Santos then Sao Paulo, Brazil and Back Home

Wed Dec 7
Our day began at 6AM to prepare for leaving the ship in the port city of Santos.

Another cruise ship pulled in with us and the area outside the terminal was an incredible mess with so many people milling around trying to get organized onto several dozen buses that at times you could not even move for some time.

It was also very warm and the crowd made it even worse for some older folks in our group. Finally after literally two hours of pandemonium and standing around we found our bus and were on our way to Sao Paulo. It was quite a climb and we passed a lot of jungle vegetation and crossed a couple of large rivers on the one and one-half hour ride. Sao Paulo is the largest city in South America with a population of around 20 million. It is the main hub of business and industry in Brazil with many beautiful, tall sky scrapers. One of the more beautiful buildings in Sao Paulo is the LDS temple and adjacent stake center which we visited. It is amazing how, like in Recife, the grounds are immaculately groomed and the temple is also very beautiful.



Stake Center adjacent to temple grounds

Across one street was, believe it or not, a Wal-Mart, apparently the first in Brazil.

Then across another street is a huge modern shopping mall similar to any you might find in the U.S. with a large food court and many specialty stores. We had an excellent lunch of rice and black beans which is a Brazilian traditional staple followed by a small ice cream cone.

Dad says it is simply amazing how much the country has improved and changed in the forty-five years since he lived here. There are many, many more cars that are for the most part new instead of aged volkswagens and 20 or more-year old U.S. cars back in the early 1960's when he was here. The buses are huge and very nice. Things we took for granted even then such as refrigerators, water heaters, air conditioning, televisions, telephones, decent public restrooms and drinkable tap water were all but non-existent at that time but you would never know it now. It seems as modern as anywhere back home. Not that there aren't still millions of very poor people living in the slums called favelas on the outskirts of all cities but even they don't seem to be constructed of wooden crates, corrugated tin sheets and cardboard with dirt floors any more either. After the visit to the temple grounds and the mall we were driven straight to the airport where we began an arduous journey back home Wednesday evening at 8PM. Our first flight of five hours took us to Lima, Peru where we caught a nine and one-half hour flight to Los Angeles that arrived early Thursday morning.

Thu Dec 8
After a four hour layover we caught a two-hour flight to Salt Lake City and then got a shuttle to pick up our car and drove bleary-eyed the two hours to home. We didn't find the piles of snow we expected but single-digit overnight and teen daytime temperatures welcomed us (It must be time to head for Arizona). By the time we got settled in and ready to retire around 8PM we had been up for forty-two hours going from Santos time with only what little sleep we could manage on crowded, somewhat bumpy flights where one can never really rest. But what a journey and what an experience! We hope you haven't been bored with our journal. It has been difficult to select a few pictures from the nearly eight hundred we took on the trip to share our experiences. Also, we were probably the least well-off financially of our entire tour group as nearly all were wealthy successful entrepreneurs and professionals, some of whom were still working, who had already traveled much of the world. But what we found is that they were friendly, down-to-earth people who accepted us as equals and along the way we heard many interesting stories, learned much, had a wonderful time and made several friendships that we won't soon forget starting with the trials of our trip to Milan with the Days and the Johnsons.