After my ordeal with my arrival at the airport in Buenos Aires, I fortunately enjoyed a smooth flight to Sao Paulo, where I had to switch not only planes but airports to make my connecting flight to Rio. I took a shuttle bus from one airport to the other and that journey comprised all that I saw of the Sao Paulo, an aesthetically unappealing city but a huge and industrious one which pumps the lifeblood of Brazil. My day improved greatly when the check-in attendant bumped me to an earlier flight, saving me from a 4 hours of airpot dawdling. Within that time, I was already in Rio.
Immediately upon arrival, I got a taste of how James must have felt knowing so little Spanish, and I realized just how good my Spanish was and how much of a security blanket it had been. Suddenly, Portugese, which had always sounded so similar to Spanish, sounded markedly different, and my simple Lonely Planet guide to phrases and pronunciations fell far short of my needs. The assertions of my travel friends that everyone in Rio speaks English proved woefully untrue. Fortunately, after some linguistic bumbling and some help from a couple of good samaritans, I managed to get on the bus to Ipanema.
As an aside, let me explain something about buses in Brazil, namely that they make no sense. You have to board the bus, pay your money to an attendant who sits behind the driver, then pass through a turnstile within the bus, which is virtually impossibly with a backpack. They are inconvenient and tedious and require two workers instead of one, but there you are.
In any case, the bus dropped me off on Ipanema beach, two blocks from my hostel. The beach was lovely, but clouds obscured the sun and much of the beauty of the place. My hostel, Che Legarto, had few frills or common areas, but it sufficed, and the staff was lovely. Apparently I had arrived on the big day for incomers for the New Year because my empty room filled up within minutes of my own arrival. Three older guys from Argentina and two younger from Australia shared my 6-bed dorm.
By the time I had settled in, the sun had set and a small band had started to play in the bar on the hostel's first floor. I had a couple of capirihnas with some other guests at the hostel, and headed to bed around midnight, having been awake for 41 straight hours by this point.
Unfortunately, loneliness struck and I didn't fall asleep for some time. First off, I hadn't had to stay in an actual dorm room in some time, having had the luxury of splitting doubles with James for a month, and I missed the private bathrooms, free towels, and the freedom to sleep in as little or much as I wanted, in both senses of the phrase.
Secondly, I had realized through my conversations in the hostel bar that I was one of the only solo travelers there and that there were far fewer of us in Brazil as a whole. The expense and extravagance of spending Rio in New Year's wards off many solo travelers, and most people would rather spend such an event with old friends rather than new. But, as I would discover in the following weeks, the higher costs of travel in Brazil, the distances between destinations, the fact of it being more of a vacation/beach destination more than a cultural one, and the use of Portuguese rather than Spanish all make the country at large a less-traveled off-shoot of the backpacker circuit. Couples and groups of short-term vacationers (particularly Argentinians) are far more common. As a result, meeting people proved trickier. Pre-established groups from one country are still friendly, but harder to join than groups cobbled together from singles and pairs from around the world.
Finally, I just missed James. And it didn't help that the hostel band had played three songs back-to-back, for which we had some private joke or remembrance. I went to sleep rather unhappy, but hoping it would pass.
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