Brazil,  Independent travel,  South America,  Travel Blog

Time To Go

March 14, 2024 /

When the plane touches down in São Paulo on Friday morning it will be precisely four weeks since we made our way to Rio airport for our hastily organised and unexpected journey home, and frankly there hasn’t been much to shout about in those four weeks. Unless you are given to shouting about rain.

One of the anticipated joys back when we were first planning long term travel was to escape the English winter. That word – winter – conveys, in many parts of the world, images of pristine white snow, frozen lakes and icicles hung from the eaves of roofs. It’s not like that in England, oh no. Winter is a seemingly endless procession of miserable grey days, colourless skies and days which turn to darkness half way through the afternoon.

These four weeks have been particularly dour. If it hasn’t been drizzling, it’s been raining heavily. If it hasn’t been miserable, it’s been properly grim. There’s been days when it hasn’t got bright enough to switch off the lights indoors, and apparently our home county of Kent has seen two months’ worth of rain in those four weeks compared to the average for the time of year. Even that rain isn’t quite as miserable as the days when those reduced hours of daylight never shake off the cloak of grey. Fifty shades of miserable.

No surprise therefore that it rains on the day of Ray’s funeral, it seems that funerals come on wet days at any time of year – in fact we’re hard pressed to remember any such thing as a funeral on a sunny day, ever. Funerals take a long time in England: four weeks from passing to funeral day was by no means a bad result, it can often take longer.

With the Ides of March fast approaching, the days are lengthening now, meaning that we have an extra couple of hours of grey to separate one night from the next. We think it’s fair to say that one way and another our usual zest for life has been a bit tested these last few weeks. But now we are once again stuffing clothing into backpacks, once again preparing to head for Heathrow, once again feeling that tingle of excitement, that reawakening of the senses.

Goodbye grey days, it’s time to once more swelter in drenching humidity and bask in 34 degrees, time to acquaint ourselves with unfamiliar towns, time for different cuisine and different culture, time to venture once more into the unknown. Different parts of Brazil await, as does a small corner of Argentina, and the states of Louisiana, Tennessee and California.

We’re emerging from this enforced hibernation, we’re climbing out of our chrysalis and taking to the wing.

My God are we ready.

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