Who We Are: A Bela e o Bigode

Who are we? We’re the couple behind A Bela e o Bigode (“The Beauty and the Mustache”), and we love traveling, eating well, and trail running.

Our real names are Caroline Varuzzi and Andrey Hurpia da Rocha, and we live in São Paulo. I, Caroline, am a doctor, also born in São Paulo. Bigode (“Mustache”), meanwhile, studied advertising and now works in IT — he was born in Belém, in Pará state.

We picked this name for the blog because Andrey is known for switching up his facial hair, especially mustaches and mutton chops. These days, for dermatological reasons, he’s mostly clean-shaven.

Our trip to Cunha, with Andrey and his mutton chops

As of this post, we’ve been together for about a year and a half, and we genuinely love traveling, eating, and running. The food side tends to fall on me, since getting to know a place’s food is such a big part of understanding its culture — it adds so much to a trip! Not that Andrey doesn’t love food too. He does — he just loves eating a lot, and of everything.

We love food so much that we recently started a São Paulo food series, writing about the restaurants we visit around the city — and that says a lot about who we are too.

How did we meet?

A lot of people assume we met while running, but actually, it happened somewhere pretty unexpected, at an event that’s not exactly typical for us! Any guesses?

I won’t keep you waiting: it was, surprisingly, at a vegan first-birthday party for a friend’s son, Gabo. He’s the son of Guilherme, a friend of Andrey’s from school who went on to study alongside him in college.

We met, hung out a few times, and then lost touch for about a year before running into each other again at Parque do Ibirapuera. After a few messages back and forth and some missed connections, we finally got together at a small bar in Pinheiros, right before Andrey left for a vacation in Greece.

We’ve been inseparable ever since — even the distance didn’t stop us, since we video-called constantly. We’ve now lived together for seven months, since right at the start of the pandemic. That’s actually when we started this project together.

Carol and Andrey, our very first photo together

Our blog

Our goal with this blog is to make it genuinely useful — something you can actually use to plan your own trip. We want to help you pick a good restaurant and avoid wasting time on bad ones simply because the information wasn’t out there.

We hope you enjoy reading it as much as we enjoy writing and building it — everything here is made with real care, since I’m the one putting together all our travel itineraries! We hope you see a bit of yourself in who we are and in our story.

If you’d like to add something, or just let us know if you agree or disagree with our take, reach out — we’d love to hear from you.

With love, from A Bela e o Bigode.

Read about our travels in Cunha and Barreirinhas.