Advertisement
Published: November 3rd 2006
[youtube=b_dTd1CbAMw][youtube=b_dTd1CbAMw]
After the wonderfully pleasant boat ride back from Ilha Grande, we caught a bus down to Paraty. Paraty is a delightful town south of Rio and fairly popular with tourists. Fortunately though we are here out of season so it is not very busy, and we seem to be landing on our feet staying in hostels who can offer us a private room (5 other empty beds).
The International Hostel in Paraty is excellent, although somewhat cluttered with statues and plants and things. The town itself is very attractive although after a while it all looks very similar. As in Buzios the paved streets require a degree of concentration especially after a few capiarinhias (sp). (Sorry about this almost sounding like a guide book!)
Anyway we met up here with the lovely Jess, Simon, Marco and Alex. Simon and Marco are from Switzerland and following some cerveça fuelled rather boring James banter we managed to determine that although neither of them had a clock, Marco had an army knife - I think they live near the Fjords.
We visited Trinidade beach via bus (20min) which apparantly is the ¨best beach in Brazil¨. Indeed it is a stunning beach
and you can walk to and from it at either end via rocky outcrops or across trail paths, although on occasion Simon had to be persuaded that walking was a good idea ;-)
That evening we had a very enjoyable meal together, much better than the hostel arranged BBQ the evening before. Although Marco still recovering from the BBQ fell foul of a rather spicy chilly and had to leave the restaurant rather early. The rest of us fell foul of caiparinhia and cerveça.
The next day was very enjoyable although rather exhausting. We hired bikes and cycled uphill for about 10km. I have to say that it was a hell of a climb and more than once the team morale was flailing (is that a word) - anyway we continued and eventually arrived at the waterfall.
When we arrived we saw some crazy local man surf the rocks with bare feet to land in the rock pool at the bottom - it's difficult to describe and I can't really be bothered as there are photos which say a lot more - I will try also to upload a movie of the nutter. The same man kindly
took us under his wing and escorted us to the top where he showed us around his ´domain´ and helped us to sit under the waterfall (I think we are all thinking about that scene in Last of the Mohicans)
Just stay alive, I will find you, just stay alive...
.
Anyway the swim was great and the ride down the 'mountain' was also rather good.
After a brief recoup Jess had us busy again walking up and over another hill to a nearby beach where the water was like bath water; a little mirkier admittedly, but none the less - even the Brazillian ladies were in there swimming and thats not the norm!
In the evening we somehow managed to sign up to an all you can eat
pizza which involved walking over the hill we had just come back and waiting about half an hour between slices of pizza. Needless to say we Brits held true and moaned until the alcohol kicked in properly.
Advertisement
Tot: 0.164s; Tpl: 0.01s; cc: 20; qc: 87; dbt: 0.0962s; 1; m:domysql w:travelblog (10.17.0.13); sld: 1;
; mem: 1.2mb
