Cheese Man Eftpos, An English Christmas & 3am Buffets

21st – 28th December, 2024

My initial thoughts of Brazil as we crawled along the highway from Iguaçu to Florianópolis were that it didn’t really seem at all Brazilian to me. As we crept closer through the insane holiday traffic toward the coast, we passed fast food chains, huge car dealerships and hardware stores. It all seemed a little… American. Everything was massive. Huge signage, big utes and SUVs, six lane highways completely in gridlock. As we crossed the bridge from the mainland of the country to the island of Florianopolis itself, highrises began to appear, with enormous shopping complexes and multi storey car parks sandwiched together amongst all sorts of restaurants and bars. We even passed one Australian themed restaurant called ‘Didge Steakhouse Pub’, which we vowed to steer clear of. Luckily, we weren’t staying in the city itself, which is home to over half a million people, but instead we caught an Uber from the bus terminal to our hostel in ‘Canasvieiras’, a much smaller town on the north coast of the island. We arrived at ‘Innbox’, a hostel made of half a dozen shipping containers, where it seems they cram as many bunk beds in each as humanly possible. Being the holiday season, the price of accommodation everywhere was very expensive. We wanted to stay on two different parts of the island, and due to the absolutely insane cost of our Christmas accommodation that we’d booked for a few days’ time further south on the island, we needed to stay in the cheapest place we could find here in the north. This place sucked. We were in a 6 bed dorm room that absolutely reeked, and there was bugger all space to move around inside. However, my theory that the cheaper the hostel, the better the guests continued to be true here. Even though Rachael and I were the only whiteys here, we were accepted by several really nice Brazilians, Chileans and Argentines, and we’d sit around the table in the outdoor communal area of a night and drink beers while trying to converse in a weird Spanish/Portuguese/English hybrid language.

On our first day in Canasvieras, we attempted the nearly impossible task of trying to obtain a sim card for Rachael’s phone, so we didn’t have to rely on Wi-Fi everywhere we went. What was such a simple task in Chile, turned out to be one of the most unnecessarily complicated things in Brazil. Here, it seems that you cannot buy anything that would usually require some form of ID without having a Brazilian CPF. This is an 11 digit number that shows that you are registered as existing inside of Brazil. Why they don’t just give you one of these when they stamp you in at the border is absolutely beyond me, but without one it can make life very difficult. If we had known prior to our visit to the country, we would have just sorted one out, but I didn’t know that foreigners could get them until we were nearly finished with our time in Brazil. Instead, we had to plead with the girl running the phone store to let us register our sim card with her CPF, which she was kind enough to do. But this is something we’d have to do numerous times over the following months. Not having our own CPF also meant that we were unable to buy bus or plane tickets online, so every time we were going to catch a bus, which would be a lot, we’d have to turn up to the bus terminal and hope they had space for us.

Now that we had a phone number, we could use Uber to get around and also look up phrases in Portuguese to help us talk to people. During our time in Canasvieras we visited several nearby beaches where blokes would push carts along the sand, selling all sorts of delicious treats like corn on the cob, grilled cheese on a stick and one of my all time favourites from Argentina, the choripan, all of which could be paid with by card. There’s something hilarious about buying a piece of cheese from a bloke walking the beach with a small, hand held charcoal grill, that fans the coals with a folded up banana leaf but also has an eftpos machine, I loved it. What really stood out though, and would continue to be a recurring theme for our entire trip through Brazil, was just how easy it is to buy alcohol. No matter where you are in the country, you only have to cast your gaze a good 20 metres or so to find someone selling a beer or a cocktail. Here on the beaches of Florianópolis, bars line the sand with chairs and umbrellas, and cocktail and beer merchants travel up and down the beach selling all sorts of cheap drinks. It does become really annoying very quickly, when you’re unable to sit on a beach for more than 30 seconds at a time before someone will approach you and wave a menu in your face or ask if you want to buy sunglasses from the immense, portable wall of sunnies they’re able to carry around with them all day. It was definitely a bit of a shock, coming from beaches on the south coast of NSW, where oftentimes we’ll have an entire stretch of beach to ourselves, and on a busy day during the holidays there’s still plenty of space to feel like you’re not on top of other beach goers. Here in Brazil, it wasn’t uncommon for the sand to completely disappear beneath the sheer mass of people crowding for a spot to sit down by the water. Honestly, it was pretty gross.

