Wednesday, 2/7/19 – São Paulo, day of relaxation at the Airport
Porter enjoying a cioccolato latte in the Sau Paulo airport….
After a 7 hour red eye from Panama City, we landed in Sau Paulo. Confession, we don’t actually plan on going into Brazil. There is currently a yellow fever outbreak that we want no part of. We have a long layover with plans for a relaxing day at the airport all day long. If relaxing and airports don’t sound like they belong in the same sentence, then you have never spent the day at Sau Paulo with the priority pass.
Sau Paulo airport has a wonderful concept. They have a hotel inside the international terminal that can be used for long layovers. It’s also fairly cheap if booked ahead of time (but very expensive for walk ups). We were prepared with our reservation and headed right over for a half day of sleep in our own private room.
After a nice several hour respite, we left our bags in the room and went bird watching. We were lucky to see an endangered species taking a nap. A Boeing 747 in Lufthansa regalia. Once a work horse of the airline industry, the 747s are now practically extinct at US airports with the exception of ones in cargo service due to replacement with newer energy efficient birds like the 777 and 787! But there she was parked off in the distance. We snapped a shot with our little hitched hiker so that she would know they were still in service when she was born.
After exploring the terminal, we visited the American Express executive lounge. If you do a fair amount of international travel, the lounge passes make the trip very nice. Porter signed up for a credit card that came with a free priority pass just for this trip. We have definitely got our use out of it. The lounges have food, drinks, WiFi, phone charging, and even showers! Basically an escape from stale egalitarian airport terminals. We left the lounge to take care of some paperwork. We had a minor hiccup in the morning, one of our boarding passes was not in the system! Yikes! It was no problem, though, we just had to wait for the airline representatives to show up. Luckily we had enough time to visit another airport lounge after, the “Gool”. Each of them had exquisite Brazilian fare. After a relaxing day we are very much looking forward to our last flight, which is on a 787 Dreamliner operated by Ethiopian airlines! This will be the third airline we bag on this trip, starting with Southwest, followed by Copa, and now Ethiopian. Next stop, Argentina!
Hike the Good Hike!
-Sherpa and Porter
