As an inveterate armchair traveler, I've been looking for a good Brazilian literary/journalistic travelogue and I'm not finding much. There are plenty of 19th-century explorers' accounts and a handful of modern Amazonian sojourns (most notably Redmond O'Hanlon's gonzo In Trouble Again and Alex Shoumatoff's slender and out-of-print In Southern Light). There's also Travelers' Tales: Brazil, one in the well-known series of travel anthologies, not a very satisfying format in my opinion -- it takes a book-length chronicle of a journey to really get the narrative flowing. What few titles there are seem to focus on the Amazon and ignore Brazil's other regions and its cities.
Could this be true? There are dozens of literate travelogues for places like Mexico and India. Even obscure corners of the globe such as Patagonia, Central Africa and (pre-war) Afghanistan are well covered. Am I missing something obvious for Brazil?
And if the omission is real, could this be a niche for a canny Brasilophile writer?
Addendum: I had the chance to pose this question the other day to a historian specializing in Brazil. He couldn't think of many recent travelogues, but he did have a couple of good books to recommend in other genres: Joseph Page's overview The Brazilians and Alma Guillermoprieto's Samba. He wasn't so complimentary toward The Brazil Reader. And the one I'm quite curious about is Priscilla Ann Goslin's How to Be a Carioca -- somehow I doubt that it can be learned from a book.