By now having spent a good couple of weeks in Brazil - being completely wowed by its tropical scenery, buzzing cities and incredibly friendly locals - we really felt a long way from festive, snowy England. We’d also picked up on how prosperous Brazil was becoming, they had recently won their bid for the 2014 World Cup, to be closely followed by the 2016 Olympics in Rio, had just discovered one of the world’s largest oil fields and are expected to become the world’s 5th largest economy, so it seems Brazil is THE place to be. With all of this in mind, together with discussions we’d had previously with Louis (the hostel hunter), an idea began to form and leaving Rio we flew to Natal, a city on the north-east coast, also soon to have one of the largest airports in Latin America and only 6.5 hours from Europe...
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| Us trying to look like property moguls! |
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| The view of the ocean from our "would be" Brazilian house |
First arriving in Natal and then onto a nearby popular beach town called Praia da Pipa, our initial idea was to check out the area with the potential of looking at available pousadas/guest houses with the romantic notion that we could spend the rest of our days living an easy life with a stunning Brazilian beach as a backdrop. To cut a long story short we spent a week in Pipa, managed to contact an English company specialising in Brazilian property in Pipa and Natal, viewed a number of properties and building plots, alienated ourselves from the hostel where we were staying as the English guy who’d recently opened it became very suspicious of his two new guests, and finally concluded that we really didn’t want to cut our trip short, which would have been necessary if we were serious about buying. Of course during all this property hunting we did make time to try and perfect our surfing (still a long way to go) and were joined in the water by a school of dolphins!
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| Still smiling after an unsuccessful day surfing |
So, instead of investing in Brazilian property we headed back to the airport and after a few short stops to change planes in Brasilia, Sao Paulo (which when landing at the airport looks remarkably similar to arriving at Manchester Airport – lots of green countryside and... rain, but is by far the biggest sprawling city we’ve seen so far and with no sign of a B&Q warehouse!), we landed in Campo Grande – the entrance to the Pantanal, the world’s largest tropical wetlands bordering Bolivia and Paraguay.
By now having spent a good couple of weeks in Brazil - being completely wowed by its tropical scenery, buzzing cities and incredibly friendly locals - we really felt a long way from festive, snowy England. We’d also picked up on how prosperous Brazil was becoming, they had recently won their bid for the 2014 World Cup, to be closely followed by the 2016 Olympics in Rio, had just discovered one of the world’s largest oil fields and are expected to become the world’s 5th largest economy, so it seems Brazil is THE place to be. With all of this in mind, together with discussions we’d had previously with Louis (the hostel hunter), an idea began to form and leaving Rio we flew to Natal, a city on the north-east coast, also soon to have one of the largest airports in Latin America and only 6.5 hours from Europe...
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