Current Date: Feb. 16, 2002 (2:42 p.m.)
Location: Sao Paulo hostel
Subject: A night in Vila Madelena and Pinhieros

Friday, Feb. 15, 2002
The next morning, Tony rolled in about 10:30, still bombed and covered from head to toe in sand. It’s all a pretty good story that I will defer to him for telling. Anyway, I let him sleep for a half hour and then we had to get up, pack everything and hit the road for Sao Paulo, but not before grabbing some free breakfast at the hostel. I’m really growing accustomed to papayas, bread, butter, and jelly for breakfast.
We hit the road, once again exhausted, but we only had a couple days left. It was time to dig deep. The 8 hour drive back to Sao Paulo went without incident. Tony slept a good chunk of the way. We actually went BACK to that same Mom and Pop restaurant that we ate at on the way to Rio (just after going to the WalMart) but unfortunately it was closed. We were pissed because we were really looking forward to surprising them.
After getting to Sao Paulo, we realized for the first time that we were truly in one of the LARGEST cities in the world. There was a spot when we were up on a hill as we were driving into the city and you could seriously see high rise buildings stretching in ALL directions as far as the eye could see. It really amazed me to see a city that huge.
Up until that point, we had not had ANY trouble driving. Before we left, there were all these stories about the crazy driving in Brazil. Well I can now attest that most of those stories probably came out of Sao Paulo. The thing that makes it tough is that the roads there never really go in one direction for a long period of time. There are so many curves and crisscrossing roads and crazy intersections. If you don’t know where you are going it can be VERY difficult to get around. If you are going one way on a major road, and you want to turn around…good luck!! It is almost impossible. Anyway, you combine that with a bunch of people that drive pretty fast and without caution, and you get a very tough situation. So Tony and I were faced with the task of figuring out how to get from one side of this enormous city to other, with a very crude map, and finding the hostel which is on this tiny little road in this neighborhood. It took us about an hour and a half and we were both pretty stressed out be the whole thing. We decided that we had to get rid of that car right away!!! But first, we needed to catch some Z’s and shower. We checked into the hostel and got all our stuff into this tiny little room we had. We took a short nap but it was pretty uncomfortable. It was VERY warm and humid and there was no AC. Plus we were both just so tired and stressed out from trying to find the hostel. Eventually we showered up and built up enough confidence to tackle the task of taking the car back to the airport, which, according to our map, was only about 3 miles from the hostel. This time, just to add another element to the equation, it was dark. Off we went and it was just as difficult as we imagined. It wasn’t long before we were completely lost. For the first time on the trip, and maybe on any trip, I felt like a scared, lost tourist. We were really lost in the city and it’s tough because if you don’t know the city, you have no clue what type of neighborhood you are in. I didn’t know if we were ever gonna find the damn airport, not to mention getting back to the hostel. It took us almost an hour before we even got remotely close to the airport. Finally we ended up on this 5 lane road that went past the airport and I just told Tony to pull over and I would run inside and try to get someone from Hertz to come out and take the car. So I left Tony and ran inside the airport and that’s where I met my savior. The woman at the Hertz counter spoke English and was able to help me. She called another guy to take me back to the car and then he would drive the car to the place where it needed to be turned in. She also was able to tell me a good area to go out to the bars. So luckily, it all worked out just fine in the end, but I was seriously stressed out for awhile. After finishing with that whole process, we needed to have a beer to unwind a bit. We sat in the airport at a little café for awhile, just trying to relax a little. It had been a very long and trying day and neither of us had slept much. We were pretty tired, but we knew we had to continue on.
We caught a cab over to this area called “Vila Madelena” where we ended up at this quasi-famous Empanadas restaurant that I had read about in the Lonely Planet book. The place was super cool, and pretty packed. We had some grub and few beers. It was probably pretty close to midnight by then and we were both literally falling asleep at our table. We were about to call it quits and head home, but decided we would go to one more bar and try to stay fired up. We ended up at this little Jazz club that was awesome. We stayed there for awhile and started to wake up a little bit. From there we decided we would walk around the area and find ONE MORE bar to check out. We went past a couple spots that were closed and finally ended up at this psuedo-club that seemed like it was for a younger crowd. Everyone there was also pretty alternative so were ridiculously overdressed. That didn’t stop us from having a couple beers in there though. It was pretty weird in there. We started to get pretty tired and got a cab to head back to the hostel. On the way, we passed a few bars that seemed like they were still hopping and we decided to get out of the cab and give it one last shot. It was around 4:00 a.m. by then so we were both running on fumes. We tried to get into one place that was packed but they were closing and wouldn’t let us in. They directed us to an afterhours spot that was around the corner from there, so we decided to go for it. We get to this club, and it was ABSOLUTELY awesome. It was full of beautiful women and the music was pumping. It was club that had three levels, the third of which was a rooftop balcony. It was great. We hung out at the top for awhile and had a drink. For whatever reason, there were a ton of people in there that spoke English so we had no trouble meeting people. We ended up staying there, dancing our asses off until about 8:00a.m. and it was a phenomenal night. In fact, it was probably one of the better clubs I have gone to on this entire trip. We were both blown away because we had almost gone home soooooo many times. It just goes to show you that you can’t give up on a night. Sometimes when you dig deep, you strike gold.

AC