The night before the carnaval Dani (my long time friend who lives in Belo Horizonte) and I went to pick up Nicola (the Swiss traveler I met in El Chalten in Argentina) at a bus station. I was very excited to have a competent and pleasant travel companion to be a final part of the Know No Borders expedition through Brazil. After getting some well deserved rest at night, Dani took us to see what was a "low key" pre-carnaval preparation. From the distance we could hear the party buses blasting the currently popular MPB and Pagode songs, dancers on top of them were performing choreography relevant to each song and people in the streets were moving along the music, drinking and having a blast. This appeared to be a very liberal crowd as many of the photos portray :)