After a few days on the north of the island we made our way further south to a neighbourhood called Barra de Lagoa, and walked into the hostel we’d be staying at over Christmas. This place was nuts. It was easily one of the most modern, clean and spacious hostels we’d ever seen, with a big pool, huge outdoor area, a halfpipe, a pool table, a table tennis table, a bar, a restaurant and direct access to a big surf beach called Praia do Mojambique, or ‘Mozambique Beach’, which was immensely better than the beaches we’d just seen on the north of the island. Despite the fact it is a surf beach, there really wasn’t a surfable wave here which was a little disappointing, but that’s something we’d have to get used to. We strapped on our dumb wristbands that served as digital tabs to track the beers or food we bought from the bar, and we were shown our beds in the 11 bed mixed dorm we’d be staying in for the next 5 nights. Not at all romantic to be newlyweds, sleeping in a room with 9 other people over Christmas, but we were paying a whopping $73AUD a night, which was some of the cheapest accommodation on the island. I had a bottom bunk, while Rachael was able to hide away in a little capsule type thing on the second floor of the huge dormitory. That night we bought pizza and took it to the beach to eat as the sun went down, a date night tradition from back home which we get quite excited for.

Over the next few days we got chatting to many people staying at the hostel, the vast majority of which were English. Some of them were really nice, others were really up themselves, but the undesirables didn’t venture far from each other so we didn’t really have to deal with them too much. Tom and Matty, two young poms, were especially easy going and very funny guys. It was great to chew the ear off Matty as he is a chef back home, and Tom was very knowledgeable about Brazil as he’d visited a handful of times before.

We went for a walk through the jungle on the morning of Christmas Eve to the natural pools nearby, which were packed full of people jumping off giant, smooth rocks into the ocean. It was a really beautiful area, and given a different, less hectic time of year it would be a great place to spend a day. Instead, we just walked out and back, dodging people along the narrow path. The highlight of the morning was seeing our first ever Marmoset which was very exciting. Brazil is home to 22 species of Marmosets, which are the smallest monkeys in the world, most of which can fit in the palm of your hand. It was also nice to see frigatebirds soaring overhead, which Rachael thinks look quite ominous, but I reckon they’re pretty cool.

Later that day, Will, another nice Englishman, did the rounds and asked everyone if they’d like to pitch in with buying and/or cooking food for a big Christmas lunch, which we obviously were quite enthusiastic about. Due to the number of people who would be partaking and had already called shotgun on a number of dishes, Rachael and I didn’t need to buy or prepare anything. Instead, we told Will that we’d sling some cash his way which we completely forgot to do, so if Will ever reads this, please visit us at home so we can repay the favour. That night, the hostel restaurant also put on a Christmas dinner for everyone which was actually really good. There were different roasts and veggies, typical Christmas foods, and a lot of them. 
Hopefully my Christmas DJ mix, complete with Destiny’s Child 4th studio album titled ‘8 Days of Christmas’, more than made up for the lack of cooking from Rachael and I on Christmas day. There were, again, a lot of good roasted meats and veggies, this time mostly prepared by Matty the chef.  Everyone had a great time chatting and listening to Christmas music, and the food was sensational. An English Christmas certainly wasn’t what I was expecting when we knew we’d be in Brazil, but it was a fun day, and one I’m not likely to forget.

I must have drunk a million Sols (great beer) on Christmas day, as I awoke with a whopping headache which a dip in the ocean could only partially mend. When I eventually got my shit together, we caught an Uber down to another beach further south on the Island called Pria Mole, Soft Beach. This was definitely the best beach we saw on the island, and I was able to do a decent amount of body surfing before lounging around on the sand, getting delicious Caipirinhas delivered to us from the beach bar. These instantly became one of my favourite drinks in the world. Made with lime juice, sugar and Cachaça, which is a Brazilian spirit distilled from fermented sugarcane juice. The strength of a caipirinha can differ greatly depending on where you’re buying it from, but usually it ranges in strength from “Geez that packs a punch” to straight rocketfuel. Fantastic.

