Author: Isabelle Vaudrey

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!

Sorry for our lack of blogs over the last few days, we are staying at the head of conservations apartment, she does not have wifi so we have to use her computer that is in Português, has a funny keyboard, auto corrects words into Portuguese and the mouse broke yesterday so we have had to borrow one from the Pinacoteca today (Friday)!

On to Sunday….

Sunday started well a good breakfast of rolls and doce de leite with coconut for me and Grace has sliced banana on her roll. Very tasty.

We packed up our belongings (but left them in lockers to collect later), settled our bill and said goodbye to our new Mexican and Peruvian friends. We confidently trekked out of the hostel gates in search of the bus stop that was supposedly just around the corner, when we waited at the corner for 15 minutes we decided to go to the shop opposite to get some water and food just in case we couldn´t get any. While in the shop we asked where the bus stop was and the kind men (drinking beer at 10:30am) pointed to a road and told us to go down there. We found a bus stop down a quite rural town road and waited another 20 minutes. When no bus had arrived yet we decided to go and find a bus stop around the corner on a busier road, when we did we waited for 20 minutes on the wrong side of the road and watched a bus drive past, so we went to right side and got out some Ruffles (crisps) to eat while we waited and waited. We then gave up and hailed a taxi to the bus terminal. The taxi driver drove us to the wrong bus terminal; he started to take us to the other one and then suggested he drove us to the waterfalls. We told him to stop before the waterfalls and dropped us at the Bird Park instead. The taxi was R$70 or 20 English pounds between us both, a bit more expensive than the R$2.85 or 85p each bus ride.

The Bird park itself was very interesting, full of a massive selection of native Brazilian species, and guess what…it´s time for lots of photos…

We loved looking at all of the different types of birds, plant life and animals there; it was exactly what we thought Brazil would be like.

After we had used up our bird viewing quota for the year (Technician Chris would have been very proud of us), we ordered some food at the restaurant counter and went on a `rekkie` (That´s right Mummy I used your favorite saying) off the gift shop. Then our lunches arrived that consisted of yummy fresh juices, I had pineapple and mint and Grace had passion fruit, Brazilian juices really are the best and two strange veggie burgers, with crisps on the inside but they were only R$5 or 1.45 pound sterling each!

Once we had re-fueled we headed back into the gift shop, where we purchased large amounts of gifts for all of our wonderful family and friends, let’s also hope everyone likes parrots…..

But because of our shopping extravaganza we ran out of time to visit the Brazilian side of the waterfalls, we did not mind though as we have seen the best side anyway. We would have probably had time but we thought it was best to not risk our luck with the public transport here. So we headed back to the hostel to be able to collect our belongings and get a lift with Giselli, our hostel owner, to the correct bus terminal to catch another ´´wonderful´´ and `´comfortable´ long bus back to Sao Paulo.

Everyone will be pleased to know that we did manage to get two buses in the correct direction, only making one mistake and getting off two stops early so we had to walk quite far to the hostel.