Belo Horizonte Euanopolis Bus - March 28th

Today we leave Belo Horizonte and Minas Gerais for Bahia and the beach.  But as all the long distance buses going north in this part of the world are overnight buses, we have to fill a long gap between our checkout time of 10:00 and our bus departure at 20:00.  So what do you do with 10 hours in Belo Horizonte, the answer is quite simple, you get out of Belo Horizonte.  The UNESCO World Heritage site of Congonhas is 80km away, and the buses are frequent enough that a day trip is easily accomplished.

So after leaving our bags in the left luggage in Belo Horizonte bus station, we get the 11:00 bus to Congonhas.  This is actually all the way back the way we came from Petropolis on Saturday, so there isn’t much new scenery to see.  The bus station in Congonhas is of course on the edge of town, so when we get there we get a taxi to the square with the Basilica do Bom Jesus de Matosinhos.  This is the actual UNESCO site, and when we get there we see three other tourists leaving, meaning we are the only ones there.  It is pretty bleak, but luckily for us it means that there isn’t much hassle from vendors, tour guides or anything.  In fact the cleaning staff and security guards outnumber the tourists 10 to 2.  The Basilica itself isn’t the main attraction (and it’s not that big, smaller than average for a church) but the 12 statues of various Old Testament prophets outside it are.  These were carved by the local genius Aleijadinho, and are said to be the greatest of his works.  I have to say they weren’t as impressive as I thought they would be.  There are also some chapels with the Stations of the Cross there which I thought were better.

Once we looked around for about 30 minutes that was it.  Because we were going on a long journey we ate a large dinner in a hotel across from the Basilica, where we were the only two customers, and then they got us a taxi back to the Congonhas bus station, and we headed back to Belo Horizonte.  We were back by 17:00 leaving us 3 hours to kill in the bus station, which we are not experts in.  Luckily it isn’t the worst bus station we have been to, so we were able to pass the time before getting on the bus.

The bus journey itself though was not great.  In order to get from Belo to the coast we have to head back over mountains, and rather than a highway, we were on a narrow twisty road.  The road was dangerous, we saw two recent crashes (recent enough that the police were still on the scene) before we decided to try to sleep.  But sleep was hard because the bus was always throwing you around the place, and because of the number of stops to let others on.