Wow! Where do I begin? We’ve been in Brazil for almost a month now, and for the most part, you wouldn’t really notice that there is a global pandemic. When we were in Rio less than a week ago, the beaches were crowded and every time we went anywhere, including the supermarket, things were completely normal. But things here have slowly started to catch up with the rest of the world. It sounds like the country will be declaring a state of emergency soon, and it just closed its land borders. Our flight from Salvador to Lencois today only had nine people on it. We also flew this past Sunday from Rio to Salvador, and I was surprised that there were no additional screenings for passengers. Other than the higher number of face masks, it was just another day of flying. But after our flight landed today there were some doctors taking everyone’s temperature and asking questions, which I appreciated. But since we don’t speak Portuguese and they didn’t speak English or Spanish, it was tough communicating with them (even after we opened up Google translate). I don’t think they liked hearing that we were from the United States. We tried to tell them that we haven’t been in the US since last July and we have already been in Brazil for a while, which I think they understood, but they then tried to ask us more questions and eventually gave up and let us through.
Lencois is a small town compared to the places we’ve been to recently and it is pretty isolated, which is probably a good place to be at this time. It borders a national park, so we’ll be practicing our social distancing with a lot of hiking. We’ll be here for ten nights and I’m sure a lot will change during that time. At this point we’re not sure what we’re going to do. We were supposed to go diving on the island of Fernando de Noronha next, but they just closed the airport and I doubt they’ll reopen it anytime soon. Apparently, the president of Brazil is going there for Easter, so I hope that’s not related to the closing of the airport. The people here are not happy with him right now because he hasn’t been taking the crisis seriously. Sound familiar?
We were also going to go to the Amazon and finish our Brazil trip at Iguazu Falls, but we’ve pretty much given up on them. After that, Ecuador was next with our first stop in the Galapagos. We were extremely excited about that, especially for the diving liveaboard where we would hopefully finally get to dive with hammerhead sharks – Therese’s dream adventure! Ecuador, like almost every other country here, has already closed all of its borders, so at this time we pretty much can’t travel anywhere in South or Central America. And last night I was notified that our flight from Brazil to Ecuador has been cancelled even though it’s over a month away.
Today the US State Department issued a “Do Not Travel” warning and said all citizens should return home unless they’re prepared to stay abroad indefinitely. Over the past few days, we’ve talked a lot about whether or not we should go home, but it sounds like we would just be going to a worse situation. At least here, you’re not going to be fighting over toilet paper because everyone has bidets. Hopefully, after this crisis is over the US will finally get its act together and start using bidets because they are awesome!
Another issue with going home is that we don’t actually have a home to go to since we’re renting our house out. So more than likely if we went back, we’d stay with one of our mothers. But that makes me nervous since I wouldn’t want to chance to stay with them, or anyone else, after travelling.
And if those weren’t good enough reasons not to go home, if we go home before June we’ll have to pay taxes on all our income earned outside of the US.
So right now we’re thinking about finding a place in Brazil to hunker down for the next few months to give us time to re-evaluate the situation. We can stay in Brazil until mid-May but if all of the other countries still have their borders closed, hopefully, they’ll allow us to extend our stay.
It’s definitely a scary time and it sounds like things won’t be going back to normal any time soon, so I hope we end up making the right decision.