Brazil

For the Christmas and new year vacations of 2009-10 I went to Brazil. Looking back it looks like one of the best trips ever. I would be writing detailed post about every city but this one is a summary.

If the first thing that comes to your mind when you think about Brazil is beautiful girls in Bikini on the beach on Rio you are not very different from most who have mostly got that image from TV. But once you visit Brazil you will realize its much more than that. Its a country I fell in love with much before I reached Rio's beaches.

Whats so special about Brazil ? Well to start with the people are amazing, hospitality and friendlyness is in the viens. Second Brazilian undoubtedly are the most party people I have ever seen. Its not unusual for a Brazilian party to start at 7-8 PM and go-on till 5-6 AM. Which implies the point that Brazilians love food and beer (and very rarely other drinks but definitely Caiparina) besides music and dancing. Overall the most merry ppl you will ever find IMO.

Now on to non-people things the country itself is beautiful with large landscapes filled with greenery, mountains, water bodies and beaches. On this regard its very similar to my other favourite place Kerala (in India). Brazilians definitely love greenery and water as you can see by either natural or man made lakes.

Another interesting thing about the country is that its amoung one of the fasted growing developing countries and if you see the new cities like Brasilia clearly give the feel of a developed country with all those good roads and buildings.

The country does has some problems of its own. Brazil's big cities like Rio de Janeiro and Sao Paulo are infamous for their crimes rates which clearly emerge because of a big social divide between the Rich and poor. The cost of living in Brazil is pretty high and increasing and the poor have increasing difficult time coping up.
A different language from most countries in the region and very limited English friendly environments can make the travel for a person not knowing portuguese quite hard. If you know at least some Spanish you are in much better spot but only English is not gonna be very helpful.
I am pretty sure these two issues does cost Brazil at least some Tourist loss.

Would like to mention this book which came pretty handy to start planning the trip. I have now used LP for Europe and Brazil and would probably buy it for any place I am spending quite some time at (thanks to my friend Thomas for suggesting the travel book idea based on his experience of exploring India.)

I visited 4 cities of Brazil, Sao Paulo, Brasilia, Rio de Janeiro and Paraty which were all amazing and came to realize that I want to see much more, I already have some place in mind for my next trip: Ilha Grande, Foz de Iguazu, Florianpolis, Salvador and Amazonia.


Now some details many people ask about (and even I search for on net):
Approximate Costs: (find
My flight ticket (return) 1189 USD (+65 USD for travel insurance) from Orbitz via Aero Mexico (a post on why not to choose it follows)was
Plane ticket from Rio to Brasilia ~ 200 Reals (from Oceanair.com).
Bus ticket from Brasilia to Sao Paulo ~ 163 Reals (from util.com.br)
Hostel (dorm) costs typical 30-50 Reals
Food: 10-20 Reals for normal. 30-50 for fancy.
Overall cost about: 2100 USD (but be aware that I was hosted by friends for at least 8 out of 15 days).

Vegetarian Food:
- Not too many choices but you won't die.
- Ask them for custom sandwiches if you don't like any in menu, most shops can make Cheese sandwich for you
- Juices are amazing and very reasonable in price. Fruits are abundant too.
- Try going to Self-Service Per-Kilo restaurants to get a chance to pick food selectively.
- Italian food is you friend, Pasta places make them to your order, Pizza places always have cheese only pizza.

Getting a Brazil Visa

So, I applied for Brazil visa at the Brazil Consulate in San Francisco.. The process is very straight forward. The consulate is very helpful, welcoming and timely. I would think using a visa agent won't provide any great advantage.


0) Get an appointment from the website (this gets you a appointment time for visiting the Consulate).
1) Needed: 1 passport size photo, pre filled form.
2) USPS Money order for required fees addressed to Consulate General of Brazil (fees for Indian citizen, 20$, for US 130 $).
2) Passport with 6 months validity
3) Return tickets/Itinerary (I just took them to be sure, the website doesn't mention this to be required).
4) For getting the Passport returned by mail, use Express mail from USPS. (costed 17$).

The application process took about 30 minutes in total.  The visa took about 10 business days, my passport was returned duly is about 12 business days including delivery time. I choose to get the passport delivered as I didn't want to travel to San Francisco again.

BTW, when the consulate mentions they will only process 42(or whatever) applications per day it doesn't mean that you may or may not be able to apply visa that they if you get the appointment if means that you are in those 42 applications.

