Because Rio de Janeiro is in a tropical climate, you're going to get some crazy rainstorms. And they're going to be out of nowhere. I mean, all of a sudden, you're going to be walking down the street, you know. And then, all of a sudden, water comes right down the street. And you're just going to have to find a way to get around it. But it'll be fun.
The weather here is quite hot, it's always sunny pretty much the whole year and be prepared to feel the warm temperatures and yeah, if you like the sun, if you like the hot weather, you're gonna like Brazil and yeah, that's it.
Sao Paulo is fairly moderate. It's not too humid. There's the rainy season and then the dry season where it gets so hot. And so the coldest it ever got was just above freezing and that was pretty, that was really rare. So I only took two sweaters and a coat and I was fine. But yeah, the sun in Sao Paulo, it feels stronger than the sun anywhere else I've ever been.
Alrighty, so I was living in Vitoria, Brazil and that's like right above Rio. So it's not quite the equator but it's more north so it's close around there. So what I would recommend is that Brazil is so bipolar with its weather that in the afternoons a lot of times it will rain but that rain only makes things more hot and humid because it will rain and fill the air with just that moist H2O and it's just water vapor everywhere so whenever you walk you're just dripping in sweat. So just be used to being moist, always having a thin layer of sweat on you and then bring an umbrella a lot of the times for the afternoons because it will rain and it can rain a lot. I've never seen so much water come down at once. The roads just turn into just canals and just rivers everywhere and waterfalls so you'll love it.
Sao Paulo is a really nice city. It doesn't get too hot. It does get hot but it's not unbearable and it doesn't get too cold. It'll have a nice breeze in the winter time but it'll still feel like, you know, fall or even summer here in the United States. But you will get a lot of rain. There is a lot of rain and lots of flooding on the streets because they're not designed very well and they're kind of old. So be prepared to walk through a lot of rain.
So the weather in Santa Maria is very warm and very humid actually. I was very surprised that I'd wake up, take a shower in the morning, get dressed to go out for the day. We'd take a step outside and I'd feel myself dripping with sweat already, so it's definitely going to be hot. In the winter months from about late May till mid-August, it's going to be cold. Colder than you think, you're definitely going to want to bring sweaters and a warm jacket. And it rains a lot in Brazil and Santa Maria for sure, so when it rains it pours, so make sure you've got some good clothes to prepare yourself.
So in Salvador, there's basically two types of weather. It's either sunny or it's raining really hard and it depends. There are some areas inwards where it starts to get actually kind of cold for Brazil, like 50 degrees, but I'd say the majority of the time, especially if you're in the capital, just expect hot and humid weather and then during their a lot of rain. I remember just being amazed at how much rain there was all the time, especially if you're on the coast. It's rainy pretty constantly during the winter time.
In Curitiba, in the south of Brazil, it gets freezing. It gets so cold. And the thing is, is that in the apartments and houses and stuff like that, they don't have air conditioner or heat or anything. So you need to make sure that you pack warm clothes and that you pack lighter clothes for in the summer. And that way, when you do that, then you'll be more prepared and ready to go for whatever weather you have going on. And it's rains all the time. It's always raining. So just make sure that you always have like an umbrella with you or make sure that you're prepared because it can be sunny like one hour and then next it's already pouring down. So just make sure that you're ready for that and expecting some rain every now and then. And just have a happy attitude about it because there's not much you can do.
So most of the cities there are just like hot and humid all the time. The weather there is basically crazy. It's just super hot, humid, or cold, or burning, burning hot, like crazy. So be careful because it would be just like crazy, but you will enjoy it. You will learn to enjoy it. It's funny.
So the weather in Brazil is kind of unpredictable and I would say just be prepared for random rainstorms and really really hot weather and really cold weather that will just come suddenly and unexpectedly.
It is really, really hot all the time and humid. The sun will feel a lot hotter than it is in the U.S. at least. Yeah, so be prepared to be, you know, sunburned a lot. So bring some sunscreen. And there's like a rainy time, but even when it's rainy it doesn't really get cold ever. So you don't have to worry about a jacket or anything. Even sometimes an umbrella isn't even worth it because you're just going to get soaked anyway because it rains really, really hard when it does rain. And so it's just going to splash and get you soaked.
So definitely had a few monsoons in Fortaleza and in some of the surrounding areas. Hurricane amounts of water fall in a short period of time. Not as... there's a rainy season, but it's not as bad as you sometimes would imagine. At least it wasn't the couple years I was there. It rained every day, but it wasn't terrible. I mean basically it's warm. You're on the equator. It's warm all the time. The sun rises at 6 a.m. The sun sets at 6 p.m. And I wore a short sleeve shirt every single day. So the weather is pretty normal, but sometimes you get a ton of rain.
Brazil, it's generally really hot, as you might expect, but it can actually get a little bit cold like down into the 40s, even high 30s at night for like a month or so out of the year, the Brazilian winter, which because it's in the southern hemisphere is the opposite months as it is in the United States, but generally it's pretty hot, hovers around 80-90 degrees Celsius for most of the year, and if there's some parts, Falls do Iguacu, they get up to in the hundreds for a few months out of the year. The hardest part is there's no air conditioning pretty much anywhere. There might be some stores that have air conditioning you can walk in to cool off a little bit, but generally there's not really any air conditioning to be found.
The weather in Ribeirão Preto is pretty just hot. It's not that crazy. I mean, you'll get a lot of rain sometimes in the rainy months. It's pretty standard. You can usually tell when it's gonna rain that day. And sometimes you'll just wake up and there will be floods in the street. But yeah, it'll just rain. There's like zero natural disasters in Brazil, so you're pretty safe. It's really just rain sometimes and it's usually not even that bad.