That night we went out for dinner to a restaurant that I knew would be an absolute gringo trap, given its waterfront location, but we were joining a group of poms that we spent Christmas with the day before and it wasn’t our call to make. I ordered the swordfish because the price tag was alarmingly low for such a dish, which obviously turned out to not be swordfish at all, and rather a small piece of some white, rubbery fried fish on a plate with a few chips. Alarmingly expensive for such a dish. It was great to have a chat over a meal with everyone though. 

We had a nice easy morning on our last day in Florianópolis, swimming and lounging around on the sand. I was feeling pretty huge from a few solid days of drinking and eating as much as humanly possible, and it was quite shocking to be told the final bill on my tab at the bar as we were checking out from the hostel. Turns out that cheap beers aren’t actually that cheap when you buy nearly a hundred of them, but it’s not every year you get a Brazilian Christmas.

We jumped in an Uber at around 6pm, to make the half hour journey to the bus terminal to try and catch our bus by 9pm. Thankfully, we were expecting heavy traffic so we allowed plenty of time for the trip to actually take us nearly TWO HOURS. At long last, we were aboard our overnight bus to take us to São Paulo, which was supposed to take 14 hours but actually ended up being 17. This is where we found the buses to differ in Brazil, compared to Argentina and Chile. For long haul buses in other South American countries, it’s rare to get a break to get out and stretch your legs, but here in Brazil they love to stop multiple times during a trip, often adding hours of time to the voyage. This is great in the way that they stop at huge buffet restaurants in the middle of nowhere, which have enormous salad bars and a great assortment of grilled meats which you can pay for by weight, but really annoying in the way that you just want to get this seventeen hour bus trip over and done with. It’s also pretty strange rocking up to an all you can eat restaurant at 3am which is packed full of Brazilians who are taking other bus trips across the country.

We finally arrived in São Paulo at 12pm the following day. The city is home to 12 million people, and the larger metropolitan area is home to over 23 million, making it the most populous city in all of the Americas, as well as the southern hemisphere. It’s also home to the largest populations of Arabs, Italians and Japanese in the world, outside of their countries of origin, which makes for a great food scene. I really wish we spent more time here, but I’d heard that the city was really boring and we may as well skip it. We had to get a move on to our New Year’s accommodation so we only spent one afternoon and a night here, but it would have been great to stay longer. We stayed in the neighbourhood of Pinhieros (Pines), which was really chill and full of nice bars and restaurants, and had a good deal of green spaces for such a huge concrete jungle. We walked through the very touristy Beco do Batman, or ‘Batman Alley’, which got its name from an apparently famous painting of batman here during the 80s, and is a maze of narrow, cobblestone alleyways where the walls are completely covered in really well done graffiti. There were many more bars and cafes here, and a lot of artists selling their paintings beneath makeshift shelters to protect them from the random torrential downpours that seem to be a common occurrence in the city. 

For lunch we went to a very small, local restaurant selling a few different Japanese noodle dishes, which were quite good, and for dinner we walked to a fantastic Arabian restaurant. Rachael was a bit frightened to be walking around the city at night, but we made it there and back in one piece, and the food was sensational. It’s around this time that I must have mistaken the official conversion rate of the Brazilian Real to the Australian dollar for a rate that I thought was way more in our favour. Upon reviewing our expenses during our time in Brazil a few months after leaving the country, we realised we were spending a lot more than we thought we were. This was great at the time because I thought we were eating delicious food and sinking delicious tinnies for next to no money, and I was really living it up. But, in hindsight a lot of that money could have been saved for later in our trip. You win some and you lose some, but I think that being mistakenly confident about our finances during our two months here added to the enjoyment of the whole experience, and I don’t regret it.