Finding what we didn’t seek in Brazil

Written by Granville Toogood, Special to The Darien Times
Tuesday, 28 April 2009 13:21

Dispatches to Darien: Brazil Part V

We are on a small plane heading north to Porto Seguro. From the air we can see the private beach estancias carefully hidden in all the green. Our second flight takes us farther north to Salvador, the Afro-centric cultural and historical capitol of Bahia state. At 9 that night we are preparing to board our third flight to push even farther north. The airport is full of people. Here day flows into night and night into day, with flights coming and going around the clock. After midnight until 6 in the morning some three dozen flights will depart to destinations all over Brazil. With luck, we hope to be in our pousada in Olinda, another World Heritage Site outside the tropical hell hole of Recife, before midnight.

Searching for paradise down a long, bumpy and muddy road

Written by Granville Toogood, Special to The Darien Times
Tuesday, 28 April 2009 13:05

Dispatches to Darien: Brazil Part IV

Getting to Trancoso — touted as a rustic and charming fishing village where billionaires beach comb with the locals — is a pilgrimage. For us, the journey takes two days, first driving to the central city of Belo Horizonte, where we spend the night in an airport hotel, then flying the next day to steamy Porto Seguro, where were met by a taxi, ferried across a muddy river, then driven two more hours to Trancoso. We would like to say the trek is worth it, but it is not.

Ouro Preto: Golden city of Brazilian independence

Written by Granville Toogood, Special to The Darien Times
Tuesday, 28 April 2009 12:55

Dispatches to Darien: Brazil Part III

What a stunning surprise to arrive at Rio’s very modern international airport on a quiet Sunday and find the place almost empty (a luxury we will not experience again in Brazil). The terminal is new and immaculate, the food fresh, wholesome and delicious, the shops full of great stuff. And the TAM 737 to Belo Horizonte is clean and new and staffed with a stylish, smiling team of flight attendants. In the weeks ahead, we will discover that Brazil’s domestic airline operations, for all their maddening added costs, eclipse U.S. carriers by a long shot in on-time performance, cleanliness, new aircraft, schedule frequency, and the sheer numbers of impressively cheerful employees.

Brazil Lesson No. 2: Never rent a car

Written by Granville Toogood, Special to The Darien Times
Tuesday, 28 April 2009 12:22

Dispatches to Darien: Brazil Part II

In virtually every country we have ever visited, we have rented cars, even in Lebanon, where we drove through a war zone, and later 1,200 miles across the Atlas mountains and deserts of Morocco without seeing another car. But Brazil is out of the question.

Road signs are nonexistent or misleading, and posted only in Portugese. If you need to ask directions, no one speaks English. Worse, Brazilian roadside travel advisors have been known to indulge in mischief at the expense of foreigners, and you might find yourself zooming off in the wrong direction on a wild goose chase that may take hours to unravel.

A month in Brazil in search of paradise lost

Written by Granville Toogood, Special to The Darien Times
Tuesday, 28 April 2009 11:00

Dispatches to Darien: Part I

Not counting the urban Frankenstein that is Mexico City, few places in the world reveal the distressing impact of man like Sao Paulo, Brazil.

After a 10-hour flight from New York, the clouds part and a surreal megalopolis unfolds below: a plasmatic jumble of crumbling shanty towns and basic government housing carpeting hill and valley as far as the eye can see — 100 miles, we later learn, from one edge of the city to the other.

This galloping super sprawl has spread like a cancer in just the last 20 years, the result of millions of largely illiterate, impoverished country folk flocking to the city for a better life, which they rarely, if ever, find.