Highlights of Brazil, 16 Days Privately Guided

01

Rio de Janeiro

Day 1-4

4 nights

Four nights, which is one more than most itineraries give Rio and exactly the one that matters: it turns the city from a checklist into a place you have actually been. Your guide meets you at the airport and is with you each day, and the mornings are timed around the light and the crowds rather than the opening hours.

1. Day 1

   Landing, and nothing else

   You are met inside the terminal, not at a meeting point, and driven to the hotel. The rest of the day has no plan in it on purpose. Most people walk down to the sand, eat too early and sleep at nine, and that is the correct way to spend it.

   • Airport pickup
   • No schedule
2. Day 2

   Corcovado early, old Rio slowly

   Up to the 38 metre Christ by cog railway through the forest, timed so you are there before the tour buses rather than inside them. Down into the old centre afterwards for the Selarón steps, the baroque churches most tours skip, and the little yellow tram up to Santa Teresa.

   • Corcovado
   • Santa Teresa
3. Day 3

   A rainforest that was planted by hand

   Tijuca is the largest urban rainforest on earth and almost nobody knows it is artificial. Coffee estates stripped these hills bare, and from the 1860s the forest was replanted by hand. Today it hides toucans, capuchins and waterfalls fifteen minutes from Ipanema. In the late afternoon, the two cable cars up Sugarloaf, timed for the moment the bay turns gold.

   • Tijuca by jeep
   • Sugarloaf at sunset
4. Day 4

   The view the locals actually use

   Rio's best view is not from a postcard lookout. A short, steep trail starts up in the Vidigal community and opens onto the whole curve of Leblon, Ipanema and the open Atlantic from the Dois Irmãos summit. If that is not your morning, it becomes a beach day with a table booked for lunch, and neither version costs anything extra.

   • Dois Irmãos
   • Or a beach day

02

Foz do Iguaçu

Day 5-7

3 nights

275 waterfalls over a cliff nearly three kilometres wide, on the border of three countries. Three nights is what it takes to see both sides without rushing either, and the two sides are genuinely two different experiences rather than the same view twice.

1. Day 5

   Three countries in one look

   You land at lunchtime and start gently. The bird sanctuary by the park gates is one you walk through from the inside, past rescued toucans, scarlet ibis and harpy eagles, with macaws flying free overhead. Then the Marco das Três Fronteiras at dusk, where the Iguaçu meets the Paraná and Brazil, Argentina and Paraguay face each other across the water.

   • Bird sanctuary
   • Three borders
2. Day 6

   The Brazilian side, the whole sweep

   The Brazilian trail is the panorama: a cliff walkway with the entire falls in one frame, ending on a catwalk that pushes out into the spray below the Devil's Throat. Morning light is the right light. Coatis will try your bag and great dusky swifts fly straight through the water to nest behind it. In the afternoon, an inflatable up the rapids and under the cascades, if you like being soaked.

   • Panorama trail
   • Optional boat
3. Day 7

   The Argentine side, from the inside

   A full day across the border, where the walkways run through the forest and out over the water to the lip of the Garganta del Diablo, the 80 metre throat into which half the river disappears at your feet. Here the falls are not in front of you, they are around you. Bring a poncho and expect to lose an hour just standing there.

   • Devil's Throat
   • Full day

03

Manaus & the Rio Negro

Day 8-12

4 nights · riverboat

Five days on the river rather than a lodge you drive to, because the boat is the point: its shallow draft slips into side channels no larger vessel reaches, and you wake up somewhere different every morning. Air-conditioned suites, two viewing decks, kayaks carried along, and a private naturalist throughout.

1. Day 8

   Onto the black water

   You board in the early afternoon in Manaus and the city is behind you within the hour. The Rio Negro is black because of the tannins the flooded forest leaches into it, which is also why there are so few mosquitoes here, a detail nobody mentions in the brochures. A welcome drink on deck, your first river sunset, and a canoe into the still side channels after dark.

   • Embarkation
   • Evening canoe
2. Day 9

   Anavilhanas

   The largest freshwater island archipelago on earth, roughly 400 islands that the river floods and empties every year. By canoe in the morning and on foot with a naturalist who reads the forest the way you read a street. After dark, a night safari for caiman eyes and everything else that only moves once the sun is down.

   • 400 islands
   • Night safari
3. Day 10

   Dolphins, and people who live here

   Piranha fishing in the morning, which is easier than it sounds and funnier than it looks. Then a caboclo community, the river families whose lives run on the water level rather than the calendar, visited properly rather than photographed. In the warm afternoon water, the pink river dolphins come to you.

   • Pink dolphins
   • River community
4. Day 11

   Deeper in, and quieter

   The day the boat earns its keep. Kayaks off the deck into channels too narrow for anything with an engine, a sunrise most people sleep through, and long stretches of doing nothing at all while the forest goes past at walking pace. This is the day guests describe when they get home.

   • Kayaks
   • Sunrise
5. Day 12

   The Meeting of the Waters

   On the way back, the dark Rio Negro and the pale Rio Solimões meet and then refuse to mix, running side by side in one riverbed for kilometres. You can see the seam from the deck. Back in Manaus around midday, and on to the coast.

   • Two rivers
   • Return to Manaus

04

Praia do Forte

Day 13-16

4 nights · or 3 to 5

A former fishing village on Bahia's Coconut Coast, and the reason the trip does not end at an airport. Four nights is our default, three if your flights are tight and five if you have understood the point. Nothing here is compulsory, which after twelve days of highlights is exactly the right offer.

1. Day 13

   Sand, finally

   The coast road north from Salvador, then a pousada steps from the water. The village is built around one sandy lane, there is no through traffic, and the day ends with your feet in the Atlantic. Nothing is planned and nothing needs to be.

   • Transfer
   • Beach
2. Day 14

   Turtles, and the pools that appear at low tide

   The flagship station of Brazil's national sea turtle project sits directly on the beach here, with open-air pools of green, loggerhead and hawksbill turtles and, in nesting season, hatchlings. Afterwards, the natural tide pools that form in front of the village at low water are the best snorkelling you will do without a boat.

   • Sea turtle project
   • Tide pools
3. Day 15

   A castle almost nobody visits

   On the hill above the village stand the ruins of the Casa da Torre, the fortified manor of the Garcia d'Ávila family and one of the oldest colonial buildings in Brazil, begun in the sixteenth century. It takes an hour, the view runs the length of the coast, and you will likely have it to yourselves. Inland, the Sapiranga reserve adds Atlantic forest trails and a tea-coloured river to paddle.

   • 16th century
   • Atlantic forest
4. Day 16 · Finale

   The day you do nothing, on purpose

   Between July and October humpback whales pass this stretch of coast to breed and a morning boat gives you a fair chance of seeing them breach. Outside those months, the correct plan is no plan. Either way this is the day the previous two weeks arrange themselves in your head, which is the whole reason we put the beach at the end and not the beginning.

   • Whales July to October
   • Or nothing at all