Part 2: São Paulo — Paraty, September 25-27.

After our exhausting 8-mile-walk Sunday in 90+ degree heat and the intense but vicarious excitement of São Paulo’s triumph in the Copa do Brasil, we took it slightly easier on Monday.

A morning walk through some less than beautiful streets brought us to the strange, hippy-alternative art world of “Batman Alley” - the Beco de Batman. Most of the streets of São Paulo are straight and right-angled, but this area is a maze of small alleys, with all the walls graffitied with huge and very skillful street art. Every surface including doorsteps, trash bins, and lamp posts are painted in weird and wonderful art.

In São Paulo and most other big cities, everyone uses a phone app called 99 to summon taxis. It is much cheaper than Uber, and most of the fare goes to the driver, so we made good use of it to get round the huge city of 12 million people. The drivers uniformly do not speak English, but are happy to try to communicate with us on many topics, but particularly how terrible the other drivers are and how bad the rush-hour traffic is.

The second half of the morning we spent in the Parque Ibarapuera — São Paulo’s equivalent of Central Park — with lovely flowering trees, lakes, interesting birds, and sadly many closed museums.  Monday is their day off (bad planning on our part).

São Paulo has reputedly some of the best Japanese restaurants outside of Japan, and there is certainly a huge population of Japanese origin. So, we found a lovely little restaurant with one counter seating about 20 people and 4 cooks working furiously in a tiny kitchen preparing delicious food. It looks quite dangerous with boiling oil, many sharp knives and opportunities for collisions. We had a delicious meal…

Yesterday, we left our little hotel in the Pinheiras district and taxied along the horrifyingly polluted Tiete river to the main bus station, where you can catch buses to almost anywhere in South America. We took a very comfortable bus for a 6 hour journey through the Central Valley east of SP, then over some hair-raising mountain roads to the Atlantic coast, eventually arriving in the extraordinarily quaint and tiny town of Paraty, built in colonial times and now a world heritage site. The old city is closed to all traffic by large chains across the streets. The “cobbled” streets themselves are extremely rough on pedestrians and wheeled suitcases, more easily navigated by horse-drawn buggies. They are “paved” with ballast stone from Portuguese ships in the 17th century, which filled up with gold mined in central Brazil for the return trip to Europe. The town itself is beautiful and picturesque, as is our hotel, which has high ceilings, antique furniture, beautiful wood floors, pan-tiled roofs and very helpful staff. We plan to spend a couple of days here taking it easy, using the hotel pool, exploring the churches, museums and alleys, and enjoying the restaurants, especially today which is Lin’s birthday. 

The only vehicles allowed in Paraty

Rough cobbled streets

The harbor is filled with colorful boats ready to take visitors to island beaches on daylong booze cruises, some looking distinctly less seaworthy than others. The weather is alternately hot and dry and overcast and humid.

Colorful boats, including the “Carota Linda”

Museum of dilapidated maritime machinery

Sadly, Paraty is seeing the effects of coastal erosion and rising sea levels. At high tide, the streets round our hotel are flooded for a couple of hours. The locals seem unconcerned as long as the tide goes out before the restaurants open for dinner.

High tide on Main Street

Part 1: São Paulo September 23 - 24, 2023

 It is a long time since we posted anything on this blog. We haven’t done much adventure traveling recently. This is our first unscripted holiday in a long time. 

We arrived in São Paulo on Saturday morning after an uneventful overnight flight from Newark. São Paulo is not a beautiful city, but it has its charms. We Ubered from the airport through heavy traffic, avoiding potholed roads and stretches of construction, to our little “hotel” in the quiet district of Pinheiros. With excellent reviews on our favorite web site Booking.com, we were a little surprised to have a room with no window, and to find that breakfast was do-it-yourself, with a hot plate and frying pan provided, along with big brown eggs, cereals, fruit juices, fresh fruit, bread, and excellent coffee. We are not complaining.

We are a bit unlucky to arrive at the start of an early heatwave. 93 yesterday and 96 today. Low humidity, however, makes it bearable, and there are plenty of air conditioned shops and galleries we can take refuge in.

Some observations about São Paulo:

• People are very polite and courteous. On the subway escalators everyone stands on the right to let the speedier people pass. They leap up to let us old people sit in the seats reserved for the elderly.
• There is an astonishing variety of complexions and body types, many tattooed — African, Asian European and every mixture in between. Some women, especially young ones are tall, many nearly 6 feet. Old people are shorter and wider.
• Styles of dress vary widely. Men in suits, or neat shirts and slacks, or tee shirts and shorts, or even bare-chested. Women in tight and revealing outfits, or long and flowing robes and everything in between. 
• Today so many male and female soccer fans, in red and black striped shirts supporting SPFC (São Paulo Futbol Club). They were playing in the final of the Copa do Brasil match today, and we got caught up in all the excitement.
• We visited the main market — so many varieties of fruit, many with no English names. At one stall we were plied with samples of many, some excellent and some weird. We eventually bought a mango weighing over 2 lbs that was the best we have ever tasted. Other stalls were selling less tempting varieties of dried cod — they seem to love their “bacalao”. 
• Today, the Main Street of the city, the Avenida Paulista, was closed to traffic and was packed with people enjoying every variety of live music — samba, heavy metal, punk, etc. — and dancing, sometimes solo and sometimes in large and well choreographed groups. Vendors along the sidewalks sold art and handicrafts, baked goods, clothing, jewelry, weed and drinks. 
• We visited a beautiful exhibit in the Japanese Cultural Center of very inventive miniature art made from everyday objects — a set of brushes being harvested by tiny farmers, a temple made from polystyrene food containers, a little fisherman sitting on the edge of a cup of soup — so imaginative.
• São Paulo suffers from almost New Delhi level wiring chaos. Every lamppost is decked with hundreds of power, phone, cable TV and other wires in vast profusion.
  

Later….

Now we have a power cut and will be out of electricity for 2-3 hours. Everyone is at home with the A/C on and watching the big match on TV.

So, our host, Jessica, owns a bar not far away, and said we could go there and have free drinks and burgers while the power was out. What an insane scene! It was the final minutes of the final of the Copa do Brasil, which São Paulo has never won. They were 2-1 in the lead and managed to hold on for the win. The bar and indeed the whole street erupted with delirious fans jumping, screaming, chanting, singing, dancing whenever their team got the ball…the most Brazilian scene ever. When the final whistle blew the already crazy scene got even crazier. People were in tears, overwhelmed with emotion after their team won the national championship for the first time ever. They were very well behaved fans, taking selfies in front of the TV, revving their bike and car engines, waving flags and applauding. No overturned cars or lamppost climbing,

We are looking forward to one more (cooler) day in São Paulo tomorrow before we leave for Paraty, an old colonial town on the coast.

Little guy fishing in a cup of green tea

Dry cod

Lin in Japan town area of São Paulo

Wiring chaos

Dancing on the Avenida Paulista

Going crazy after São Paulo wins the Copa do Brasil