cultural and musical hub in the center of the coast, the Pantanal region deep inland, and some of the white sand beaches in the south of the country are atop my list.

On the downside, however, Brazil definitely feels much more dangerous than probably any other place I have traveled. I generally avoided Copacabana which is the famous beachfront area of Rio which overflows with prostitutes and generally shady characters who cater to American and European partiers. Fortaleza (city in the Northeast) did not seem particularly pleasant or safe. Most of Sao Paulo is not safe to walk around in alone after dark. While I don’t think these safety concerns make Brazil a place to avoid entirely, it is definitely worth having your wits about you at all times and only going out in groups at night.

Also, perhaps more than anywhere else in the world, there is a massive disparity between the very rich and very poor. The urban poor have built favelas or basically ghetto communities that support as many as 1 million people, and generally have their own justice systems, utilities, political organization, and (often gang-controlled) industries. Unlike a lot of the cities in Africa where the poor are relegated to the fringes of town, these favelas are built right into the fabric of the city. In both Sao Paulo and Rio, you can walk across the street from some of the cities nicest most modern skyscrapers and be in the heart of an extremely poor community.

Despite the raging poverty in many parts, Brazil has improved its economic situation over the past 10 years nearly as dramatically as India or China, though with much less press coverage (it is definitely the least talked about “BRIC” country). While corruption and the rich/poor gap remain major issues, the outlook (at least until the past few months) is brighter than it has been in decades. Brazil has become a clean fuel leader, and most cars run on sugar cane ethanol which is 8 times more efficient than the corn-based ethanol that has failed here in the US. There are still other, very serious environmental problems, perhaps the largest being significant deforestation in the Amazon, but this is one of the world’s biggest green success stories.

It is not yet clear how the economic downturn will affect Brazil, but in my view it is an under-appreciated economic and tourist destination, and I hope it will continue to prosper. And I hope to go back and spend even more time there.