Notes From A Road Trip.

Not every radio station has to be talk radio. Not every talk radio host has to shout. 

Once you've thought the word piranha on a Brazilian river, it’s impossible to un-think it.

It’s surprising to see how film stars supplement their income. Yes, Sharon Stone is now flogging apartments in the state of Santa Catarina.

I had forgotten how a sky full of stars can stop time.

Brazilian food photography still leaves a lot to be desired. The tower of murdered prawns on the left, speared atop a brutalised pineapple, constitute Exhibit A.

The affinity between Brazilians and their nation’s cultural stereotypes of samba, football and beaches, which is sometimes quite baffling to outsiders, might be due to the fact that there is less of a centralised authority mediating those signifiers here, and hence the people still feel them to be theirs. This might also account for why there’s less interest in counter-culture: because the primary culture does not generate the same kind of friction we’re used to in the ‘old world’.

The paradise of towels is very exciting.

The great irony of tourism is that it makes the communities in which it develops unfriendly. 

When you come back to your guest house to find a white guy with dreadlocks juggling on the beach, you know that place is lost. The only thing you can do is get to a safe distance and nuke it.

It's amazing the number of ways you can find to reheat milk in a hotel room.

The whole point of our holiday was to ride the famous train from Curitiba to Paranaguá and go whale-watching in Florianopolis. However, due to the peculiarities of Brazilian bureaucracy (an ineffable conjunction of incompetence and officiousness), we managed to do neither. 

You take your kids here:

And all they want to do is this:

I would quite like to find the person responsible for planning the section of road from Curitiba to Florianopolis and punch him many times in the face. If it was a woman, I should confine myself to a few choice words.