Minor Miracle - or - It's a Good Thing that my head is attached to my shoulders via my neck

Life in Brazil revolves around documents and ID papers. I learned this the hard way a year ago when I tried to fly from São Paulo to Brasilia without my passport. Seeing that the flight was a domestic one, I figured that my health card or driver's licence would suffice. Not so. And no amount of rationalising, pleading, and then begging got me on that plane. I ended up returning home, fetching my passport, paying a change fee, and catching the next flight out, making me embarrassingly late for my first meeting. I was thankful though for the fact that I ultimately was able to retrieve my passport and catch the next flight, since for several weeks prior to trip, my passport had been in Brasilia [without me] getting all its necessary stamps and signatures required for me to call Brazil home. I asked both the airline and Consulate what would have happened in the case that I absolutely had not been able to fetch my passport. In both cases, the answer was an unequivocable well, you could forget about any thoughts of travel by plane.

Fast forward to the Five-Cities-in-Five-Days tour of the Northeast. Heading out last Sunday, I decided to slip my passport into my suitcase. A last minute decision based on the fact that the tour company we had hired to drive us around had been quite insistent on having the names and ID numbers of every person who would be travelling on the bus. Thinking that maybe they would want proof that we were who we said we were, I figured that my passport wouldn't be such a bad idea.

Seeing that Aracaju, the last stop on the tour, is a nine hour [somewhere between 500 - 600km] drive from Recife, I had decided much earlier on that I would fly home rather than bus it. Weighing the options of a 45 minute flight versus the nine-hour ride, it was a no-brainer. However, it was only when I walked into the Aracaju airport this morning that I realised how lucky I was that I had brought along my passport. After an initial gasp, I remembered that I had indeed packed my elusive passport and would be able to return home. In no way linked to any forethought about my flight back to Recife, I can only imagine how I would have felt had I had to catch a bus all the way home. I suppose that I should thank the bus company since without their request for our ID numbers it never would have crossed my mind to bring along my passport. Yeah Mar Tur, your need for bureaucracy has saved the day! And for this, I thank you!