Our Experience in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil | Watch This Before You Go

Bom dia! So we're looking to travel to Brazil. We just spent 20 days in Brazil as a stop on our world tour and after a little bit of back and forth on if we should make this video, we thought that we would have loved to see a video like this before we traveled to Brazil. So we will be sharing with you guys the pros, the cons, and everything between of what we experienced on our trip to Brazil. Let's dive in. So first stop on our trip, we traveled around Rio de Janeiro. We went to the city, we explored a lot. What were some of the spots? We went to Ipanema and Copacabana and actually stayed in both places long term to sleep. So we liked both, however, it has changed a lot since the last time I came. We went to Arapador Rock for sunset. That's a good spot to go out there. Yeah, we saw the Corcovado, the Christ at the top. It was very, very cloudy though, so we should have looked at the weather beforehand, but I was in a haste and I bought the tickets, but it was still nice because there were pockets of it was clear up and everyone yelled and it would be nice seeing the Christ up there. You have to take a train though. Yes, but be aware that that is also one of those Instagram versus reality spots. It is packed like every single inch is filled with a person and also, yeah, really important be sure to check the weather. Otherwise, when you get up to the top, there will be zero visibility. So other things to do are so viewing or hiking the Sugarloaf Mountains and then also Pedra Bonita is a sunset hike where you can see a view of the city, ocean, the whole coast area around Rio de Janeiro. There are also a lot of other hikes that you can do around the city. There are no shortage of tour companies that will be selling you their tours to go on any of these hikes. Be warned though, if you're extreme nature lovers like we are, you really love to go into nature for sort of that peaceful, calm nature experience. This isn't really the place to be able to find that. We went to Areal do Cabo and then we went to Búzios and there you'll find really cool boat tours that will take you off the coast into these really cool caves and islands. That's what we really liked. The Areal do Cabo has very blue beaches, really nice, and then Búzios itself has a very nice town. In Areal do Cabo, we did a boat tour. It was around four or five hours. You can go around, see all the different beaches. They show you some really cool split rocks and really cool lighthouses all around. Areal do Cabo is nicknamed the Brazilian Caribbean, so you can go around, see this beautiful blue, clear water, white sand beaches that almost look fake. They're so beautiful. We did a boat tour, like we said, four or five hours for around $24 for two people. It was a really fun experience. We got to jump off the boat. They offered snorkeling if you want to do that, so we strongly recommend that. In terms of where we stayed, we stayed at an Airbnb, which was one block from the Praia do Anjos. It was really nice. You can actually eat coconuts right there. We drank coconut water right on the beach right there every morning. There are a lot of really nice vendors. Areal do Cabo is a lot smaller of a town, though, so Búzios is a lot more of where you have those boutiques, luxury shops, all the places to see, nightlife. Areal do Cabo is a lot more of a small-town vibe. Our favorite places in Areal do Cabo were Praia do Farol. That was a really, really beautiful beach. Another one as well, Rental do Atalha. There's a really cute stairway that leads into that. That's a really cute Instagram spot in Brazil. That was also a really favorite beach, really, really beautiful. We took a bus from Rio de Janeiro to these two places. The bus company is called Milo Uno. It's 1001, 1-0-0-1. It's the best bus company you can ask for. Very nice seats, very streamlined service. They have about 10 bus rides every day to everywhere you can imagine across Brazil. Very good company. You can recline your seat all the way back. We love it. When we went, it only took two hours, I believe, from Rio to Areal do Cabo. It was very streamlined. Areal do Cabo to Búzios is so close, we actually Ubered between them. It was an hour, and it was like a $10 Uber ride, so it was really nice. The Uber got us there to Búzios. We also found a really great Airbnb to stay there. We loved exploring Búzios, especially the nightlife. They had a lot of really cute boutiques with a lot of handcrafted goods that everyone was making. The clothes in Brazil are really beautiful. That's why I wore this. This is actually from Prana, but they have a lot of prints that are really similar, really colorful, a lot of flowers, a lot of floral prints. It was summer when we visited in Brazil, and so it was really fun to see all the different summery styles and everything. If you really like colorful, vibrant, bright prints, that was probably one of my favorite parts of Brazil, was seeing all their really beautiful shirts and sundresses and the sort of sarongs that they wear at the beach and everything like that. There's also a really popular beach in Búzios called Ferradura Beach. It's sort of this really cool horseshoe shape, but also a really, really packed area. These places we thought were sort of like hidden gems, but they're very, very popular, very, very well-known. Especially in the summer, Brazilians will love to go to these beaches, enjoy, play music, really packed. Everyone's going to be out there. So yeah, that's just what you can expect if you go there. Now let's talk food. Food. Brazil is known for their fruits and their meat. Great place if you're a foodie. The cut of meat they're known for is the picanha. It has a nice fatty layer at the top, and so it's just delicious to eat. You have to go to Brazil and order yourself a picanha. And then their fruit. Their fruit is fresh, it's organic, it's delicious. The mango juice we had is spectacular. So good. Best mango juice. Ask for any of their juicers, they're so good naturales, they're so delicious. And a pro tip that we like to do is ask them to give us the natural juice with no sugar added, because fruits themselves have a lot of sugar, they're perfect as they are. So we like to ask for them to please not add any sugar, and it's delicious, it's wonderful, we love it. And also with the picanha, something new that I tried in Brazil was the farofa. It's sort of this dried little mix that you have on the side of your steak. I had never tried that before, but that's really famous in Brazil. Yeah, it's really good. So the classic plate, you're going to get white rice, farofa, meat, and then black beans. And then you can have feijoada, which is a mix of the black beans with these cuts of meat and everything in there. Ask