Rendezvous in Rio
Our morning started off in the city of Dourados as we were greeted at our hotel by a local man selling authentic Brazilian coffee. After some students made their purchases, we had a group lunch at a local restaurant. Early in the afternoon, we travelled to a small agricultural consulting firm by the name of Coperplan. This relatively small firm services 130 producers, with their clients’ average farm size measuring about 500 hectares.
Coperplan specializes in providing farm management business plans to producers. These business plans help producers keep track of their accounting practices related to their input costs such as seed, fertilizer, and chemicals. Some of their business plans will also be pitched to banks to assist producers in financing their operations. Coperplan is aiming to assist producers in becoming more organized in managing their operations.
After our visit with Coperplan, we headed to the airport in Dourados for our first of two flights for the day. As we waited in the extremely small airport, we passed the time by playing various card games. The airport handles only two domestic flights per day, so we were overjoyed as we saw our plane touch down around 6:30 pm. In a strange coincidence, just before we boarded we ran into Julio, who toured us around his family’s ranch a day earlier. We boarded our plane, its propellers started up, and we took off soon after for our two-hour flight to Campinas.
Our dinner for the night consisted of food on the airplanes as various delays did not allow for time to eat dinner during our layover. This was not much of a worry as all of the students were excited to venture on to Rio de Janeiro. After the brief layover, our second flight departed for a roughly hour-long flight to Rio. Upon touching down, it was already past midnight and our day’s journey was nearly complete. For the last leg of the trip, we piled into a bus and drove to our final hotel of the trip. As our trip around Brazil comes to an end, we are looking forward to another fantastic day in possibly the most famous city in the country.
We would like to thank our hosts at Coperplan for being so gracious towards us and allowing us to get a sneak peek inside of their business. In addition, we would like to show our gratitude towards our flight crews that made our flights as seamless as possible.
