Boipeba Island - Brazil's best kept secret

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Boipeba Island is a quiet, tropical island well off the coast of Salvador. It isn't really known to the tourists, who head to the much easier to access Morro Sao Paulo or Itaparika to hit the beaches. Knowing it was a difficult place to reach, we start early on our mission to get to Boipeba Island, getting an 8am taxi to the ferry terminal, just 10 minutes away. It was one of those mornings where we woke up with no idea what to expect and decided that we would just stay calm and expect the unexpected, we had a whole day and surely we could get to Boipeba in a day - even if we had to swim!

We get tickets for the 8:30am ferry to Bom Despacho, the main terminal on Itaparica island. It is complete madness, with millions of people queuing to get home for Christmas, crying babies, huge families, not many tourists. We get through the crush, glad we aren’t carrying much luggage and enjoy the 1 hour trip to the island. We then book a bus to Valenca, which we can’t get on until 11am. It’s 3 hours and the driver asks us where we are going (as we are the only tourists on the bus). When we tell him he goes to great lengths to tell us something but we can’t understand him and just nod. Just before we hit the town of Valenca with the bus still full, the driver stops the bus, walks up to us and tells us to get off. He points to a man outside the bus who greets us (not in English of course). We then get in his car and wonder if was going to take us to the speed boat or chop us into little pieces and feed us to his dogs. Lucky for us, after 10 minutes of sweating we were at the speed boat jetty and he pointed to the ticket window for us. He certainly wasn’t a taxi so I can’t figure out why or where he came from so I gave him 10 reais and we moved on.

Of course we buy the wrong ticket at the jetty but we eventually get on the right speedboat which was at capacity with 2 other couples on board. The boat trip was about an hour, winding past little treed islands as we rounded Morro Sao Paulo on our way to Boipeba. The boat just went up on the sand as there is no jetty and we jumped off into the water - lucky we packed lightly, the others had to get their cases in a wheel barrow up the beach to the Pousada Santa Clara, just a 2 minute walk from the beach.

The pousada was amazing with beautiful gardens and plants like we saw in the jungle. A great restaurant, a library and open air rooms with balconies and hammocks. We met Charles who ran the place and he was delighted that we made it at a decent hour and told us how great it was that we are joining them for Christmas dinner tonight in the restaurant because it will be fabulous and nobody else on the island does gourmet food like they do and they have the most popular restaurant on the island with the most talented chef. We check out the beach at the front of the pousada (portugese word for hotel), which is OK and then we have the fabulous Christmas dinner which lived up to the hype - roast turkey, lobster and the richest chocolate mousse to top it off. We were stuffed.

Christmas morning was strange. We woke up in a tropical garden and had a marvellous breakfast of fresh fruit, porridge and cake and good coffee. One of the other couples at the posadda had the same idea as us for Christmas day. Do the two and half hour walk partway around the island to Morere beach - supposedly the best beach on the island - have a swim, a sunbake, lunch on the beach and head back. So we joined forces at 9am and headed off walking along the white beaches with the palm trees lining the sand. We had to cut the corner using a stair trail and walking along a wavier beach before coming to a river crossing which was almost waist high. We crossed it and it wasn’t the nicest water in the world, and on the other side of a cliff was Morere, a beautiful beach, very quiet, very white sand. We swam out, it was very shallow as it was low tide and the water was very warm but refreshing from the heat of the day. We then sat under a palm tree and dried before hitting the one restaurant on the beach, sipping coconut water while having a great shrimp moqueqa, so good.

Another swim after lunch and we had seen plenty of sun. We decide on getting a tractor back to the main village on request of the girls who have sore feet. The views from the tractor were amazing as it takes the high ground back to town as the tide is up and makes the river crossing impossible. The island is very remote with only 1,000 or so people living on it doing a little bit of agricultural stuff but mostly tourist services. The island is not very touristy at all and attracts mostly rich people from Salvador as it is largely unknown to foreigners and difficult to get to. The village itself has a small plaza and a handful of shops. Surprisingly an internet cafe, but no ATMs.

We go out to dinner close by the posada as we have no torches to find our way back and have nice pizza. We find our way back in the dark and sleep under the mosquito net again and I thought I had finished with mosquito nets after the Amazon! Charles organised a late private transfer for us tomorrow at 3pm so that we could spend more time on the island - and why wouldn’t we want to, the sun was shining, the beaches were great and we were just starting to get decent tans - so we accepted his offer. We had another amazing breakfast, this time pancakes with maple syrup which fuelled us for a walk back to the wavy beach where we laid in the sun and swam all morning. We walked back to our beach and had a grilled chicken lunch on the beach while the people selling stuff approached us and Sarah bought a shell bracelet. The funniest is the gay guy in the green t-shirt selling plastic bowls of fruit salad chanting ‘salada de frutas, salada de frutas’ as he skips past.

We were wearing our new skimpy bathing costumes to try to keep up with the locals - but we couldn’t, the locals have the skimpiest of skimpy costumes, I can’t figure out how guys can stay inside them and the females leave absolutely nothing to the imagination, which is very scary when some of them are in their 70s and have legs that resemble the surface of the moon far better than moon valley in the Atacama desert. But you have to take the good with the bad and some of the locals simply looked amazing!

We went back to the same restaurant for dinner and ordered pizza again when something strange happened. At 7pm, the island was plunged into darkness. A complete power black-out. Luckily the pizza oven was still cranking and we got food by candlelight. We found our way back to the posada in darkness and go upstairs to our bed, managing to sense our way around the bed.

We wake up this morning a little sunburnt. My upper legs haven’t seen sun since I was a kid. Nevertheless we pushed on and did a complete groundhog day of the day before, beach, lunch on the beach, this time we had a 3pm departure though. Now Charles had requested that we accompany a young Spanish girl back to Salvador as she would like some company. What we didn’t know was that she had just spent Christmas with her boyfriend of a year and his family and was distraught to be leaving and would be crying most of the way back to Salvador.

Our speed boat got us to a different spot just out of Valenca where we had to wait about half an hour in the middle of nowhere for our car. Just as I was getting suspicious that not all was right, our car arrived - a very nice black VW at that. It was a 2 hour drive to Bom Despacho to the ferry and on the way we narrowly avoided a bad head on collision with a crazy driver turning onto the wrong side of the road as we were going around a blind corner. Our driver was shaken and cursing in Portugese. We saw many acts of appalling driving and now understand why they bless their cars. We make the ferry back to the madness of Salvador and considered ourselves lucky to have had three days of remote tropical bliss on Boibeba Island!

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Photos

Skimpy bathing costumes
Not appropriate for me really