After another steamy night we were happy to be on the road to someplace we hoped would be more suited to the climate. We headed to the bus station early and (in what would become another running theme) the bus turned out to be nicer than our hotel room.
A bit of an aside here. With the exception of Bolivia, intercity buses in most South America are not what you might expect. They are nice. Very nice. They make most airlines look bad and all other buses I’ve seen look absurdly shitty (that’s right Greyhound, I’m talking to you). Imagine, if you can, a bus with A/C, very comfortable, (almost horizontally) reclining chairs, sort of clean bathrooms, assigned seating and even decent dinner service in Argentina and Peru. There appear to be two main reasons for the quality. First, a lot of people use buses rather than planes. There is a huge lower-middle class in Brazil and Argentina (where I'm guessing this trend began) and they need to travel to do business, visit family and go on holiday but they can’t always afford to fly. We were almost always the only tourists on the buses, so the industry is booming and it’s supported almost entirely by the local economy. Second, there is a lot of competition. If a company doesn’t have dinner or comfy seats they’ll have trouble keeping customers.
Heading to Paraty I noticed a few things outside of the bus as well. Firstly, now that we were headed to the beach it was raining and it rained pretty much all day. A good day for a bus ride but a bit of an ill omen for our coming beach days. Secondly, there were cows grazing under palm trees. I tried about a dozen times to get a good picture of this Brazilian phenomenon but I never managed a good shot from the bus window. Thirdly, waterfalls in Brazil are almost as common as trees. One that we passed an hour or so from Paraty was at least a hundred metres high. In any other country it would be a big deal, but in Brazil? Meh, there are like six more around the corner. The few hours on our luxury transport passed quickly, as my wife slept most of the way and I day-dreamed out the window, trying to imagine what it would have been like a few hundred years ago when the Portuguese settled.
A bit of an aside here. With the exception of Bolivia, intercity buses in most South America are not what you might expect. They are nice. Very nice. They make most airlines look bad and all other buses I’ve seen look absurdly shitty (that’s right Greyhound, I’m talking to you). Imagine, if you can, a bus with A/C, very comfortable, (almost horizontally) reclining chairs, sort of clean bathrooms, assigned seating and even decent dinner service in Argentina and Peru. There appear to be two main reasons for the quality. First, a lot of people use buses rather than planes. There is a huge lower-middle class in Brazil and Argentina (where I'm guessing this trend began) and they need to travel to do business, visit family and go on holiday but they can’t always afford to fly. We were almost always the only tourists on the buses, so the industry is booming and it’s supported almost entirely by the local economy. Second, there is a lot of competition. If a company doesn’t have dinner or comfy seats they’ll have trouble keeping customers.
Heading to Paraty I noticed a few things outside of the bus as well. Firstly, now that we were headed to the beach it was raining and it rained pretty much all day. A good day for a bus ride but a bit of an ill omen for our coming beach days. Secondly, there were cows grazing under palm trees. I tried about a dozen times to get a good picture of this Brazilian phenomenon but I never managed a good shot from the bus window. Thirdly, waterfalls in Brazil are almost as common as trees. One that we passed an hour or so from Paraty was at least a hundred metres high. In any other country it would be a big deal, but in Brazil? Meh, there are like six more around the corner. The few hours on our luxury transport passed quickly, as my wife slept most of the way and I day-dreamed out the window, trying to imagine what it would have been like a few hundred years ago when the Portuguese settled.
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