Aluratek Internet Radio Alarm Clock rocks!

I recently purchased this device from Amazon mostly imagining myself to keep up to date with the news and music from channels other than locally available on FM/AM. Besides the fact that I was in love with the iHome Radio alarm clock which wakes you up to your choice of buzzer, Radio or iPod.

This one beats that, it wakes you up to Internet Radio, FM/AM, Music from USB disc or a simple alarm. As expected it also allows you to use all these options to listen to music. As the photo didn't mention it actually comes with a Remote control.

The setup of the device was pretty straightforward even on a WIFI with security enabled. It did take 2 attempts to get it right but then it immediately showed a impressive list of channels.

First thing I wanted to do was to check Indian news channel, specially seeing people talk about listening to BBC (in Amazon reviews), to my dis-appointment Indian news channels still don't offer internet radio channels, but I could listen to news from BBC or other ones easily.

Next, I was quickly able to get a list of Bollywood channels along with multiple other music channels (Go Locations->Asia->India (the list has about 7-8 channels including Tamil/Telgu music).

As people mentioned on amazon one single issue I can think of with this device is the lack of battery support, but in my extensive review for the products at this price range this one beats all.

Death Valley National Park trip

From Death Valley National Park

On the Thanksgiving long weekend we had a trip to Death Valley National Park (DV). DV is about 8 hours of driving time away from Mountain View, CA. DV turned out to be great. I have been to couple of national parks earlier like Yosemite and Kings Canyon and Sequoia national park, and also few recreation parks like Muir Woods National monument and Point Reyes, but DV seems to have been the best till now.

From Death Valley National Park

From Death Valley National Park

As they say DV is a land of extremes, I have only read about deserts' extreme climate conditions, during this first proper camping experience I felt it. When we reached Death Valley it was about 4:00 PM on Thursday pretty warm, had good sunlight around.then in some time we camped up and by around 5 PM or so things were very different, it got dark, very windy and started getting colder. Within an hour or two I had to put on gloves and head band to feel comfortable outside. Interestingly the second day of the camping we witnessed light showers in the night and early morning.

From Death Valley National Park

From Death Valley National Park

From Death Valley National Park

We stayed at the Emigrant site where the camping site we took easily accomdated 2 2-3 ppl camp and a 1 2 ppl camping and still had enough space to park cars around to save ourselves from the winds. The camp-site is about 8 miles from the stove-pipe wells village which had an Okay restaurant and a decent a General store. The Restaurant didn't have any decent Veggie dinner but we could find quick to cook food at the General store which they allowed cooking in their microwave.

Next day we went to points of interest around Furnace Creek which included The Badwater, Zebreikies' point, Natural Bridge, Artists Drive, the 20 mule canyon. All of these places are worth the visit. We missed the Golden canyon trek but had enough trekking at other places like Natural Bridge and at the Artists drive.

From Death Valley National Park

From Death Valley National Park

From Death Valley National Park

From Death Valley National Park

The next day we went to the Ranger's station at Stovepipe to figure our what was the next thing to try. We decided to head to Scotty's castle direction but not for the castle but the Ubehebe Crator which is an interesting place to visit. Ubehebe crator isn't very big in size compared to ones I have heard of or seen like the Lonar Crator in Maharatra, India.But interestingly this one allows you to go all the way down to the bottom most point as its not being filled with water and has a nicely lade out though a moderately difficult trek. We did see the castle but beside being a pretty one there is nothing much about it.

From Death Valley National Park

From Death Valley National Park

From Death Valley National Park

From Death Valley National Park

As planed earlier we left for Las Vegas after that. Vegas is about 3.5 hours away from Death Valley. The return trip from Las Vegas on Sunday of Thankgiving weekend became a painful one taking about 12-13 hours in stead of 7.5 required during normal timing ours.

Unhiding KDE applications menubar/toolbar when GUI fails to

Just figured out this by experimentation. If you end up hiding your menubar and toolbar and can't get them back through GUI, you can go edit the applications config file in

$HOME/.kde/share/config/

for e.g

$HOME/.kde/share/config/digikamrc
 [MainWindow Toolbar ToolBar]
Hidden=true
IconText=IconOnly

 [MainWindow]
Height 1200=1201
InitialAlbumID=10003
MenuBar=Disabled



Set these values to false and Enabled respectively.