RO Talks: Brazil

Brittany: Hello, before we get started here. Tell us where you’re from in the comments and tag your friends to join us. I am joined today with Eduardo, who is the regional manager for our Brazil office. And we’re going to get to know him a little bit better today. So we are alive from the ERDI page today.

So if you have a comment or question that you would like to be seen head on over to the ERDI page, by searching in the search bar at the top ERDI divers. So while we wait for people to tune in Eduardo, I want to know, have you been watching. Yes, I’m very happy. Is your favorite sport in the Olympics?

Eduardo: Oh, the skate.

Yeah, I’m skater. I’m a skater for, in my, when I young. So it’s very impressive that the little girl from Brazil that are in the super. Yeah, that’s so nice. It’s 13, 13 years, year a years old, the little girl. Yeah. 13 years old. And have a soon.

B: We were watching swimming last night. And there was a guy that was like 19 or something. I can’t remember what country he was from my husband and I were just talking about like, he’s 19. Last year he was going to be 18 and do the summer training to meet in the Olympics. And then now talking about this 13 year old.

E: Yeah, yeah, the skull. I know, I don’t know. I’ll just say that in English it’s father, father it’s like I tried to remember the word in English, but. Let me see… fairy fairy..

B: small?

E: Yeah. fairy a little fairy yeah.

B: All right. So we have a decent amount of people here. So let’s go ahead and dive into it. I’ll introduce myself and then I’ll turn it over to you to let you introduce yourself to people. Hello everyone. And welcome to Facebook live. We are going to be featuring our regional offices over the next couple of months so that you can get to know who they are.

And the areas that they serve a little bit better as well as just bring our social media initiative more global. I am Brittany Bozik your content manager here at International Training. So any social posts that you see, any newsletter or any blog posts that you see coming from international training is my responsibility.

So. If you have an idea for a piece of content that you would like us to produce, please send me an email at marketing@tdisdi.com. So, as I said today, I’m joined by Eduardo. He is the Regional Manager of our office located in Brazil. He’s here to tell us more about his office, where to dive in Brazil, and the status of COVID.

But before we begin, I’m going to have Eduardo introduce himself. So go ahead. Take it away.

E: Hi everybody. I am Eduardo from Brazil. I’m the regional officer in the Brazil area. That’s only Brazil and I’m very happy to stay here and talk with you guys.

B: Awesome. So let’s kick it off with where are you located in Brazil.

And what areas do you serve?

E: Yeah, I’m located in the center of the country. The capital of Brazil is Brasilia and our original office served, only Brazil area in Brazil country Brazil. It’s a very huge country. It’s located in South America. If you don’t know it. And it’s a very huge territory of land.

It’s bigger. Like USA it’s the 5 biggest country in the world and, and the big country in Latin America. So it’s, it’s a, it’s a continued our country too.

What brought you specifically to international training?

E: I was the owner of a dive center for 23 years. And it’s called Scuba Du because it’s my name, my nickname is do-do and I work with other agencies and ITI as well.

And in 2015 I was not happy with the agency that I was a course director and start looking at other ages, its work in recreational side. And then I have a meeting with Paul Montgomery in the tech dive USA 2014 and we have a nice conversation and I decide to stop to work with my dive center.

I sell my dive center and start to dedicate 100% of my job with this new business Regional Office. And it’s very nice because you will helping the Brazil markets to have another option in terms of agency for recreational dive. And when we start, we start with 5 dive centers and we have 15 new Instructors.

And today we have 76 facilities. And we have more than 400 Instructors. So I’m very happy in five years or six years we do a lot of things and a lot of things, goods for our market. And we have a lot of respect from the dive center owners.

B: That is incredible growth in that region six years now. Wow.

I’m blown away. Okay. So that’s incredible.

Tell me more about like, what’s going on in Brazil as far as COVID are you guys open for visitors, right now?

E: Yeah. Yeah. For some countries, we are open for many countries. We, we cannot travel to, this time to the others countries, but we can receive tourist, et cetera.

We, we are open. All the dive center is open and resorts and the dive centers near to the coast is open. Okay. We had a huge problem of COVID in April this year, but now the number of the people recovering increasing too much because of the beginning of the vaccine. And at the moment we have 50% of the population get vaccinated.

So it’s very nice because we have people recovering very well. Yeah. That’s okay.

B: Yeah. Yeah. That’s awesome. So you guys can’t leave, but people can come to you

E: Yeah, yes, please come

B: Great for tourism.

