Porto Seguro

I went to Porto Seguro a little while ago. Porto Seguro is a little city on the beach relatively close to here. It was here that the Portuguese explorer Pedro Cabral was the first European to set foot on Brazilian soil just over 500 years ago.

It was really nice, but it didn't start very well. 

The flight was scheduled to depart late in the evening, twenty minutes to midnight. After checking in, I saw that the departure time on the boarding card I just received was one hour later than what it said on the monitors all over the airport.  

I didn't worry too much about it though, since there is basically always something wrong. Most often it's the gate number which changes a few minutes before the boarding starts. Obviously there is never any information anywhere either. 

There are often delays, but this time there was one flight, which was scheduled to depart 10 min after our, which all of a sudden was moved to depart one hour earlier. A while later, our flight completely disappeared from the monitors. 

The terminal was very small, but there was a help desk. However, a few minutes before our flight disappeared, the help desk was conveniently left unattended. Almost no one seemed to be worried at all though. 

After a while someone appeared in the help desk and a few people went to ask what was going on. We also went there and were reminded that there was a time change this evening, such that at the stroke of midnight the clocks were turned back to 11 pm. I did know that there was a time change that night, but I could never imagine that it was at that time and not in the middle of the night, when most people are asleep, as it is in Europe. 

Anyhow, due to this time change, the time would be 23:40 twice this evening. Therefore, the airline was not sure whether the flight should depart the first time the clock was 23:40 or the second time. Since they were not sure how they would do, they removed the flight from the monitors and they did that without giving any information whatsoever. 

Instead of actually solving the "problem", they did something that Brazilians do a bit too often: they waited and hoped that someone else would fix it or that it would fix itself. Thanks to the nature of this problem, that actually worked this time, since that meant that the flight did after all depart around the second time the clock showed 23:40. 

Normally I'm quite happy when we turn back the clocks one hour, since I get one more hour of sleep or one more hour to do something. However, this time I got to spend the extra hour confused in a small, cold and boring airport, so I was less happy than normally. 

In the end I did arrive in Porto Seguro and had a wonderful time, so I'm not complaining too much.

One of the main streets of Porto Seguro.

 This animal is a kind of starfish, which was very common on the beach.

 There was a small shop where they sold adrenaline in the form of fruit.

This guy was playing on a different kind of instrument - a bunch of keys. There is a close-up below.

There was a boat that transported cars and people across a big river. The pictures just above and below are taken from this boat. The funny thing about this boat was that it seemed to have been built by attaching a small boat to a large raft. There were no engines on the raft and it could change direction by changing the angle it was pushing the raft, see the pictures.

There were a lot of people walking around selling stuff on the beach. You might be able to guess what the guy above tried to sell.

This sign above was on the main road to and from Porto Seguro. It means: "Born in Porto Seguro. My name is Brazil".