Today, I learned that the Brazilian site, decolar.com (which means something like “takeoff.com“) runs price comparisons for flights, cars and hotels for Latin Americans to fly around their continent as well as see the rest of the world.
I checked: Yes, I could have booked BA-Mendoza and Mendoza-Santiago myself. (Skipping the fact that LAN still wasn’t flying into Santiago six days after the February 8.8 earthquake, so I took a bus over the Andes and forfeited my plane ticket.) (See “Chile Puede,” my NG Intelligent Travel blog about the quake.)
This welcome news about Decolar arrived with my houseguest, Diego Alcantara, a Brazilian political reporter. I first met Diego in 2002 when he and five other low-income high school students from Brasìlia visited DC on an Ambassadors of Hope exchange, which was sponsored by the DC-Brasìlia chapter of Partners of the Amèricas. Now Diego covers the Brazilian presidency and diplomacy for SBT television, the second largest network in Brazil. With his job comes four weeks of vacation, which he has to take in one chunk. That’s enviable!
Last year, his first on the job after graduation, Diego flew around Peru. This year he’s circled the United States. Next year, he’s thinking about some country in Asia. Which is how we came to talk about major shifts for citizens who live south of the equator to travel around the world.
Like:
- A 14-hour non-stop from Sao Paulo to Istanbul, Tel Aviv, Dubai or Doha and then on eastward.
- Or, a 13-hour non-stop from Santiago to Auckland.
- Or, the classic short hop (8:30-hours) from Sao Paulo to Johannesburg.
Even Brasìlia, where I’ve spent most of my time in the country, has become a darling of the airlines. New non-stops to Lisbon, Atlanta and Lima are departing from the capitol, with a Miami non-stop scheduled to open in November. Think about the map of Brazil for a minute and you can begin to understand what a relief that is. In the past–and still for the unknowing in the present–the route from the United States to Brazil is to fly over Brasìlia on your way to Sao Paulo, about two hours father south. Once there, you either hang out in the international airport (if you’re lucky) or catch a bus to the downtown airport to catch a plane that will fly you back north to Brasìlia.
Visualize the difference to the non-Europe/US world
National Geographic’s gigantic world map dominates my living room wall. DIego and I studied it last night, trying to see the difference it would make in a journey to Asia if a Brazilian didn’t fly to NY/Europe to travel onward.
I saw, but I couldn’t imagine the trip when I woke up this morning, so I went to Qatar Airlines and tUnited sites and compared their trips to Delhi, a journey which I made last year when I flew on Qatar from DC, with a change of planes in Doha.
Do you realize that it takes only 1:20 hours longer to fly from Sao Paulo to Doha (14 hours) than DC? (12:40 hours)
But if you’re in a hurry to get to Delhi, you’re better off flying United to JFK to Frankfurt to Delhi (32 hours) or British Airways, etc, directly to Europe, since Qatar’s plane from Sao Paulo arrives too late to catch the daily Delhi flight. There’s a 21-hour layover, which makes the Qatar route a 39:35-hour endurance.
Or, is it. I’m back on the Qatar site, checking out Qatar Stopovers. Four-wheeling over dunes, swimming in the Inland Sea, sleeping in Bedouin tents…rising to watch the sun rise over the desert…I’m in. Someday.