Let me say right now that if American Airlines wanted to take on the terrorists of the world in a “how to drive people insane” contest, they’d win hands down. First of all, they showed an episode of “Everyone Loves Raymond” which was, as is par for the show as a whole, designed for the mildly retarded. They then aired three repeated versions of their “shop with us duty free” commercial, and then left the television screens dead for a few hours. At one point, we awoke to find a movie playing in the middle of the night, and barely a soul awake to appreciate it. Compared to the previous few hours when everyone was waiting for the shows to continue, it was peculiar to say the least.

Adding to this misery was the fact that they stopped the intake of fresh air on the flight. Investigations revealed someone thought it was too cold, so they had turned off the air conditioner unit. With a ten hour flight, the body heat of so many people turned the air to a stifling stinking stagnant air that reeked of body odour and general humanity. Our eyeballs were so dry in their sockets that I ended up getting a cup of water specifically for the purpose of rehydrating my sockets.

All this, and completely unable to walk anywhere in the cabin because the guy next to me speaks only Portugese and we can’t communicate what Deep Vein Thrombosis means.

Arrived at Sao Paulo eventually (never quite been so glad to get off for fresh air, and Sao Paulo does not have air that could be considered fresh at all!) and checked through customs. In all probability, if we had been wearing clown suits, and handed him a banana and a small rat when he asked for our documentation, he most likely would not have noticed. Yawning all the way through the procedure, he dutifully stamped our passports and handed back one original and one copy of the entry forms we’d had to sign upon our arrival.

The bus to Piracicaba (pronounced “pirra-si-car-bar”) was delayed, but we set off on our jaunt at 1:30pm. En route, we stopped for lunch and it was about then that it occurred to us that we knew no Portugese. Luckily, we had an English speaking assistant there to help us out, but still, we figured it would be a good idea to learn a few basic words to get us through the next few days.

As we drove through Piracicaba, a town of 300,000 residents, I watched with some interest when we stopped at traffic lights, two men with a large dog each. One of the men was peering through the railings of a garage door, and then handed his dog leash to the second man before silently clambering through the bars. Obviously up to no good, he was our first example of street crime in Brazil. Luckily for us, I thought, we were going to a much better part of the town. Two blocks later, the bus pulled up at the Nacional Inn.

We met the woman from Araiby Viagens (the travel agent organizing the IGC) who was to be our translator for the next few days, then went upstairs to sleep. Our room was described as “very comfortable” in the rating scheme for the IGC program, but frankly, we’ve seen a lot better. The air conditioner did not work, there was a funny moldy smell in the air, and the bed consisted of a 3″ foam layer on a wooden base. The mattress, incidentally, did not fit the base at all. For $US66.00 ($AUD132.00) per night, this was a bit of a surprise. Looking out the window, our immediate view is of a house with a large hole in the roof, and a burned out high-rise hotel block.

We got a new room immediately, this one with a working air conditioner and collapsed 90 seconds later, waking just in time for dinner. After dinner, the time to total loss of consciousness was again about a minute and a half, and we slept through the night without moving.

Categories: Travel, Odyssey 2001