The Bilikiki boys will have their first training run today almost 20 hours after they flew into Vitoria in Brazil.
They arrived on Sunday (Saturday in Brazil) and spent the good part of yesterday catching up on much needed sleep.
Team spokesman, Viv Wickham says the team was absolutely exhausted after 2 days of strenuous travel.
“From Santiago where I last updated you, we flew into Sao Paolo international airport (Pele´s old club town) for a 30 minutes refill and then onward to Rio De Janeiro where we checked out and caught our connection flight to Vitoria.
“Sao Paolo is the industrial hub of Brazil, Rio is re-known for tourism. Rio is a lot greener than Sao Paolo, the one thing that struck me from the air was the amount of futsal and soccer pitches,” says Wickham.
There were more surprises awaiting them as they connected their flights to get to Vitoria.
According to Viv, the Rio airport reminded him of somewhere in Eastern Europe, the terminal was made of concrete and look like its hasn’t been renovated since the 80’s.
“They do not have a computerized customs control area, much to our surprise as we were expecting it to be top class.”
He says from the moment they stepped out of the terminal they were hounded by everyone, taxi drivers, airport workers e.t.c. not because they were going to play in the world cup, but they (Brazilians) were offering to convert their overseas currency to the Brazilian Rais (dollar) with the hope of getting a commission.
“It seemed that they would do anything for money. The entire team was shocked and scared to be quite honest, we did not know anyone, no one met us at the airport and hardly anyone could speak english, it was all Portugese, they started to get aggressive when we told them we had no money to convert and then they started asking for our lotto gear though we hadn´t even kicked a ball yet.”
“We finally found the domestic terminal and checked everyone in for Vitoria using sign language to communicate. It was a 40 minutes plane ride to Vitoria from Rio, from the air we realized that Vitoria was something similar to the Gold Coast in Australia, isolated yet very high class and tailor made for tourism.”
It was the first time for us to see golden beaches.
The team was met at the airport their by their liaison officer and a beach soccer official from the Brazilian Beach soccer confederation.
“We arrived at the airport not knowing who was going to meet us and how we were gonna get to our hotel. It was so comforting to see someone standing with a sign “Welcome Solomon Islands´´ so we wandered over to this guy, it was our liaison officer and a beach soccer official from the Brazilian Beach Soccer Confederation, they spoke minimal english.
The boys were later taken to the waiting vans and headed off to their hotel.
“The lifestyle here is similar to that in the Cook Islands and Tahiti where life is laid back, bicycles everywhere and endless golden beaches.”
They had their first walk about around the beach front yesterday morning to familiarize themselves with the new environment before getting into the real stuff.