São Paulo

It must be well over ten years ago that my cretinous boss of the time and his henchwoman set me up in São Paulo, Brasil.

UK flights arrive early in the morning and, much to my surprise, I had been guaranteed early morning access to my hotel room. However, this was not the case when I arrived at the hotel – I was made to wait for 3 hours before staff nervously led me to my dark pathetic room.

During my sojourn in the hotel lobby I discovered that Lonely Planet described the surrounding area in terms of “somewhere you may wish to avoid”. Great choice on the part of my boss, who, anally retentive about most things, was particularly stupid when it came to getting what he considered “deals”, especially where my travel was concerned. As it looked as if my end was in sight and as I had this first day "free", I thought it best to do a daylight reccie of the area and almost immediately found a rather wonderful bar where I had a leisurely lunch (4 hours). After returning to the hotel for a snooze, during which I had the most disturbing dreams, I ventured back to the bar for the evening – to find that they were shooting a movie there and were more than happy to have rather eccentric foreigners in frame downing caipirinhas as if there was no tomorrow. It was a long evening, and I felt no threat walking back to my dreary hotel (possibly on account of the cachaça). Again, my night was filled with horrible dreams which were only made worse by the threatening ambiance of the room. The room felt deathly cold even with the air-con switched off. What a crap hotel I seemed to have while all my colleagues were enjoying the opulent (if somewhat unfinished) Renaissance.

When I arrived back in my office a week or so later from less worrying visits to Rio, Curitiba and Bello Horizonte, I became increasingly annoyed by people asking whether I’d slept well in my hotel…

It seemed that my boss and his henchwoman thought that it would be a real hoot for everyone but me to know that the reason for the delay in getting access to my São Paulo room was that they were removing the body of the previous occupant…

The madness continued the next year when the henchwoman refused to pay my expenses because, she claimed, one of the days of my business trip did not exist - I'd crossed the International Dateline...