Okay. So when people do come to Brazil what are the must dive locations in Brazil?

E: Yeah, Brazil, like I said is a huge country.

We have a large coast. We have 7,000 kilometers long off the coast. So the water is warm is about 26 Celsius degrees. I don’t know in Fahrenheit, but it’s 26 degrees Celcius is very, very warm water. And the water is very clear in, in some island like Fernando de Noronha, it’s paradise and we had another island called Abrolhos Archipelago. That’s a very nice place to dive into.

And in the, Salvador, it’s a very nice city that you can go to dive in and see the carnival and et cetera. We have a lot of big animals in these places. Like you can see reef corals, we can see humpback whales, you can see sharks turtles et cetera.

And in the, in the Southwest, in the Rio de Janeiro, we have two cities, one, like one is called Paraty and the other one is a Arraial do Cabo. In Arraial do Cabo, the beaches are like the Caribbean. We have the blue water, you have the white sand. It’s very, very similar to the Caribbean.

And in Paraty, we can see, you can see the old Portugal colonial center. It’s very, very nice from the 17th century, you can see the cobbled streets. And in the Paraty, we have the literary festival international literary festival, the books, festival and, and Brazilian people.

It’s very receptive people. So coming to Brazil definitely will be a fun and adventure the cuisine is sensational very tasty, exotic, and we have excellent dive centers, SDI resorts, and dive centers spread all over these places. And inside of the country, we have many caves. I like, I like cave diving. So yeah, we have many caves.

We have 16,000 caves and many of them are floated. We have caves with different lithology many types too. We have the two worlds, we have the “Mexico caves” like Mexican caves here. And we have like spring caves, like Florida caves here and in the same country. So we have this, the both.

So the water in the caves is very warm. It’s 25 and 24-celsius. And I know we have a lot of things to do here. Yeah.

I heard that for a while. The government prevented any cave diving, what is the status of cave diving in Brazil now?

E: We do not have any prohibited. We can, we can dive. And the only thing that we have, because Brazil, the caves is not a property for the owner of the land.

The caves are the property of the, of Brazil okay? Of the union. Okay, so we have if you want to open a cave to sell it, sell a ticket for. Tourists, et cetera is not permitted. Even if you spent a long, a long time with licenses and pay a lot of money and, and the studies, et cetera.

But if you were a diver and want to do a cave, dive into caves. is no, a problem the problem is if you want to like to sell a ticket, to enter in the cave. No, it’s not, it’s not, it’s not permitted anymore but if you are diver and want to do cave diving, okay, cool. Because of that is not easy, as the United States. We don’t see a Ginnie Springs resort, like that.

Yeah. You have to stop your car in the middle of the jungle and go. It’s like Mexico when you’re cave diving in Brazil, it’s just like,wherever the cave is, that’s where you stop and that’s where you unload. And like you hike back to the cave with your gear and do the dive.

Yeah. In the cave, then the cave that we dove here for many years, we had, you have to do a zip line and then a difficult access.

Yeah.

Yeah. It’s very difficult. It’s like a two, three hours descent, all the equipment. For diving for more than two or three hours, if you’re a rebreather and then more than three hours getting out with your rebreather, and keep them out from the cave.

As I said is very, very exciting, very fun, and very epic adventurous

B: That gives a whole new meaning to where there’s a will. There’s a way.

E: We don’t have stairs with carpet like you have in the caves in the USA.

B: That’s hilarious. So what about exiting the dive site? What happens then with the zip-line?

E: Yeah, yeah. This place is, so it was about 100 kilometers driving. Yeah, it’s a very huge cave. I start to dive in this cave in 97 and in 2017, we, reached the bottom of this, cave saloon 185 meters deep.

So it was very, very deep. And this dive was a film by a TV show. Here called Fantastico. No, it’s just like, it’s the same. It’s the same in English as Amazing is that TV program show. And you can see that in YouTube. This cave, this cave is Called Buraco do Inferno. in English Hell’s Hole, but nothing about Hell is a paradise place.

Beautiful. The water is clear 25 degrees Celsius and a lot of fishes and turtles, et cetera. So it’s a very beautiful place and you have to do, we have to, to. Need to do a zip line to get in there, to go to the water. You can see some videos on the internet and YouTube.

B: We’ll have to link those up in the comments so people can see it if they’re interested. Yeah, that’s really

E: The other, is another cave that is 400 kilometers from my house and the bottom is 214 meters. And the Brazilian diver gets there in the ’90s and the name of this diver is Gilberto Menezes. We don’t know where he is here, but they get the 12 hours deco I think.

