Our journey home from the waterfalls turned out to be rather interesting, about two hours into our journey the bus stopped randomly. Grace and I were just falling asleep after an hour of moving around to get into a comfy position. The interior bus lights came on and in our sleepy haze we looked up to find three federal police men standing in the entrance, one with a massive gun (!) I thought I was dreaming and closed my eyes again; it was only when they started to deliver a long speech all in Portuguese that I realized that it was real! One of the police men checked the toilet at the back and stood there, one stood in the middle and the other one in the doorway with his massive gun (he was quite old with a beard and also wore a woolly hat, the whole look made him actually look quite funny).
We drove for another hour with the police men onboard and then the bus pulled into a federal police building. The middle man spoke again in Portuguese and asked if everyone understood what he said, us and two boastful Australian men behind us asked if he could translate into English. When he did he said there was nothing to worry about, that they were from Brazilian Customs and were here to stop illegal electrical goods from the Paraguay markets entering Brazil´s markets in Sao Paulo and Rio.
Waiting at the police building were another 8 police men, one of the main men went to the back of the bus and got 5 young men in their twenties off. I had the seat window so I watched as they all got off and got their very large square bags out of the bus. All of the police men looked as if they knew the young men already, probably repeat offenders.
They cut open all of the bags to reveal ´´Motorola´´ mobile phones, DVD players, ´´Samsung´´ CD players and some other larger electrical goods. I worked out that one bag contained about 48 mobile phones. Then police men then put all of the goods into very large plastic bags, cable tided them up and took them away, numbering each bag and giving the number to another police man who was filling out paper work for each of the offenders.
The police then came back on the bus and got 2 girls off then 3 more older people, then sorted through their luggage. The older people’s luggage did not contain anything illegal and were allowed back on the bus, as well as one of the girls and a man but the others were taken away and did not return to the bus. All the while the man with the gun stood by watching and each of the offenders when being questioned was surrounded by police. This took one hour to complete meaning that our 14 hour bus journey was now going to be 17 hours!
Grace was not very happy about being woken up and dozed throughout the police searches; she was also more worried that the police would go through our own bags only for them to be greeted with a bag full of dirty washing and lots of bird merchandise!
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