We only planned one week in Brazil expecting to go to soak in Carnaval and see some of the sights. What we didn’t plan for was accommodations. We looked around at hostels and hotels and nothing was reasonably priced. I mean $80 USD a night per person for a mattress in a room with 19 other people?!? That rate really existed, but most weren’t in a room that large. Plus since it’s Carnaval, a minimum 5 to 7 night stay. We “tricked” the system and booked for the 2 nights after when prices returned to normal.

What to do until then? Check out Sao Paulo! From Puerto Iguazu, Argentina we found a bus to Sao Paulo. The fun part is the boarder crossing. First, we take a local bus to the central bus station. Then, get on a special boarder crossing bus. Funny thing is since it runs all the time, it drops people off at the boarder and continues on. Most people don’t need to get off since they are residents of either country, but since we’re not we were left there. We were left to our honor system to actually walk over the crossing station instead of just walking right on through. Good thing we did because we needed a slip of paper that lets us leave Brazil.

While waiting for the next bus boarder crossing bus to pick us up we spotted the bus company that we were getting on to go to Sao Paulo. This is when we realized Portuguese is not closely related enough to Spanish. After a couple of minutes of English/Spanish/hand gestures, the driver let us on even though it wasn’t our bus. We just wanted to get to the bus station instead of standing around. Once we got the to bus station, we had an hour before we got on our 16 hour, overnight bus ride to Sao Paulo.

Happy Valentine’s Day! Although not really celebrated from what we could tell. We arrived at 8 am, ditched our bags at the hostel and hit the town. Since it was Sunday and Carnaval week, lots of stuff was closed and very quiet, but still beautiful to see. We also learned that Carolyn’s friend in Rio was willing to show us around starting on the 16th, the last day of Carnaval! So we shorted our trip to Sao Paulo and walked around taking in as many tourist sights as possible. We saw Banespa (the Empire State Building), the Cathedral, juice stands all accessible by the subway which was very nice and cool! We also got a chance to see Sao Paulo’s version of Carnaval. It’s more like a block party that hits the streets. People sell street food and drinks and then a semi-organized marching band starts playing and people with banners take the crowd into the streets for dancing and singing. Everyone young and old are having a great time. We followed the party for about an hour and couldn’t figure out where they were going and if there was a grand finale. We found out the next morning that the whole thing takes about 5 hours and they just make a loop back to the same park they started from. I’m glad we didn’t follow them until 3 am!

Tomorrow morning we are heading back to the bus station to find ourselves a bus to Rio, it is advertised as a 6 hour ride.