Well I've had a really crap time here in Rio and I do now wish that I had gone straight out to Sao Paulo or even skipping there too and going on directly to Peru which is where I know I have friends who will not let me down.
I know that my blog is not the most grammatically correct and a little bit jumpy in places, all I can say is that any final book will be a lot more polished and I don't want to waste too much time writing a great first draft instead of being out there actually trying to enjoy myself.
Oh, but just before I carry on where I left off I forgot to say that I got kicked out of a British style restaurant ( that only served jacket potatoes ) for trying to take a photograph of the counter.
Anyway, yesterday was a totally crap day and after I had the row with the hostel boss and got kicked out for giving them a bad review I had to take a midnight bus to Sao Paulo for BR $78.
Finding the bus station wasn't that hard by using the metro and then a connecting bus and despite the fact that not one person on the entire station seemed to speak English I managed to purchase a ticket.
However getting on the bus was another matter as they refused to let me on the bus til I had completed a form, even though the form was all in Portuguese, no one could translate it or tell me what I was meant to put in the boxes and I was only going from one Brazilian city to another.
Using a lot of guess work, and I bet that I got some of it wrong, I put down as much information as possible except the document no, which turned out to be my passport number and that pissed me off even more as I hadn't thought to keep it to hand and had to go turing out half my bag in order to find it in the middle of a busy train station at a quarter to midnight.
Finally they let me in and I had a little run around trying to find my seat, and if you have never been in a Brazilian overnight coach before let me tell you that the numbers don't go in sequence like a airplane but round the clock up one side and down the other.
Luckily I managed to find it before the bus started up and I hoped that this would be the end of a bad time, if only...
At about 5am the bus pulled into a layby so that the driver could stretch his legs and then when he got back in he couldn't get it up and running again. So at the coldest time in the day, surrounded by a bunch of crazy half asleep Brazilians all swearing and demanding things that I couldn't understand I had to wait in the cold for the next coach to come by about half an hour later.
When I checked my luggage on the first bus they stuck a sticker on it just like they might on a flight, and as the other half of the ticket was on the wrong bus now I chose to sit with my ruckscak on my lap for the remainder of the journey as I certainly wasn't going to want to fight to get my bag back when we finally reached Sao Paulo.
I still had no map for Sao Paulo and so I was again using only my googlemap + digital camera to find my way around, and to be honest if it wasn't for there I would have be forced to get taxis almost everywhere I wanted to go in Brazil. I only hope that Peru for me is a much better trip.
I arrived finally at my hotel where I had to wait ages before I could check in as the room was not ready or prepared for me at 7am, and so I got a chance to relax in a bit of comfort in their reception til it was ready, and then I would just try to eat and sleep the days away as I have nothing to see or do in Sao Paulo and no one to spend it with.
Bring on Peru cos from where I am sitting Brazil has got nothing going for it and the sooner I leave the better.
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