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.
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| The only vehicles allowed in Paraty |
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| 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.
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| Colorful boats, including the “Carota Linda” |
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| 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 |
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