São Sebastião
I’m back home now after a long trip home. Basically, during the last 24 hours, I drove three and a half hours from the coast, waited at the airport for 3 hours in lots of different lines, flew the 10 hours to Houston, waited another 4 hours for my connecting flight and then 5 hours later landed in Seattle. After a lunch with Derek consisting of goat cheese salad with corn chowder and a pint of Boundary Bay Cabin Fever (YUMMY), a shower and a load of laundry, I’ve got some time to recap the last couple days on the coast.
On Tuesday afternoon, we left the hotel around 2pm to make our way to the airport to get a rental car to drive over to São Sebastião. We got the tip from one of Josh’s coworkers that it would be a great place to take a couple days to hang out on the beach. All we heard was that it was a couple hours’ drive outside of São Paulo. I got basic directions from the hotel reception and it would be very easy to get to. For economy, we decided to go super compact since we didn’t have too much stuff. I had my bags since I was going straight to the airport from the beach but everyone else could pack light so it made sense at the time.
We got to the rental counter at the airport and everything went smoothly. One of the guys spoke English, so we thought we’d ask him about getting to São Sebastião. He said the way we were told to go would take an extra 4 hours and that we should go a different way and he mapped it out for us. He also said it would take about 4 hours, not 2 like everyone else said. It jived with how long the bus would take so we decided to go with his advice. The actual cars were across the street from the airport, so we took a shuttle bus. We got to the garage and there’s a tiny tiny tiny Chevy “Life” waiting for us. I kid you not when I say that this thing was smaller than a metro. I don’t know what I was thinking, but I thought the website said it would have 4 doors. Ha! We all looked at each other and resigned ourselves to making it work and we actually did manage to shove all of our bags into it without affecting everyone’s personal space. The guy with the paperwork disappeared and finally came back 30 minutes after we had already been waiting to leave. I have no idea what he was doing, but Josh gave a pretty good explanation of the process of renting cars in Brazil, so if you see him ask him about the green forms that get sent to Ohio.
We finally got the green light and we headed out into the city and followed the directions and made it out to the freeway. It took us a good hour to get out of the city and by that point we needed a bathroom break so we stopped at the Frango Asado just as it had started raining and thundering and lightning. The storm quickly picked up in intensity and we got soaked just trying to get to the building with the food. This was a really intense storm. The building we were in didn’t have proper doors, but rather some openings with vestibules. At one point, the wind was blowing so strongly that the rain was flying in through the openings in a horizontal column that was hitting the back wall of the building. You could barely stand in the column of wind and water without getting pushed back by the force. Things were flying off the shelves and the workers were using squeegies to get the water out which had accumulated about 1 cm in the store within 5 minutes. I thought that the building or at least a wall or two could go at any minute. Eventually, the storm died down enough where we were finally able to drive safely and we eventually got out of the fried chicken death trap.
We continued along in the rain and eventually came to an extremely curvy part of road that took us down to sea level. It was an exciting drive mostly in the clouds. When we got to the bottom we still had another town to get through before São Sebastião and we were excited to finally get there with some daylight left. Unfortunately, the directions to the place we were staying were terrible and the woman at the hotel didn’t speak English and failed at any attempts to communicate with us who were not fluent in Portuguese. It should also be noted that while we were booking the rooms over the phone we had help from the very help front desk girls at the São Paulo hotel and even they had a hard time communicating with her in the same language. To add to the drama of the situation, the place doesn’t accept credit cards so we had to make a deposit into the bank account of the hotel’s owner before we left. So much to our chagrin, when we called from a pay phone to find out where the place was, all I could manage to get out of here was a street address and the fact that it was next to a soccer field and a diner. If you’ve ever been to Florida this is like saying to turn left at the house with the dolphin mailbox. We find out that the hotel is also at Camburi beach. Should be easy to find, right? Wrong. There are no signs for Camburi and everyone we ask on the road says to keep going down the road. We get to what looks like the edge of town, it’s dark now, and people keep pointing in the same direction we’re going. Finally we stop to ask for real and they say it’s about 35km down the road still. Apparently, São Sebastião extends further than the official city limits and includes the beaches in a 50km radius. Did our lovely communicative friend give us any advice about driving 40km from the city center? You bet not.
At this point, it’s late, it’s dark, everyone is hungry and tired of being in the car now for 6 hours, Lauren is pissed because in my frustration I didn’t see a speed bump and her head drove into the ceiling of the car. Why did she hit her head when we went over the bump? Well… when you drive the cheapest car every made, you don’t get things like rear seat belts, horsepower, heat or even brakes that work well. This was a brand spanking new car when we got in it. It had no heat. No heat. Rented from a city where the winter temperatures can get down into the 40s. How could you have a car and not have heat? Anyway, Lauren was wearing a hair clip and the force of her head hitting ceiling broke some teeth on the clip and left a big dent in the ceiling. That put us in even worse spirits. So in the dark, we kept driving on curvy, unfamiliar roads not even sure we were going to the right place. Finally, around 9pm, we see a sign for Camburi and there was much rejoicing. We turn down the dirt road which is like a lunar landscape and end up at a dead end with no soccer field or hotel in sight. Luckily, there’s one guy walking down the road and we get it out of him that the bridge that connects both halves of town is out and you have to get to the other side from another access road into town 2km down the road. On the other side of town, we finally see the soccer field and cheer again and shortly after, we walk into the Pousada Villa Paradiso. We set our bags down and run out to the only place in town that’s still open and end up having some great wood oven pizzas and strong caipirinhas.
The next morning, we woke up to find that we had checked into a wonderful little villa and since it was the middle of the week, we had the place to ourselves. There was a very helpful staff (except for the dingleberry with the directions), the breakfast was great and we were about 50m from the beach. The second day was rainy, but we discovered the sauna and spent a good part of the morning going between the sauna and the pool. After lunch, I packed up and got in the car for the long trip back home. Which is where I am right now. It’s not quite 8, but the time difference is starting to kick in and Uncle Buck is done on the TV. I’m going to fight off sleep for a little while longer, but I will probably need to give in soon.