The Long Journey to Brazil

One thing that we have is time. One thing that we don’t have is extra money. During the booking of this trip we had to factor that in. When you have time but no money you buy the cheapest flights possible. And then spend days regretting it. We flew to Rio from Panama City. Our flight left at 6:45am and landed in El Salvador at 8:00amlocal time (it was an hour and a half flight). We had a seven hour layover in El Salvador, which is not a super exciting airport to have a lay over in. It is long and skinny and doesn’t have free wifi. So we mostly spent the time browsing the duty free shops.

Our next flight left El Salvador at 3:02pm and it was a short 3 hour jaunt over to Bogota, Columbia where we had another lay over (a very nice airport, one I would highly recommend a layover in). After our relatively brief layover of only three hours, our flight left from Bogota to Rio at 9:56pm. Five and a half relatively sleepless hours later we landed as zombies in Rio. We did take Avianca, which made it slightly more bearable. We had touchscreen consoles with several movies, TV shows and even music to choose from and the food was not terrible.

Anyway, we got to Rio about 6am local time (about 1 hour later then Eastern Standard Time) and we were complete zombies. Fortunately, we had foreseen that this could be a problem, so when our host had asked if we wanted a driver to pick us up from the airport for an extra charge we jumped on it. Unfortunately, it was a terrifying drive, this is the observation Nick made regarding drivers in Rio- A drivers foot is always on the floor, no matter which pedal it is on. In fact, when we got to the B&B we are staying at, our drivers car was smoking. We made it to our Rio home (which is actually in Niteroi, across the bay from Rio)  about 8:30 and almost immediately fell into the bed- it felt so good to stretch out and within minutes we were asleep. We slept until about noon and decided to get up and try and salvage the day. We went and properly introduced ourselves to our hosts, and inquired about food and a grocery store. We walked to get lunch at a tiny little restaurant with lots of salads and other tasty green things and then proceeded to walk down to the beach. It felt wonderful to get out and stretch our legs after being cramped up and unused for so long as they had been. The beach was incredibly beautiful and on clear days is supposed to have an incredible view of Rio.

There are two beaches in Niteroi. Both have decent surfing (we actually found the beach by following people with surfboards). Here are some hilarious surfboard sightings we have had so far:

• A man with a surfboard in one hand and a stroller with a baby in the other hand- he was trying to meet his wife on a beach where she had gone surfing but complained that no taxis would pick him up with so much stuff (this was actually in Bocas del Toro, but hilarious and worth remembering anyway).
• 2 teen boys on a moped type bike. The one in back had a surfboard in one hand and a boogie board in the other hand.
• A man with a surfboard going down the street on his longboard.
• Not a surfboard sight but interesting anyway: in Niteroi there are Moto Taxis- motorcycle taxis, the driver even carries an extra helmet for his passengers!

 

In other news, we booked our flight to Europe using reward miles. We leave Argentina and fly overnight to Houston where we have a ten hour lay over. Then we fly overnight to Germany. The we fly to Sofia, Bulgaria. So, that should be fun. But beggars cannot be choosers and we got them using points- once again, what we do have is time.