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Published: March 17th 2014
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Paraty (“Para-chee”)is a small colonial town around 5 hours by bus from the centre of Rio. Its a place full of cobblestone streets and old buildings from the 1800's and surrounded by tiny coastal islands. Andreia and I went there for the weekend to celebrate her xx birthday (the figure shall remain undisclosed, but lets just say she is looking absolutely fabulous)!
Getting to Paraty was, as is becoming custom in Rio, a bit of a drama. Getting to Rodavaria station at 7pm on a Friday night required (a) getting a taxi and (b) it not shafting me. Both quite epic tasks at that day and time. After about 45minutes of hailing taxis at various locations throughout Botafogo, one stopped, agreed to take me to the bus station and we were off, for 2 metres before being halted by bumper-to-bumper traffic.
I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again, I have no idea how Rio is going to cope with the World Cup this year, the city’s infrastructure simply does not support the demand of traffic users. Traffic here is the worst I’ve ever seen in my life, even the ever patient Carioca’s are getting sick of it.
Many people have told me the traffic is just getting worse and worse...
I finally arrived at the bus station almost an hour later, met Andreia, slammed down some food-court dinner, bought some chocolates and jumped on our bus. Again, a very comfortable ride, nicely air conditioned. The people behind us though thought it entirely appropriate to snort, sing an have innane conversations the entire ride there. I didn’t even speak their language but still knew they were talking crap. Crap is universal and you just know it when you hear it. We boarded around 8.30, arrived around 1 am and during the entire trip, even when the bus was dark and silent but for these two monsters, they were singing along to music and chatting and snorting away.
We arrived in the darkness of Paraty and hobbled along the cobblestone streets looking for our pousada. It was interesting being out so late in such a little colonial town, I had expected silence and a cool breeze given it was a coastal town, but it was hot,hot, hot and amongst the doof doof clubs, and restaurants closing up, but lots of people stumbling along the street with beer
and cachaça in hand.
Cachaça is a distilled liquor made from sugar cane juice. From what I have seen, its quite popular in Brazil and many places we go have roadside stalls selling cheap shots of the stuff. Gabriela cachaça is a speciality of Paraty, and is the traditional cachaça flavours, infused with cloves, cinnamon and honey. It tastes strong, but is very drinkable!
Let me tell you, the colbblestones of Paraty are not a safe place for the drunk or balance-impaired, such as myself. Although we had a map, the streets of Paraty are not well signed, or signed at all, and it was hard getting our bearings as we were constantly looking at our feet trying not to trip and tumble over the rocks. After about 30minutes of walking around, it became apparent that we were not finding our pousada and we asked some friendly neighbourhood police for directions. They gave us excellent directions, to the wrong hostel, and we continued circling the streets. We found another gentleman and asked him for directions, he resolutely pointed us North and had a brief discussion with Andreia in Portuguese before consulting our map and resolutely pointing South. I
was not convinced. He and we travelled along further down the street, where we asked another lady who confirmed that the direction we needed to go was in fact East. So we went East, found someone else who reiterated our friend’s initial judgment that the Pousada was North. Around 2pm, we stumbled across the doorway of the Pousada, gave our inebriated tour guide $10 for his troubles and fell inside the pousada. I went straight to the pool (it was about 30degrees that night) and Andreia went for a shower before we both collapsed in bed for the evening.
The next day, we had breakfast in the pousada (yoghurt, fruit, juice (of course), eggs and bread) and headed out to the marina which was about a 5 minute walk away. At the marina, we selected a boat to take us for a cruise. The boat we chose was about 95% full, with everyone crammed under the centre awning. We walked straight to the end and spread our sarongs over the blistering rubber cushions to lay in the sun at the front of the boat, which turned out to be the best position for the entire trip so we were
happy. The boat pulled out and we spent the day travelling around the islands near Paraty, stopping at various places and dropping anchor for us to jump off the boat into the water. The water was warm, like, bath warm, I would have preferred it actually to have been a little cooler, but you know with statements like that you are getting fussy about what was otherwise a wonderful tour. We saw fish, monkeys and even some turtles. We were cooked lunch on the boat (fried fresh fish with shrimp sauce, rice, and salad) which we ate before jumping back in the water to cool down (sorry Ben, I didn’t wait 30 minutes before swimming although I know that is important to you) and returning back to the pier around 5ish. All up, the tour cost us $12.50 each, plus lunch ($10) which was amazing. It was a truly wonderful day.
After returning to dry land and taking some showers, we headed out for dinner in Paraty. Being the good Cariocas that we are, we didn’t stop for dinner until around 10 pm and first had some drinks and nibbles. It was here that I realised just how expensive
it was to eat in Paraty. I ordered some ‘seasoned olives’ which cost $11 and arrived ‘sans seasoning’, after some drinks our tab came to about $40…. Given there were only a couple of beers, some cachasa shots and water drunk $40 is something I’d expect to pay in Australia really. Then we went to a beautiful restaurant and had some meat croquettes and more drinks….and $50, again Australia prices. Plus, I had my first ‘tourist tax’ (see photo) of R$1 (50c), which Andreia saw and promptly had removed from the bill, with disgust.
While we were at pre-dinner drinks, we had various young children approach us for money and to sell biscuits and knick-knacks. From the little I saw of Paraty, it seemed to me to be a town built on tourism but inhabited by essentially poor people. There were the locals for one, who could be seen sitting on the sides of the streets selling jewellery and purses and what not but then we saw many hippies sitting on the side of the road selling jewellery and other goods. Once wandering travellors stuck who arrive at Paraty and never seemed to leave.
The next day, we
woke up late to our breakfast, relaxed in the lounge after check out and wanered around this beautiful town before heading home to the chaos of Rio. Sigh, back to Rio. Only three more sleeps until I’m in Argentina which the weather forecast promises to provide a little reprieve from this oppressive heat. Ahh to sleep again…
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