Brazilophobia

I really need to get my initial hotels booked, as well as the flights from Sao Paolo-Rio and back. So I've forced myself to look into it and I must admit I expect to step onto the flight out of Sao Paolo to Santiago and breathe a sigh of relief, assuming I'm still breathing. Both Sao Paolo and Rio sound thoroughly nightmarish in terms of crime and what have you. Nowhere seems to be particularly safe.

I am going to sleep on it a bit and maybe book something tomorrow, but my current rough thoughts are to stay at a hotel in the Paulista area of Sao Paolo, which I believe is about 4km from the city centre. I will probably stay there for 4-5 days, go to Rio for about 3 days, then return to Sao Paolo for the rest of my two weeks in Brazil. It's a bit annoying having to have three separate stays in the two cities, but it's just not practical to avoid it. (If I fly from Sao Paolo-Rio immediately on arrival in Sao Paolo, I have to worry about my translatlantic flight getting in late, or allow a stupidly long 'connection' time. I don't think either is conducive to a relaxed trip out of the UK. Only slightly better would be flying from Rio to Sao Paolo the same morning I make my onward trip to Santiago; I'd have to get a 6am flight from Rio and if I miss that flight or it's delayed then I'm screwed for the onward trip. And let's face it, having three separate hotel stays is not really a major inconvenience.)

The guides make it hard to decide which is safer or nicer, but a friend who's been tells me Rio is supposedly foul (and, perhaps because there's more written about it, the guidebooks give that impression as well - but the beaches are lovely, as if I care...) while Sao Paolo is actually quite nice (the guidebooks don't exactly give that impression, though :-) ). So that's why I'm only doing about 3 days in Rio, just enough to get the main sights in.

The main tourist areas of Rio seem to be (not entirely unsurprisingly) Copacabana and Ipanema, but neither of those actually sounds that safe. I guess it makes sense, if they are ultra-touristy then there must be rich pickings. My current vague plan is to get a hotel in the Catete region, which is apparently cheap but fairly safe. (This guide website (which seems appealingly cynical, but I have no idea how reliable it actually is) suggests the main peril consists of trying to walk through the neighbourhood between it and the centre, which sounds like something I can live with.)

Maybe I'm just being a complete coward, but every single guide I look at it seems to lay so much stress on safety in these cities that I think this goes beyond the 'Foreign & Commonwealth Office' paranoia I experienced before.

Perhaps it's a good thing that the flights into and out of Brazil are the only absolutely fixed flights on the itinerary, otherwise I might well be thinking about giving the place a miss completely, or at least shortening my time there. :-)