And, he got the bottom. This cave is very nice for us to training deep dives and technical dives. It’s very nice. Yeah. Yeah. You don’t see the bottom. You see only the ceiling. all the time It’s like this ceiling, ceiling, ceiling. See, you don’t see the bottom. The bottom is a 240 meters.

The other one that I like too is the old gold mine that was floated when, when stop it to drain the water out for many years. This old gold mine is 350 meters long and you go 100, 120 meters. Inside of the rock and that is a lot of kilometers.

There’s very nice there. We have a dive center TDI there. We can dive for mine diving and you can see many things. Interesting. It’s an old gold mine.

What if I was an open water student, where would I complete my dives in the, like the San Palo area. And same with like the Brazilia?

No, no.

In the Sao Paulo area only on the coast you know, Sao Paulo or Rio de Janeiro beaches for beginners. The best places for diving are Paraty or Arraial do Cabo, and Angra dos Reis the places in Southeast and, and the Northeast too, in Fernando de Noronha and, and Salvador, very nice places for diving for the beginners because we have warm water.

On the boat, you don’t have to travel too much. And don’t get seasickness, short time and good visibility, warm water, and a lot of fishes, big animals.

Anywhere that you’re diving in Brazil, it’s always going to be warm water. Or will there be cold water as well?

E: Yeah, only in the south, but in the Southeast and the Northeast.

Yeah, it’s warm water for us sometimes it’s cold. But when I, when I talk that with the Europeans, like, oh, the water is cold is 21 Celsius degrees. No, it’s cold.

B: we have the same thing here.

That’s funny. All right. I feel like we’ve covered a lot of diving things, which is great.

But what about our tourist attractions? Are there any that someone would want to see while they’re in Brazil?

E: Yeah. Yeah, that, that is a lot of things to see in Brazil. We have a carnival that we have in the north near to the Amazon river in the cities near to Amazon river.

We have a very beautiful festival, called Parintins It’s very interesting, very beautiful. The people dress fantasies and very nice. You have to, you have two teams, you have the red team and the blue. And the festival is, is a fight against the blue team and red team. But the fight is the most beautiful fantasy, the most beautiful dance, et cetera.

Very, very nice and very, very beautiful. Yes. and the southwest everybody knows the carnival, the carnival in Brazil, in Rio de Janeiro, you can see the. The carnival and in Salvador, the carnival was different. It’s the bands inside of the big trucks and songs they’re playing music all night.

What time of year do these carnivals happen?

E: The carnival is normally in, February which normally is one week. And sometimes get the longer 10 days, 15 days people go to the street to dance and forget the job. Forget everything.

B: I love that.

So Brazil is also known for Samba schools

E: yeah.

B: Have you taken lessons?

E: Yeah, this is the carnival in Rio. It is samba the carnival in Salvador is a different type of music. I don’t know how to say that.

B: All right. Well, cool. Those sound like a lot of fun.

So let’s wrap up by what’s your favorite thing about where you live?

E: The favorite thing. Oh, I’m living in the center of the country. It is the federal district. So it’s a very administrative city. So it is like Washington, but we have here a lot of waterfalls, beautiful waterfalls, rivers, and caves.

So that’s, I like it so much to camping and, and stay with the waterfall. Near to the waterfall, et cetera. So it’s very nice.

B: Yeah. There’s a lot of outdoor life. I like that.

E: There’s a lot of that in my city is very spread. It’s like cities in US very spread. You have to have a car because the city is very spread.

It’s not like São Paulo, São Paulo is like New York, you know, a lot of buildings, et cetera, trafficking, et cetera. No here was a very spread, very open city. Yeah, it’s very. Lots of green trees et cetera is very nice.

B: Sounds beautiful. Yeah. Well, thank you so much for joining us today. And I really hope that all of the people got to learn more about Brazil and how you came to be our regional manager in Brazil and all that.

And I know I certainly learned a lot today and I cannot wait to continue to work with you and learn more about Brazil. As time goes on.

E: Yeah. I and I would like to invite all the divers from all over the world to come to Brazil. Brazil is very, very fun. And adventure, I think that will be very pleasure to visit and dive in and know the food and the history, et cetera.

And thank you all channel listeners and SDI staff for this opportunity. I’m very nice to talk about my country.

B: Of course. We’ll have you back some time and we’ll do it again. And we’ll talk about some more diving in Brazil.

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