Getting Around Brazil

In the earliest phases of planning our trip to the World Cup, we wrestled with the problem of internal travel - once we got to Brazil. The games would be spread out all over what is a very large country. You could pick one city and stay there, but then you just get whatever games they assign - probably not the games you want. And, you don’t get to see much of Brazil. We knew that would not work for us.  Our trip would need to include multiple locations and that meant we would need to figure out how to get from point A to point B.

Once the draw came out and we got a line on ticket availability, we settled on Northeast Brazil - Fortaleza and Natal - partly because the US would play in Natal, but also because Natal and Fortaleza were not that far apart.  The trip could be manageable.

My first thought was we would just drive. It’s only 300 miles between the two. We would get to see some of the countryside, it could be fun. Then, I started researching. I read the warnings about bad roads, bad drivers, and bad people waylaying travelers on Brazil’s roads. I asked a colleague who had been what he thought. He said he wouldn’t do it. Great. Back to the drawing board. If you can’t drive, how do you get from Fortaleza to Natal?

Flying was out of the question. We were entering the market way too late. Brazil's domestic air travel system is no doubt adequate for its usual needs and usually fares are pretty reasonable. But these are not usual times. With all the teams playing one game here and their next game there - and all of their fans wanting to follow the teams from place to place - there was a giant spike in demand for seats on planes traveling between the match sites. By the time we got our game tickets (Round 3 of three lotteries) and now knew where we needed to be - most of the seats were sold. You could get a 4 AM flight for $400 one-way but that was way too rich for my blood. 

There had to be alternatives.  After driving, my next choice would have been the train, but Brazil apparently does not have trains. Certainly not trains between two pretty remote outposts which few Brazilians would normally visit.  (Fortaleza & Natal are 1,400 mi. from Rio) Trains require a lot of people traveling to justify the costs of building and maintaining the system. That traffic has never existed in northeast Brazil, so there just aren’t any trains.

But there are buses.  Much more cost-effective, especially if you already have the road to run them on. That’s how most Brazilians would make the trip. But I have a bit of an aversion to long bus trips. We took the bus from London to Glasgow a few years back. After a half-dozen trips to the chiropractor, I was pretty much as good as new. Buses can be cramped and unlike trains you can’t really get up and stretch or wander about. Even so, no planes, no trains, cars too dangerous, maybe it is the bus? Maybe, except that for foreigners, booking a ticket on the bus is difficult. First, the websites are all in Portuguese and deciphering the process was beyond my ability. I am not sure it was even possible, however. Once we got to Brazil and shared stories with other soccer pilgrims, we learned the tickets could only be purchased in Brazil and even then, not too far in advance. If you wanted to do the bus you would have to hope it would have a seat available when you got there. Because we had tight time frames and big commitments to specific dates and specific places, we could not roll the dice on getting bus tickets. We would have to roll the dice on driving in Brazil.