More Brazil Travel Tips from the NYTimes "Frugal Traveler"

In a post from last week, I summarized some of the tips that the NYTimes "Frugal Traveler" had included in a post about Brazil.  He published more tips in a post last Friday, this time from three Brazil-based experts.

Here's a partial list:

Avoid traveling to Brazil during the busiest seasons for domestic travel:  school holidays in January and June, Carnival, and national holidays that turn into long weekends.

Wait for January 10, which the author cites as the "magic date that the Brazilian summer stops being so expensive."   

Visit Rio in the Fall, after Easter (remember, seasons in the Southern Hemisphere are the opposite of seasons in the Northern Hemisphere).  
Use the bus to travel between cities.

Fly on Panama's Copa airline for convenience and decent rates.

Save money by eating small, traditional dishes.

Avoid renting a car if possible.

Try visiting Brasília, where hotels offer reasonable weekend rates, bus travel is efficient, and most main attractions are free.

Buy food "por kilo," and in a restaurant, split an entree with one or two travel companions to save money.

Use airport shuttles instead of taxis to get from the airport to the city center.

From NYTimes "Frugal Traveler": 7 Tips To Save On Your Trip To Brazil

Seth Kugel, writing in the NYTimes blog "Frugal Traveler," published a post today called "For a Brazilian Vacation, 7 Rules to Save By."

Once you get past the sticker shock of the cost of a round-trip flight to Brazil (around $1,000...I mean, I knew that flights were not cheap, but $1,000??), the author offers some good ideas about how to keep your other costs down. Even if you follow the author's advice about booking a cheaper flight, the best he could do was around $900, but every dollar or real counts.

Other ideas include not traveling to Rio during Carnival, New Year's, or other busy times, and finding lodging away from high-priced areas like Ipanema or Copacabana. After a limited stay in Rio (too expensive to spend your entire vacation there) the author recommends traveling elsewhere. He rules out an Amazon adventure ("Too far, too pricey, too complicated") and instead, recommends exploring the state of Minas Gerais.  

He offers suggestions on how to keep your restaurant costs under control, basically by not eating at restaurants, but instead buying your food by the kilo, or from a "lanchonete" or a juice stand.  For lodging, he suggests searching out a good pousada.

He recommends learning some Portuguese, warning tourists that "Your Spanish might help, but not as much as you think."

My favorite line was this one: "Rio, São Paulo and the other big cities are not nearly as dangerous as you might think from watching Brazilian movies like … well, like just about all of them." So it wasn't just my imagination that a lot of Brazilian movies deal with crime and violence.

Be sure to read the entire post if you're planning on traveling to Brazil. The author promises more tips in an upcoming post, too, so stay tuned.