By Eva Fydrych
There's no greater icon for São Paulo on a Friday afternoon than a woman standing outside her condo with entirely too much luggage, watching the minutes tick past on her phone while the Uber app stubbornly insists the driver is "3 minutes away."
In República, three minutes can mean anything.
The Negotiation
About ten minutes later—which in São Paulo time is practically early—a silver Chevrolet finally pulled up to the curb. The window rolled down, revealing a driver with the weary but patient expression of a man who has spent his Friday navigating the city's legendary traffic.
"Você fala português?" he asked.
I switched to Spanish, the linguistic cousin that always feels slightly apologetic for not being the real thing. "Un poco. Hablo más español, si no te importa."
He nodded, unfazed. In São Paulo, drivers hear everything—Portuguese, Spanish, English, the occasional desperate combination of all three from tourists who've mixed up their verb conjugations. A little Spanish was nothing.
I reached for the car door, my little black suitcase handle in one hand, my handmade giraffe print tote slung across my body, and my black Cuidado Con el Perro shopping bag dangling from my wrist like an uninvited plus-one.
The driver's eyes flicked to the Mexican bag. Just for a second. Just long enough. I didn't say anything. I never do.
But before I could open the door, he spoke again.
"É uma viagem longa," he said. A long ride.
Then came the translation, the explanation, the universal driver's dilemma delivered in Spanglish so we could both understand: The ride was far. He wasn't sure it was worth his time. On the way back to São Paulo, he might not find any passengers. The highway, the empty car, the lost fares—all of it hanging in the balance.
I knew this dance. If you're already rolling your eyes, thinking taxi scam, welcome to the club. I've rolled them too. But I also knew the math. Friday afternoon traffic. A ride to the coast. An empty return trip. It wasn't unreasonable.
So we talked. Another ten minutes passed—me standing in the heat with my giraffe tote and my misleading dog bag, him leaning across the passenger seat with the arithmetic of survival written on his face. Finally, we agreed on an additional amount. Enough to make the round trip worth his while. Enough to get me out of the República heat and into his air conditioning.
I climbed in. The door closed. The cold air hit my skin like a small miracle. My little black suitcase sat in the back with me, my giraffe tote beside it, the Cuidado Con el Perro bag on my lap where I could keep an eye on it—and where any curious passerby could keep an eye on it too, just in case they were still wondering about the dog.
The driver adjusted his mirror. The engine hummed. We pulled away from the curb.
What I didn't know—couldn't have known—was that this silver Chevrolet and I were now part of something much bigger. Brazil currently has 1.4 million Uber drivers—the most of any country in the world. One out of every five Uber drivers on the planet works here. Since the app launched in São Paulo in June 2014—with model Alessandra Ambrosio taking the first official ride—Brazilian drivers have completed 11 billion trips. That's nearly twice the entire population of Earth, each one a story waiting to happen.
My driver, it turned out, was part of a statistical majority: 45% of Brazilian Uber drivers have completed higher education. He was also, at what I guessed to be mid-forties, right around the national average age of 41.3. The research says most drivers see this as temporary, a bridge to something else. But sitting in his backseat, watching him navigate the Friday chaos with the ease of someone who's been doing this since before the app existed, I got the feeling he might be the exception.
The Soundtrack
He reached for the stereo. Music filled the car—something local, something rhythmic, something that said relax, this is Brazil, let the road take you. A good sign. I settled into my seat, my head finding that perfect angle against the headrest, my eyelids already growing heavy.
Then he started talking.
Not just talking—conversing. In Portuguese. The kind that stretches and curls, puxado from the countryside, each word taking its time to arrive. I answered in Spanish, and somehow, impossibly, we understood each other.
He talked about the city, the shortcuts only locals know. Then he pointed up. Through the window, on a hillside as we drove through the outskirts, sat his house. A house on the hill, overlooking the sprawl below. The one he was leaving behind.
I nodded, asked questions in my halting Spanish. He asked where I was from, what brought me to Brazil, had I been to the coast before. I told him—just enough to fill the space between his Portuguese and my Spanish, the two languages meeting somewhere in the middle of the car like old friends.
The Stop
Now, here's something you probably know about Uber: drivers are not allowed to make stops unless requested by a passenger. You cannot ask to stop on the way. It is definitely not allowed.
Never mind. We're in Brazil.
Somewhere along the highway, he glanced back at me in the rearview mirror. Then he pointed to the bottle holder in the center console. There, right in front of my eyes, sat a huge unopened bottle of water.
"Quer água?" he asked.
I looked at the bottle. One bottle. His bottle? Surely he wouldn't offer if he didn't have more. I heard myself say yes.
He smiled, nodded, and pulled into a parking lot. A huge supermarket loomed before us. He killed the engine. "Um minuto," he said, and disappeared.
I sat there. One minute passed. Then five. Then ten. Through the windshield, I watched the parking lot come alive with its own small dramas. A group of locals gathered outside a car parked in front of us, engaged in a very serious transaction. Gym bottles changed hands—the kind with squirt tops for hydrating between reps. Only these bottles were being filled with something that definitely wasn't water. The source? Whisky bottles. Johnnie Walker, if I remember right. Pour, cap, hand over. A little commerce in plain sight.
I clutched my Cuidado Con el Perro bag tighter. At least my bag only looked like it contained something suspicious.
Twenty minutes later, the driver emerged. Smiling. Carrying a bag the size of a small planet. He climbed in, placed it on the passenger seat, and turned to me with the satisfaction of a man who had completed an important mission. Inside: water, snacks, chocolates, cookies. Enough for a small family.
