A 25hrs bus ride and Argentina
After departing from Rio, the bus passed Sao Paulo and a couple of other cities. A 25 hrs journey.. Quite exhausting. Sao Paulo is one of the world’s largest cities (5th) having about 20 million habitants. The sad part of the journey happened just as we departed from the bus terminal in Sao Paulo and headed towards the highway. Suddenly, I heard two gunshots, first not realising that there were gunshots. I had a look to my left and outside of the bus, about 30 meters away, on the highway, someone was killing someone else with a gun. I witnessed two more gunshots and saw the man laying on the side of the highway. I couldn’t believe what I saw and the whole bus supposedly felt the same. As we were just heading towards the highway, the bus slowed down initially, but after a half a minute, the scene was gone. As crime is a serious issue in Sao Paulo, such situations are going most likely to happen daily, we were just unlucky to witness it.
The rest of the long journey is not worth to mention, but I was happy to get out of the bus after 25 hours and headed straight to the Argentina side (a small town with about 24 000 habitants, Porto Iguacu) Admittedly, I started to feel quite unsafe in Brazil, even if I was a couple of hundreds kilometers away from Sao Paulo, but the insecure feeling obviously won’t pass that fast. The hostel I was staying in was great, including a swimmingpool and 5 bungalows. As a cold wave has started to pass the night before over whole South America, it was freezing cold in the bus and so was the evening, the swimmingpool was not much of use. I went to the town with two girls (a danish girl and an israeli girl) from the hostel and enjoyed a nice (and huge) $5 black pepper steak for dinner.
This felt already quite like real Argentina! I wished I had brought more warm clothes with me though. For the next day, I had planned the waterfalls and also to get my Brazil exit stamp as I did not get one on the way into Argentina.
