Linguistic difficulties

Sigh. I got a response to my e-mail to the hotel in Rio. They have English and Portuguese on their web site, and since my Portuguese extends about as far as 'Obrigado', I wrote what I thought was a basic e-mail in English asking for availability of a single room and prices for a certain period. The reply is obviously a copy-and-paste job (probably from the web site) in Portuguese only. It's clear (and even clearer after machine translating it) that it gives the standard room rates already on their web site (fine, as far as it goes) and makes no comment about availability. Better yet, it says that tariffs for "holidays, vacations, high season etc. are available only under consultation". I have no idea when 'vacation' or 'high season' might be, which is why I tried to consult with them.

Now obviously I could just walk away and find somewhere else. But I had kind of got my heart set on this hotel, not because it's particularly nice (it isn't) but because my long minutes of research had allowed me to convince myself it was tolerably safe.

As I see it, there are two other options. I can write back again in English and hope that gets better attention, but I can't see why it would. Or I could write back in machine-translated Portuguese, which is probably good enough to get the booking done, but I really would like to be booking at a hotel where someone speaks at least a bit of English. (In Brazil, that is. In a Spanish-speaking country I'm willing to chance it.)

Guess I'll sleep on it and maybe get back to them tomorrow. If I'm up early I can e-mail them before they start work anyway, as they're three hours behind me.