The drive to Guarapari was only 13 hours. The drive back was 15 due to traffic, although that was hardly the worst part of it.
There is always danger eating food from street vendors and beach vendors are even more risky. I think that the kiosks and bars are fine, but the guys walking along the beach with fresh oysters, for instance, deserve a bit more care. They get the oysters early in the morning, put them in a little basket, and walk around in the hot sun selling them. Patrícia and I had some one morning and they were the best I ever had, opened in front of me and served with lime juice and salt. Absolutely delicious!
The day before we left, Patrícia and André had some at about 10:00 in the warm sunny morning. Everthing was fine until the next day...when I packed the car, she was feeling bad and André looked particularly unhappy. Sure enough, 20 minutes into the trip home, he did an Exorcist immitation and vomited all over the door, the seat, the blanket, himself, the floor...
With my lovely woman feeling under the weather too, it was up to me to clean up the mess. Bleah. I came close to joining André in reviewing what I ate for breakfast. The poor thing had to endure about eight hours of twisty roads and he threw up six times, the last five in plastic bags, thank god. As for the rest of us, we had to smell vomit for 15 hours.
Road Danger
After waiting through a painfully slow traffic jam we passed a rolled over car in the middle of the road with one of the dead occupants still sitting in the back seat. The others had been thrown onto the roadside. We also saw a number of smaller accidents, however that was not what caught my attention. In driving so slowly, I had time to really look at the road. Specifically, all of the scratches in the asphalt from terrible accidents. On both sides of almost every curve, there were the marks of what must have been head-on collisions.
Finally arriving into a satellite city of Brasília at 3 am, I felt like I could relax with nice large, well-lit, familiar roads. Of course, that was exactly when someone, shooting out from a side street, clipped the car in front of me, smashing both cars and spinning them like tops to the side of the road.
Showering and getting into my own bed after 15 hours of smelly vomit driving was a pleasure beyond words.
