Ribeirão dos Cabos

We left the beautiful coastal scenery behind and headed inland to the huge city of Sao Paulo. The bus journey was about 4.5 hours which we were dreading but the children surprised us again with their tolerance – probably something to do with unlimited screentime and Yoto stories!

We stayed in the downtown area of the city, our Uber driver warned us to be careful as a lot of robberies (he then proceeded to try and rip us off by not ending the journey where he dropped us off doubling our fare, it could have been an honest mistake)! Driving into Sao Paulo you can’t help but notice the fantastic modern artwork that adorns the buildings, these aren’t small pieces of art but tower-block sized art pieces. It really brightens up what can be a dull urban landscape. It turned out that our apartment faced a karaoke club on the other side of the road which opened at about 7pm and closed at 6am, with an open balcony to the bar it made for interesting sleep!

Sao Paulo has a talented street art scene, the place to see the best of it is ‘Batman alley’, so called because a painting of batman popularised the alley. Today the artwork spreads along many alleys in the area, the original batman painting has long since been painted over to be replaced by some fantastic artwork (the local agreement is that it’s acceptable to paint over work of others to keep the art fresh and ever-changing). We spent a good couple of hours milling around the alleys and some of the local art-galleries, both Elana and Bert really enjoyed the experience.

There are a couple of good viewpoints in the city which allow for undisturbed views of the city limits. We first visited the Edifício Itália (Portuguese for "Italy Building"), across the road from our apartment, it is a 165 m (541 ft) tall 46-story skyscraper built from 1956 to 1965. To access the official viewing platform you need a booking at the restaurant which doesn’t open until late afternoon. Rather than doing that we took the elevator to the floor below the restaurant and took in the views from the windows on the landing – a top tip from Lonely Planet! The other viewpoint is at the Santander building (yes the bank), the building itself is often referred to as the ‘Empire State Building’ of Brazil, architecturally there are certainly many similarities. On arrival we jumped in the elevator to the 26th floor where the viewing platforms are, the views across the city are spectacular giving a real perspective of the scale of the city and the surrounding topography. On the way down we visited a couple of exhibitions, predominantly art installations situated on floors below the viewing deck. By far the most intriguing for the children an instalment that took a scan of your retina and it mapped it into constellations and galaxies, with different coloured eyes creating different patterns! There was also a skatepark taking up one of the floors, they were entranced by those that were skateboarding and pulling off various tricks (including a boy of around 4 years old). For the rest of the afternoon they pretended they were skateboarding and are now insistent on having their own!

Wanting to get a better feel of the city early one morning we headed off on a self-guided walking tour of the city, starting at the Mercado Municipal. The Mercado Municipal is the central food market selling a wide variety of fruit, vegetables, meats, fish and spices. Located in a cathedral-like building with stained glass windows and arched and domed ceilings it’s quite a sight to behold. We could have just gone for that experience but ended up also spending a good 45 minutes at one of the fruit sellers stalls being plied with a variety of exotic fruit. Of course we knew we’d feel obliged to purchase some fruit and it would be at an inflated price (which it was), but we ate our own bodyweight in fruit (some of which were obscure but very tasty) and the children really enjoyed the experience so it was worth it!

Next stop on our walk was Mosteiro de Sao Bento (Sao Bento Monastery). The church from the outside doesn’t look very special, it’s very grey with parts daubed in graffiti. Internally however it is probably the most ornate church we have visited with detailed frescos covering the ceiling, beautiful stained glass windows and an impressive organ that has over 6000 tubes (we were fortunate enough to hear it in action whilst visiting. Our walk next took us past the Patio do Colegio (School Yard) which was unfortunately closed, but it is the sight where Sao Paulo was founded in 1554. The building has been well-maintained with it’s white-washed walls and blue framed windows and doors contrasting with the high-rise city surrounding it. Next stop was Sao Paulo Cathedral, which was again another impressive building built between 1913 and 1954, the gothic towers at the front of the cathedral (that are a later addition) are an impressive 92 meters tall! Its claim to fame it that the organ is one of the largest in Latin America with 12000 pipes, with the carillon being the heaviest and largest in Central and South America containing 61 bells!

Our walk finished in the Liberdade District which has the largest Japanese population outside of Japan. We were told by locals that we must visit and experience ‘Japan Town’ but were left a little underwhelmed – it would have been easy to walk through and not really noticed the area. They did have a small feng-shui garden that provided a little peace in the busy city. We then jumped in a cab to the CBD, on a Sunday they close the main road leading through the CBD (Paulista Avenue) and give it over to entertainers, pedestrians and cyclists. We had a great time watching the various musicians, bands and dancers. We also took the opportunity to begin stocking up on cold weather gear in anticipation of heading much further south!

We really liked Sao Paulo, it was quite cosmopolitan with lots going on, along with a mix of cultures – Italian, Arabian and Japanese.Read more