"Here, have some," he said, handing me a whole handful of chocolate candies. "São ótimos."
I took them. And I ate them. And I drank half the bottle of water he'd bought.
The Worry
And then, somewhere between the supermarket and the tropical scenery that began to unfold outside my window—lush greenery, wide stretches of water on both sides of the highway—it hit me.
Every travel forum I'd ever read about Brazil. Every warning. Don't accept drinks from strangers. Never let your guard down.
I had just eaten a whole handful of chocolates from a man I'd met thirty minutes ago. I had drunk his water. Half of it. The water he bought while I sat watching whisky change hands in the parking lot. A man whose house I'd seen on a hill, yes, but also a man who had negotiated extra money, who had left me alone for twenty minutes, who was now driving me through increasingly remote scenery.
My mind raced through every movie I'd ever seen. What came first—dizziness? Blurred vision? How long did it take? I started cataloging my own body. Any unusual sensations? Impossible to know what was real and what was paranoia.
I calculated how long ago I'd eaten the first chocolate. Twenty-five minutes? Thirty? If something was going to happen, it would happen soon. I kept waiting. Scanning. Listening to my own pulse.
"Você gosta de cachoeiras?" he asked suddenly.
The question cut through my spiraling thoughts. Cachoeiras. I didn't know that word. I fumbled for my phone, typing frantically. Cachoeira: waterfall.
"Oh," I said, too quickly. "Sim, sim. I like waterfalls."
He smiled, nodded toward the window, and mentioned a name I didn't catch. Then another name—a different attraction—that I also failed to register. I nodded like I understood.
The Tunnel
We entered a tunnel through the mountains. The sound changed, enclosed, the music bouncing differently off the walls. Traffic slowed—probably half of São Paulo had decided to spend Carnaval weekend in Santos. But something about the tunnel, the rhythm of the music, the lights flashing past—it started to feel calm again. I stopped cataloging symptoms. I just listened.
And then it came. A sudden route change. A quick turn, so fast I barely registered it. The tunnel was behind us. The crowded highway was behind us. And here we were, on an empty side road with dense tropical jungle pressing in on both sides.
The Secret Route
The road was literally empty. The contrast with the overcrowded highway was so sharp it almost hurt.
After what seemed like an eternity, he spoke. "I like taking the roads less travelled." In the rearview mirror, he was smiling—trying to hide it and failing completely. "It's my secret route. Even people from São Paulo don't know it."
I stared out at the jungle. No other cars. No signs of civilization.
A long pause. "It's actually forbidden to drive here," he said after a while.
"I noticed," I answered, forcing a smile.
Behind the smile, every movie came rushing back. The scenes where people disappear forever.
The Crossroads
And then, up ahead, a crossroads appeared. And standing at it, a black motorbike. And next to it, a guy covered in tattoos, staring directly at our car.
Here you have it, I mumbled to myself. Your Brazilian adventure.
In a heartbeat, I saw it unfold. They'd drag me from the car. Leave me in the middle of nowhere. Drive away with everything—my little black suitcase, my giraffe print tote with its precious old fashion magazines from São Paulo bookshops, my Cuidado Con el Perro bag containing only beach clothes and a fuchsia boa shawl I'd bought for Carnaval.
I clutched the bag tighter.
We kept driving. The tattooed guy fell behind us in the mirror. No recognition passed between him and my driver. No signal. No nod.
They didn't know each other.
The Waterfall
And the landscape—the landscape became truly gorgeous. Green jungle on one side, stunning steep hills on the other, with the bridge and highway we'd left somewhere far away, visible now only as distant lines against the sky.
And then I saw it. The most gorgeous waterfall I had ever seen, suddenly appearing out of nowhere. A wild cascade tumbling down, huge rocks jutting out, the water catching the light and throwing it back in a thousand directions. No one around. Just untamed nature, with no audience except the two of us in a silver Chevrolet on a forbidden road.
"Lindíssima," I whispered.
In the rearview mirror, the driver—Carlos, I now knew him to be—was smiling. Not the satisfied smile from before. The smile of someone sharing something they loved.
The Discovery
The Arrival
We arrived in Santos much later than expected. An hour and a half late. My friends were probably wondering where I was. My dinner reservation—if I'd had one—would have been long given away. Carnaval weekend had officially begun without me.
But I arrived richer than I'd left. Richer in photos, yes. But also richer in conversation, in shared experience, in the kind of unexpected adventure that travel writers spend their careers chasing. The perfect weather, the jungle walk, the feeling that I had finally discovered a piece of the real Brazil—not the version from guidebooks, but the one that exists on forbidden roads, shared by a silver Chevrolet and the people who know where the waterfalls hide.
I was, against all odds, grateful for this unexpected detour I never asked for.
The Moral
So what's the moral? If you're expecting "always accept chocolates from strangers," you've missed the point. If you're expecting "travel forums are wrong about everything," you've also missed it.
The warnings exist for a reason. Bad things happen. People do get drugged. Roads do lead to places you don't want to go. The man at the crossroads might be exactly what you fear. And those statistics—the 28% who don't feel safe—they exist because real people had real reasons.
The trick—and it's a trick, not a rule—is knowing the difference. Or maybe not knowing, but being willing to find out. With your eyes open. With your Cuidado Con el Perro bag clutched on your lap. With every movie you've ever seen playing in the back of your mind while you decide, moment by moment, whether this is the story where you disappear or the story you'll tell for the rest of your life.
I got the second one.
And I have the photos to prove it.
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