Getting around Brazil: distances are the first thing to understand

Start with the distances

Brazil covers a continent, and two places that look adjacent on a map can be a full day apart on the ground. Itineraries built on European or coastal-US assumptions about driving times fall apart here — usually by the second stop.

There is also no useful passenger rail network for travel between regions. Whatever the plan, the realistic options are flying, driving or long-distance buses.

Flying

Domestic flights are the backbone of travel between regions and the only sensible way to cover the big distances in a trip of normal length. Most routes connect through a small number of major hubs, which means a flight between two secondary cities often costs a whole day.

It is worth checking whether your destination has an airport at all, or whether you land in a regional city and drive from there. Many of the best natural destinations are three or four hours by road from the nearest airport.

Buses

The intercity bus network is extensive, reliable and reaches places flights do not. On short and medium routes it is genuinely practical. On long ones it means many hours, sometimes overnight — which some travellers enjoy and others find brutal.

Within a region, buses are often the only public link between towns, and frequency drops sharply on weekends.

Driving

A car makes sense where attractions are spread out in the countryside — coastal roads, national park areas, rural destinations with farms as attractions. It makes far less sense for travelling between regions, where the distances make flying the obvious choice.

• Road quality varies enormously between and within states.
• Unpaved roads are common in rural destinations and get worse in the rainy season.
• Toll roads are frequent in the south-east.
• Fuel stations can be far apart in the interior — fill up before long empty stretches.
• Driving after dark on rural roads brings animals, unlit vehicles and poor signage.

The last stretch is the one that surprises people

Getting between Brazilian cities is the easy part. What catches visitors out is the final stretch: the nature destination three or four hours from the airport on a road that is paved for half of it, and the attraction another hour beyond the town on dirt.

That stretch is where a plan built from flight times falls apart, because it is the part no timetable describes. It is worth asking the accommodation how long the transfer actually takes in the season you are travelling — the same road can be an hour longer after rain, and that hour is usually the one you did not have.