General: Brazil > Reviews > Is there a more diverse country

Author's product rating:   

Value for Money
Shopping
Nightlife
Ease of getting around
Family Friendly

Advantages:	food, beaches, exchange rate, friendly people, sights
Disadvantages:	internal flights are expensive, internal coach travel is very long !

Recommend to potential buyers:

yes

Full review

Leaving UK soil at 6am on the 30th of June, I was prepared to arrive in Porto Alegre, Brazil 22 hours later. However, a delayed flight meant I missed the last connecting flight of the day from Rio de Janeiro. Fortunately, I was put up in a very posh hotel in the airport, where the waiter was convinced I was prince William!

My first impression when finally arriving in Porto Alegre, the south's capital city at 12am local time, was of a rundown America. It seemed everything had been touched by the American influence - from the traffic lights and overhead electricity transformers to the drive through banks (and of course McDonalds). The City’s infrastructure was much more developed than I had expected – many of the buildings were small skyscrapers – a majority of the people living in apartment blocks of 15 stories high, all with security personnel in little ‘guard towers’ behind high fences. The Brazilian’s appeared paranoid regarding their security; many shops and all banks have armed guards and metal detector systems installed between bulletproof doors. During my whole time in the city I never felt threatened or in danger. However, the security on banks seems justified as I was told that recently a security guard was shot when an attempted bank robbery was foiled at a bank next door to where I was staying.

I stayed with friends in Porto Alegre for two weeks and visited the cities numerous posh, huge and expensive shopping malls, exotic parks where everybody likes to be seen jogging or walking, museums and in contrast downtown markets where stall after stall was selling the same copied CDs, fake (or stolen) watches and 'Durabell' batteries.

Arriving during southern Brazil's winter I was pleasantly surprised for the first few days with the comfortable 15 degrees. However after one week the temperature had suddenly dropped to 5 degrees. A few days of constant rain and impressive all night thunder-storms that lead to flooding of the streets, meant it was difficult to travel around the city. Just as quickly as the cold weather and rain had come, the temperature soared up to 32 degrees and out came the sunglasses and shorts.

Gramado, a very small originally German colonised town set in the picturesque surroundings of valleys, waterfalls and canyons was where I spent my next week. A few hours drive north of Porto Alegre it is a popular, but cold (5 degrees) get-away location for the city dwellers. The town centre is just one road full of shops selling traditional southern brazil artefacts such as Chimarrão - a popular Brazilian herb tea, drunk socially from a decorated wooden 'pot' through a silver 'straw'. People can be seen carrying them in one hand while browsing market stalls and strolling through the south’s numerous parks.

The strength of the American dollar compared to the Brazilian 'Real' means the pound exchange rate is favourable and food, clothes (although it seems impossible to find shoes in American size 44!) and local merchandise and services are inexpensive. £1 is worth R$3.3 Reals, but £1 has approximately the same street value as R$1. However, CDs and electrical equipment imported directly from the U.S.A are extremely expensive due to the strong dollar and import/output taxes. Long distance coach travel was also not as cheap as I expected and unfortunately I did not have enough financial resources to travel to and stay in Rio de Janerio as I had planned.

I was able to visit Florinopolis, a 'small Rio' eight hours by coach north of Porto Alegre. Here I stayed in a hotel located in front of a curved sandy beach very similar to Rio's famous Copacabana beach. The city is located on an ‘island’ – connected to the main land only via a thin strip of land. Tall apartments lie between unspoilt beaches and high mountain ranges. One of the most beautiful, unspoilt palm tree lined beaches was accessible only via a cable car over a steep mountain range or by boat.
Florinopolis also has the worlds 5th largest Theme Park. Although the rides were not as spectacular as popular theme parks in England, the park was huge and originally built by one of Brazil’s millionaires – Beto Carrero for his two daughters. The park was originally a zoo and there were several spectacular animal shows with horses, tigers, elephants and monkeys. I could see why these shows have been banned in UK – elephants weren’t designed to walk on their front legs or stand two legged on tiny stools however spectacular it looked. The immense size of the park did mean most of the animals had plenty of room in their cages although space did seem quite unfairly distributed – four rabbits got the same space as a pony.

Brazil is a huge country. I never appreciated the vastness of the country until realising the 8 hour coach journey to Florinopolis covered only about one fifteenth of the distance of the entire coastline of Brazil. Although I spent the whole of my holiday in the very south two states – Rio Grande do Sul and Santa Catarina I learnt a lot about the North of the country as the family I was staying with used to live in Manaus – a city in the northern state of Amazonas right in the heart of the Amazon rain forest and lying alongside the Amazon river. The south of Brazil was originally colonised mainly by Europeans and as a result is modernised and the majority of people are well off. Poor people in the city collected garbage from the streets and carry them via horse drawn carts to the city’s dumps where they would receive a little money from the government – the city doesn’t have official dustmen. These people were mainly children and it was interesting to note there were no beggars on the streets – the poor people lived in shanty towns in the south of the city, although the scale of these towns was tiny when compared to Rio and Sao Paulo. The north however, has many financial problems, and governmental corruption means every day a majority of the people live in the ‘dark ages’. The huge shanty towns in Rio and Sao Paulo are mainly due people leaving the north to attempt to make a living in the richer cities of the south, but of course there are not enough jobs to go around. The vast difference in lifestyle and facilities of the two ends of the same country are hard to imagine.

Brazilians are very keen to learn English as many of the young people would like to leave their country to work and live in first world countries such as USA, Canada and Australia, as a result there are numerous English teaching centres around the city. I gave conversation classes in one of them, to a several groups, ranging from 15 year old school children to business people. Their standard of English was remarkable and I made friends with a 18 year old who was studying Computing at one of the free state universities. He had only been learning English for 1 year, but we were able to communicate easily and I soon forgot English wasn’t his first language.

Southern Brazilian cuisine was excellent, inexpensive and varied. An example was the Brazilian pizza restaurants. For R$6 (about £1.80) you can eat as much pizza as you want. But you do not get up to serve yourself – waiters walk around the tables with 30 to 40 different types of pizza, including chicken heart, seven types of cheeses, dried tomatoes and for desert, chocolate, banana, strawberry and banana split pizzas! There were seven pizza restaurants literally next door to each other in one part of Porto Alegre – the most popular of which Don Vitto was fully packed to its 100 or so capacity every single day. The other six restaurants appeared to survive off the people unable to get into Don Vitto.

I thoroughly recommend visiting Brazil. Cheap flights start at around £350 (but dont go with Alitalia - see my other op).