Samba & Solitude

We had always talked about going somewhere far. Far not just in miles, but in mood, in music, in meaning. Brazil had this mythical pull—part football, part forest, part festive chaos. So, when our respective jobs allowed us the luxury of time, and our savings finally looked semi-respectable, we—Vinod and Manjit—booked two one-way tickets from Bangalore to Rio de Janeiro. The idea was to travel light, plan less, and feel more.

The flight was long, stretching time and our backs, but the moment we stepped into the balmy Rio night, it was like walking into a giant, open-air party where the streets themselves danced. That first evening, we stood by Copacabana beach, not saying much, just watching the Atlantic waves curl like giant sighs under a string of orange streetlights. Manjit took off his shoes. I followed. The sand was still warm. A group of locals played football nearby. Someone offered us cold beer from a Styrofoam cooler. That first sip tasted like arrival.

Our hostel was in Santa Teresa, an artsy, uphill neighbourhood with cobbled streets, graffiti walls, and a cable car that seemed determined to break down just when you needed it most. We loved it instantly. Every morning, the air smelled of strong coffee, wet leaves, and just the faintest trail of cigar smoke. Over breakfast—papaya, pão de queijo, and conversations in broken Portuguese—we met Ana and Joao, a Brazilian couple who insisted we couldn’t leave Rio without trying feijoada at their grandmother’s house. We thought they were being polite. But three days later, we were sitting on plastic stools in a backyard in the Tijuca district, laughing with a dozen strangers over bowls of black bean stew and rice, trying to make sense of jokes through gestures and smiles. Hospitality, we learned, needed no translation.

Rio was a living contradiction. At one moment, we were on the Sugarloaf Mountain, looking out at a postcard-perfect cityscape, and the next we were sweating in a crowded bus that smelled of fruit and engine oil. We hiked up to Christ the Redeemer, because not doing so felt sacrilegious, and though the crowds made us a bit grumpy, the view was worth every complaint. We spotted a rainbow over the city—a quiet one, barely there—and for a second, we both fell silent. Even Manjit, who always has a punchline, had none.

After a week in Rio, we took a flight to Manaus, the gateway to the Amazon. The city felt like a mirage—urban in the middle, but fringed by green madness on all sides. We joined a three-day jungle tour with eight others and a guide named Paulo, who claimed he’d once been bitten by a snake and survived by singing to it until help arrived. We never figured out if he was joking. On the second night, deep in the forest, we lay in hammocks strung between trees while the jungle performed its haunting opera. Manjit couldn’t sleep and whispered stories all night—about childhood pranks, about his failed attempt to become a tabla player, and about his fear of frogs, which he swore were watching him from the bushes. At dawn, I found one on his backpack. I didn’t tell him.

The Amazon changed us. We saw pink dolphins, fished for piranhas, and tasted unknown fruits whose names we never got right. One morning, Paulo stopped the boat and asked us to jump into the river. “Just do it. The river will clean you.” We hesitated for a moment and then dove in, clothes and all. It felt less like a bath and more like baptism. Later that night, sitting around a fire, Paulo said, “Now the river knows your names.” That line stayed with us.

We flew to Salvador next—a city soaked in Afro-Brazilian culture, music, and food. Here, we stayed in a guesthouse run by Dona Marta, who sang while she cooked and claimed she could tell our fortunes from the way we stirred our coffee. Every night in Pelourinho, the historical heart of the city, drums echoed through the lanes. Capoeira circles broke out in parks and squares. We got pulled into one by a boy no older than ten who insisted Manjit try a kick. Manjit tried. Manjit fell. The boy laughed for a full minute before helping him up.

One afternoon, we sat on the steps of a yellow colonial church, just watching people go by—lovers, vendors, barefoot children, old men playing cards. A woman selling acarajé (deep-fried bean patties stuffed with shrimp) beckoned us. We bought one, then another. We must have eaten five before realizing the sun had gone down and the sky was turning indigo. “Let’s stay another day,” I said. Manjit nodded. We stayed three.

Our last stop was Iguaçu Falls. We didn’t talk much on that flight. Maybe it was travel fatigue. Or maybe the strange awareness that the trip was winding down. But when we saw the falls for the first time—curtains of water thundering into mist, birds wheeling above like paper kites—we both smiled like kids on a school trip. The power of it was overwhelming. We took the boat ride that gets you soaking wet, and we screamed like idiots when the water hit us, and then laughed till our stomachs hurt.

That night, over a bottle of cachaça by the hostel balcony, Manjit said, “I didn’t expect Brazil to be this... intimate.” He was right. Brazil didn’t just show us its sights; it let us feel its pulse. It fed us with stories and stumbles, with every handshake and shared plate.

On our last day, we sat on a quiet beach in São Paulo, our flight just hours away. We didn’t say much. Vinod wrote postcards he would never send. Manjit sketched the waves with a broken pencil. In those moments, we weren’t travellers anymore. We were just two friends who had come to a place hoping to escape routine, and instead found something quietly sacred in chaos, strangers, and stories that weren’t ours but now somehow felt like they were.

Brazil didn’t feel like a place we had visited. It felt like a rhythm we had stepped into, awkwardly at first, then with growing ease. We knew we’d carry that rhythm with us long after the trip ended—even as we got back to the noise of Bangalore, to traffic and deadlines and the smell of filter coffee.

As we boarded the plane back, Manjit turned to me and said, “Let’s not wait another ten years for the next one.” I smiled. Brazil had already started turning into memory. But it was one we’d revisit often—in words, in silences, and in every samba beat that caught us by surprise.

The writers are freelance travel journalists