Rolling through lush pastures and eucalyptus forests in the countryside of Minas Gerais, Brazil.

This is the second installment of some impressions I jotted down – and snapped away – during a recent bike vacation in Brazil.

Brazil is a huge country (larger than all lower-48 states combined and occupying nearly half of the South American continent), and in the 11 days I was over there, I saw only a tiny part of it. I spent the first 8 days of my vacation with the 10-head strong group of MTB Brazil travelers, riding bikes and discovering the coffee lands around Poços de Caldas, located in the countryside of Minas Gerais, a couple hours North of São Paulo. Poços is the place where MTB Brazil organizer Augusto Carneiro grew up, where most of his relatives still live and farm, and where his delicious Nossa Familia coffee is grown. The last 3 days of my trip, I also got a taste of  São Paulo – Brazil’s ultimate megalopolis – which I’ll share some observations about in another post.

Coffee Growing 101 by Augusto Carneiro (r)

During our time in Poços de Caldas, our group enjoyed an interesting mix of 1) daily mountain bike rides through the coffee fields, lush pastures, and forested hills that make up most of the region; 2) various educational exposes about the history, geology, nature and culture of the region; 3) a multi-day course about all the aspects of growing and processing coffee in the highlands of Brazil; 4) a daily first-class experience of the culinary richness of Brazil; and 5) meeting the seemingly endless line-up of Augusto’s relatives, who happened to co-guide or host us for any of the activities mentioned sub 1 through 4.

The local connection, through Augusto and his relatives, was definitely something that made this trip very unique. First, there is the practical side of getting around in a country where most people speak only Portuguese; a beautiful language, but unfortunately also one that most of us didn’t master beyond the essential basics of hello (“oi”, “boa dia”), thank you (“obrigado/a”), goodbye (“tchau”), beer (“cerveza”) and caipirinha (“caipirinha”). Second, having a local riding with you on unmarked roads and trails, provides you some degree of comfort that you will get back to your hotel by the time night falls and leopards, snakes, and tropical vampires take over that beautiful forest you were riding through. But best of all, wherever we went, we did get welcomed in true Brazilian fashion, with big smiles, open doors, and full tables (like in: full of yummy food).

Bem-vindo em Fazenda Recreio! One of the beautiful coffee farms (and lunch destinations) we visited on one of our bike rides.

The delicious food – especially the generous dessert trays – sure came in handy to balance the caloric outtake we delivered on our bike rides back and forth. While most of the mountain biking was not very technical in nature, the area was anything but flat. Poços is actually located inside the crater of a giant ancient volcano and all the coffee fields we were riding through were draped across the outside slopes of this crater. So yes, we did get our money’s worth of daily bike work-outs.

Even better, it was great to experience a vacation where bikes were the main form of transportation to get to and from various places of interest. Besides the sheer fun of riding bikes in a foreign country, one thing I was very interested in finding out on this trip, is how cycling – both for transportation and recreational purposes – is faring in a developing country like Brazil. So here is my shortlist of non-scientific observations about bicycle use in the Brazilian countryside and in the city of Poços:

Young cyclists at one of the farm villages.

- Most bikes you see on the streets are basic, hard-tail mountain bikes, some older clunker bikes (often with front and/or rear cargo racks), some no-frills BMX and kids bikes.
- I didn’t spot any fancy bikes (road or mountain). Or any urban hipsters on fixies, for that matter.
- Most people I saw riding a bike seemed to do so to get around the neighborhood. It didn’t look like many people there were using their bike to travel beyond a couple miles. For that, Brazilians rather seem to use the excellent public transportation system (mostly buses, which you’ll see even in the more remote countryside), their car (if they have one), or motorcycles (the utilitarian 50cc type, which were very prevalent, both in the city and on backcountry roads).
- Also, people in Brazil seem to love to walk. I guess this has mostly to do with the Brazilian pace of living, which is a little more laidback and easygoing than in the USA.
- While the city of Poços provided great accommodation for pedestrians (including beautiful parks and parkways), bike facilities seemed spotty at best. Yes, they had a 5-mile long “ciclovia” (dedicated/separated bike path) along the main arterial road into town, but once downtown, cyclists were left on their own, without bike lanes and competing for road space with the busy car traffic. I also noticed several downtown streets that had “no biking allowed” signs posted, which felt somewhat surreal to the Portlander and born-and-raised Belgian inside me.

Oh, and what about recreational cycling? Well, we did see a couple other mountain bikers decked out in lycra, camel bags or other typical MTB gear. They were also the only other people I saw riding with a helmet (which either shows that mountain bikers in general are pretty smart about protecting their heads or that they are one of the most crash-prone categories of cyclists. Or both.) The almost complete absence of road bikes with drop bars was probably the most striking difference with the cycling landscape in the U.S. or Europe. And very unlike Portland (or Belgium), not a single Brazilian I talked to had ever heard of cyclocross… could you believe that??

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