So, southern Brazil is really cold in the winter. It's a very humid place, so the cold just sticks to you. So, that's something crazy that I did not expect it to be that cold, but it was. So, definitely bring some cold clothes. And also, I did not expect it to rain so much as it did, and there are some crazy rainstorms that we got caught in without umbrellas or jackets or anything. And those were some fun days getting caught in those rainstorms, coming home with soaking feet and soaking shirts and everything soaked, I guess. But, yeah, those are some crazy things about the weather in Brazil. And a couple nights it even got cold enough to freeze over. So, that was something I didn't expect, but I also thought it was really cool living in a place like that for a while and experiencing also the super hot summers and just seeing how different it was.
First you should know that it gets really hot and really cold. You'd think that since it's in Brazil it never gets cold, but it gets super cold. And also one thing that they always joke about is in Curitiba you kind of have to expect the unexpected. It's super unpredictable and you'll go out in the morning and it'll be super warm, super bright, pretty out, and then in the afternoon it'll get super windy and then it'll start to rain and pour and pour and then it's like kind of cold at night sometimes. And so you always have to leave with like a light jacket, an umbrella, some good boots, just like prepare for everything because the weather is always pretty wild.
So I never expected Brazil to be a very cold place, but at one point I was living in a little city called Guadalupe and found out that the year before I was there it snowed and the entire city left a blanket. And while I was there it got to be in the 30s Fahrenheit and I was sleeping and kind of snowing a little bit, not quite as much as the year prior, but crazy to have snow in Brazil and crazy for it to be that cold in the 30s.
Manaus is located just below the equator, which makes it extremely hot. It's hot all year round. It has a wet season and a dry season, but the only difference with the wet season is that every day at about one o'clock it rains for about half an hour, and that's pretty consistent for about four months. Every single day for about half an hour it rains. It's really hot all the time. When it's sunny and humid, you just can't get away from the heat. It is extremely hot. Two words, heat and rain. That's about everything you need to know about Manaus. That's the weather of Manaus every single day.
Rain, rain, rain. São Paulo loves to rain on you. The coldest it gets there is like 40 degrees, but 40 degrees is really cold when you're used to like 90 degree weather all the time. Sometimes it gets pretty windy, get some crazy wind storms. I got caught in the rain multiple times and you just come home and take your shoes off and dump out the giant puddle. São Paulo's pretty crazy with the weather.
There were some like pretty crazy rainstorms while I was there and stuff but mostly I was there in the heat and humidity and it's just really hot and we were doing labor outside because we were building a school. We were there for a humanitarian trip and so we were literally just a pile of sweat. So get ready to sweat when you're there but it's like one of the most beautiful places I've ever been in my life and just so fun. I highly recommend it.
It was just super, super hot all the time. And that's that. I think it got up to like 52 degrees celsius. I don't think that's like 120 something. It was crazy. That's pretty darn normal. There were a couple times where it rained for like two or three weeks straight, but it was mostly just hot.
The weather can get super crazy. I just remember it rained and rained and rained some days and then the next day it was like really hot. Some days were just super cold. So bring an umbrella, bring boots, bring sandals, bring everything, bring a coat.
I think the craziest weather that we've had down there is that it will rain for like days at a time and in almost all areas there's some type of flooding.
You'll experience some flash flooding in Sao Paulo. Actually, I ran into hail once or twice. The weather does change really abruptly sometimes and occasionally, on this one occasion really, people's roofs caved in because the rain and hail was so strong and it came on, it was in, dumped for like 45 minutes and then it left and that was it. So yeah, you'll experience some some pretty intense weather sometimes and occasionally it'll just be days straight of fog or days straight of Sun. It's kind of all over the place.
Overall, the weather's good. There's a lot of rain during the winter more, and it does get pretty cold. It gets really hot in the summer, which is during December, and then the winter during July, make sure you have a jacket because you'll get some pretty heavy rain, and you just get to walk through the streets in that rain. It's pretty fun. I don't think I ever went through any crazy storms though. No snow, nothing like that.
During winter, it gets down to about freezing, which may not seem cold, but it's very, very humid. In addition to the cold, it's very, very rainy all the time. I was caught in a lot of rainstorms where I was very glad that I had a good umbrella. So make sure that you bring a really good umbrella, maybe two or three, because they tend to break. We use them sometimes daily, usually about three times a week because of the rain.
Let's talk about the rain in Sao Paulo. Can we please talk about the rain? Anyone that goes to Sao Paulo needs to know that your shoes will be trashed. Every single rainstorm will just, you'll need new shoes afterwards. I remember just being in the streets. Sao Paulo is the kind of place that you leave with a sweater because it will be hot and cold and hot and sunny and raining, all of the different ones in the same day. And in the middle of the day when it rains, you have no luck. You get in a storm. Those streets are pouring. They would lift, like, it would flood through the streets. We would see motorcycles leaving, like, being lifted away. There was 100% no chance you could stand in the middle of that river in the streets.
So the Northeast region, it's like one of the hottest parts of Brazil and it's pretty humid. Rain a lot in the rainy seasons, like a lot, so bring a good umbrella. You can buy one there, but they're not as good quality. You're not gonna really need a raincoat, but yeah, make sure you're ready for the hot and you're ready for the rain. It doesn't really get cold, so.
It doesn't get super hot, but what is hot about it is there's no AC in your apartment or other buildings like that. So yeah, get used to being hot all the time. Rain can be pretty crazy too. It doesn't rain so hard that it's ridiculous, but the issue is their sewage system is not prepared for the rain that they get. And so there were many times when we'd be walking through the streets with water over our ankles or even higher than that in some places it floods up to your knees or our waist.
The only really crazy weather is that sometimes it rains really hard and gets really windy.