for feijoada, and that mix is the classic Brazilian dish, it's so good. Something else as well that was really popular in Brazil is pau de queijo. So that is the Brazilian cheese bread. Almost everywhere that you go, the airports, the street vendors, everyone will have pau de queijo, and then coxinhas. Hopefully I'm pronouncing that correctly, they're these fried chicken croquettes. So those are really, really famous, the pau de queijo and these coxinhas are really, really famous in Brazil, a pastry that they really like to eat. Something also really fun for you açaí lovers is that the açaí in Brazil is amazing, strongly recommend trying that, drinking coconut water, like Mateo said, their fruits there are absolutely amazing. Strongly recommend trying and eating as much fruit and as much Brazilian food as you can. Their food is truly a delicacy and we loved experiencing it. Something really interesting to know about traveling to Brazil as well is that the language that they speak there is Portuguese. And so if you're like me, you studied up on your Spanish, that will not get you far in Brazil. It might be easier for someone who's a native Spanish speaker to be able to communicate with a native Portuguese Brazilian speaker. But for someone who has learned Spanish, it was really hard for me to try to understand any Portuguese. Honestly, I'm pretty good at Spanish, but I could not understand what was going on. And something else that's important to note for your travel to Brazil is that it's not really common for anyone to speak English. And so for someone like me, I had a hard time communicating with anyone. But thankfully Mateo was able to sort of half communicate. Google Translate is your buddy. You want to have the downloadable languages. You can just download a whole language and then you can just type in the words you need and it'll show up. You don't need the internet for that. So it's a really cool tool to use. Yeah, it's so, so helpful. And then if you do have internet, you can actually use the Google Lens. So I use this so many times at restaurants on menus. I would just take a photo of the menu and then it would translate to me what that item is. And so that was a really game changing, really helpful tip for our travels in Brazil. So sort of a heavier topic that we wanted to talk on, but I wish someone had shared these tips with me sort of for what to expect before traveling to Brazil. So we wanted to share with you in the kindest way possible so that you can be prepared, but also you won't be too intimidated to visit Brazil. Something that I was sort of expecting from sort of the postcards and pictures I'd seen online was that Brazil would be the quintessential like blue water, white sand, peaceful beach. But actually it was quite the opposite of that. Brazilians are very fun loving party people. And so almost at all times there will be music playing. There will be probably like every two seconds street vendors will come up to you on the beach, try to sell you something, try to give you something. And also something that's very different from the United States is that you don't want to leave your things unattended on the beach. People are watching and people will take your things if you leave them. So you want to be street smart to keep your phone in your pocket when you can and take it out only when you need to. Yeah. And sort of like Mateo said, Brazil has gone through a lot of changes throughout the pandemic in the last couple of years. So it might not be the same as a lot of the stories that you've heard about Brazil. We were sort of shocked when we visited. We saw a lot and heard a lot of stories from locals and from people who have traveled there of sort of some dangerous situations. And so to really keep yourself safe and not to go into those situations, we would really recommend reading up on the safe areas to travel to within Rio de Janeiro. There are definitely safe areas that you can go to and then areas that you should be sure to avoid, especially as a female traveler, I would not recommend that you go into these dangerous areas, especially alone and especially, especially at night. It's definitely not safe. I've heard a lot of travel stories and you definitely don't want to be one of those travel stories. So definitely read up. If you're ever going to plan a trip back to Brazil in the future, I would recommend traveling with a travel guide or being with a local at all times. It's definitely one of those places where you don't sort of want to wing a trip or sort of go on your own or be more spontaneous. It is really important to be prepared, especially if you're a female traveler, to take those precautions and make sure you're as safe as possible on your trip because a lot of things have definitely happened there. So yeah, we say all of this to prepare you guys. Brazil is a very great country. We met a lot of really kind, really awesome people during our travels there, but we also met a lot of people who were the opposite of that. And so you really want to be as precautious and as careful on your trip as possible for anywhere that you travel to, but especially if you're traveling here during this time, they have been hit hard. A lot has happened there. There's still a lot of natural beauty you can see and a lot of stunning places that you can travel to. Of course, we were in the city area, so we did sort of see the height of everything that had happened and sort of the concentration of the past two years accumulating into what's going on now. But Brazil still is a very beautiful place. The culture is very fun, a lot of music, a lot of fun-loving people who just want to enjoy the moment. They want to enjoy life. Life is right now. And that's a lot of the beauty that can be taken out of the experience there. And so that was my overall takeaway. Go into these places with an open mind, but be prepared as well. Yeah. And like we said, Brazil is a huge country. It's huge. But of course, the most popular place is Rio de Janeiro, so we wanted to visit there and see what it was all about. We also did travel to Iguazu Falls on the Brazil side and the Argentina side. We made a video on that, so we're going to be linking that right here, where we see the Brazil side and the Argentina side of Iguazu. Both sides are beautiful. You have an outstanding view, but we share with you which side we liked better. And of course, there are so many other places that you can see in Brazil as well, like the Brazilian Amazon and all the beautiful islands that are off the coast of Brazil, more in the northern parts of the country. And so there's so much to explore. We're very grateful we had the opportunity to travel to Brazil. And be sure to follow along on our next adventures around the world. We are at MazaTravel. Be sure to like, comment, and subscribe.