A Brazil Resource

[trilingual]

Many of you have already found Brazilian hotel guide websites on your own or listed in other threads on this board. However, I strongly suggest that when you finally get to Brazil you go to any corner news stand and purchase a copy of the current year's "Guia Quatro Rodas - Brasil". (Rodas is pronounced "Ho-das".) This is a very reliable guide to hotels, restaurants, and sights throughout Brazil, laid out in the style of the French Michelin guides, so it's very easy to use and understand. Although it's in Portuguese, it mostly uses symbols, and the guide comes with a plastic bookmark that has an English key to the symbols used in the listings. The guide has quite a few illustrations and maps of city centers of many larger cities. You'll find the guide invaluable for planning excursions to other places in Brazil if you intend to venture beyond Rio or São Paulo, or for planning future trips. The guide also includes a large road map of the country, which will help impress you with the enormous size and scale of Brazil, not to mention help you figure out what kind of itineraries might make sense and what places are relatively close to each other.

 

In addition to the annual country-wide guide, Quatro Rodas publishes an illustrated guide to Rio (in English) that you may find useful, and a number of other guides in Portuguese, including an illustrated guide to all the beaches of Brazil (with photos, hotel listings, etc.). All of these are sold at the newstands.

 

Take Uncle Tri's advice: any or all of these Quatro Rodas guides will be useful to you once you become hard-core Brazil addicts!

[CT Dick]

>Take Uncle Tri's advice: any or all of these Quatro Rodas

>guides will be useful to you once you become hard-core

>Brazil addicts!

 

which will happen after your first visit. :7

 

Dick

 

PS-Both Barnes and Noble and Amazon list the Quatro Rodos guide as out of print. :-(

[trilingual]

For some reason, the Quatro Rodas guides aren't sold abroad. (The publishers are foolish not to add some introductory material in English and other languages and distribute the guide overseas, but they haven't asked for my opinion.) However, it's always in print in Brazil, and, as I said, available at virtually every corner newstand in the country. You certainly won't have problems finding it in Copacabana or Ipanema. The Brazil guide is an annual publication. The other guides (like to Rio, the beaches, the São Paulo and Rio street atlases, etc.) are published on an irregular basis and those may sell out. However, if you wander around and check various newstands and bookstores, chances are you'll find what you're looking for.