Volunteer in Mission to Brazil

23 October 2006

Whirlwind visit of Brasilia

I am too tired to think of a catchy title, so I'll just call it what this past weekend was--a whirlwind tour of Brazil's capital, Brasilia. On Friday night, I went with my roommate, three of her sisters and three of her cousins on the overnight bus to Brasilia to celebrate their uncle's 80th birthday. My roommate had found out about a "touristic" bus that offered a good round-trip fare plus fewer stops and a shorter overall trip than the traditional bus, so everybody bought tickets to go Friday night and return on Sunday night. We gathered at the touristic bus hub downtown (not the regular bus station), and thus began our adventure. Six hours after we boarded the bus, we still hadn't gotten further than a one-hour's journey from Belo Horizonte. Why, you may ask? The bus broke down 15 minutes into our voyage, so we drove to a bus mechanic, where we sat for a couple of hours while they worked on the bus. Apparently, this bus company did not have a spare bus to send us on our way.

Peppered all along this adventure, notably, is a noticeable lack of information being given to the passengers. After the bus is fixed, we get back on the highway and after another 30 minutes or so, pull over at the highway police checkpoint, where we proceed to sit for a good three hours before the actual police board the bus and tell us what is going on. The people "helping out" the bus company, meanwhile, have counted the passengers several times and collected our identity cards. It turns out that the touristic bus company is supposed to have a list to give the highway police of all the passengers and their identity numbers, and this list apparently was not correct. This list is critical for insurance purposes, but also because that company is not licensed to just be selling bus passages between Belo Horizonte and Brasilia, which they actually were doing. The highway police gave the bus company a chance to come up with their own spare bus (we already knew THAT wasn't going to work!) and then comandeered another bus from another bus company to take us the rest of the way, at the expense of the first company. The second bus didn't arrive until just before 3:00 AM, and then the new driver informed us that we'd be making a few stops that the other bus would not have. We were supposed to arrive in plenty of time for the big family birthday breakfast on Saturday, but, instead, made it in time for lunch.

Only on the return trip did it become clear to me what the bus company was doing. They were not licensed to sell individual bus tickets--only "touristic" round-trip group tickets, so they would make up fake lists to make it look like their passengers were all going together on one day and returning the next, but we weren't. The group on the Sunday return bus had a few of the same passengers from Friday's trip, but also some different ones. It turns out that the company wasn't able to get a license to sell regular bus tickets, so they were trying to get around it, at the expense of the passengers. Just a word to the wise, never deal with the company Rota Mineira, and use great caution when with other "touristic" bus companies unless you are contracting them to exclusively transport your group. And this is where my American side came out, thinking, "they'd NEVER get away with this in the U.S. without providing at least a partial refund or some other concession to the passengers, and here they're getting away scot free!"

Oh well, at least the trip went safely, and I really enjoyed meeting yet another branch of my roommate's huge family. It still never ceases to amaze me how accepting and welcoming everybody is of me, an outsider. Despite the hectic schedule trying to visit several people and attend group events while we were there, two carloads of people took me on a whirlwind tour of Brasilia on Sunday to see the famous modern architecture of Brazil's capital. I'm posting a few photos below.




































































































And Wednesday, I'm off to help chaperone the Liberdade youth group trip to the Methodist camp in Nova Almeida, in the neighboring state of Espirito Santo, where I'll also be visiting some of the local Shade and Fresh Water projects.

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