The Journey And The Arrival

The Girlfriend and I were sitting in the lounge a few weeks back, staring at a finger painting of the baby Jesus which I drew on the wall, as our DVD player had stopped working and we needed to watch something. As we were both bored and it was a Friday, we naturally decided to fly to Rio De Janeiro, Brazil, for a couple of weeks. Here with a vivid and in no way made up recount of our adventures.

This is what the Brazillian flag looks like.

For the geographically challenged, Brazil is a country situated in South America, and is famous for their soccer, samba, and beautiful beaches. (I said beaches, not bitches, I wasn’t trying to be all “gangster”)

Brazil is also a mammoth 10 hour flight away from South Africa, and is basically situated on the edge of the world, if you happened to be of the belief that the Earth was flat. I of course tend to struggle with long distances, and so required a fair amount of heavy medication in order to get through the initial traveling ordeal. So much so, that The Girlfriend reluctantly ended up slinging me over her shoulder and carrying me around as we first caught our connecting flight from Cape Town to Johannesburg, boarded the plane for Sau Paulo, before finally boarding the flight which would take us to our primary destination, Rio De Janeiro.

It was on the Sau Paulo to Rio De Janeiro flight where the meds wore off and I eventually came to, and thus made the startling discovery that air travel in Brazil seems to be in a perpetual time warp, one where female flight attendants are still expected to wear short skirts, tight white tops with push up bras, and heavy glamour model makeup.

An example of a Brazilian air hostess uniform.

To be fair, the above is probably a slight exaggeration, but you get my point. Not that I was complaining mind you, it made a refreshing change to the rather conservative attire worn by South African Airways staff, who resembled nuns or Catholic primary school teachers, and it left me with a contented semi despite sitting next to an overweight Mexican with disturbingly hairy hands.

Eventually, after what felt like a 24 hour journey (it was actually about 16) we arrived at our hotel in Rio. We would be staying in a suburb called “Santa Theresa”, which is Portuguese for “Santa Theresa” and was described in a brochure as an “artsy suburb”.

For the readers familiar with Cape Town, it had a bit of an Observatory vibe about it, minus the white hippies with dreadlocks. Think narrow roads with multi-coloured semi detached houses, plentiful trees and cobbled streets – actually, that would be more of a Bo-Kaap vibe come to think of it. Okay, imagine that Observatory and Bo-Kaap got drunk and had casual sex on the bathroom floor, nine months later their offspring would probably resemble what Santa Theresa is all about.

Santa Theresa - The love child of Obs and Bo-Kaap.

So that was that then. We unpacked our bags, tried to work out what had been stolen from our luggage during the flight (our zips and locks were damaged) and then called it a night. The following few days promised to be an exciting time, as we planned on hitting the beaches, the tourist spots, as well as some of their night clubs. More on that a bit later.

Oakes signing off.

Shaun Oakes

This was written by the hulking mass of manliness known as Shaun Oakes. If you enjoyed what he had to say, you owe it to yourself to follow him on Twitter at @shaunoakes. Do it now.