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Published: December 10th 2008
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It takes 30 hours to get from Iguazu to the Brazilian coast. A couple of buses, switching in Sao Paulo; we don´t hang around...the city just looks to big and the ocean is calling us. We have 5 days before we meet up with Sharif, Emelie, Jason and Nathalie and we plan to spend them near Paraty on the Costa Verde.
Our bus from Sao Paulo drives us through thunderstorms as we head for the coast. Monsoon like rains fall then clear to sunshine like someone´s flicking a switch. No wonder it´s called the Costa Verde...it is so green and lush with rainforest. I get my first view of the ocean as we round a bend and start descending towards a small bay, totally surrounded by green hills. It´s totally tropical 😊
The sun comes out and we pass a few more small, idyllic bays of calm water all separated by rolling jungle covered hills. Some of the beaches look like they can only be accessed by boat and I glimpse a few houses, the stuff of daydreams, secluded in their own private paradise.
Paraty bus station is buzzing with people selling snacks and taxi drivers hawking for
business. It´s hot, humid and hectic and everyone´s speaking a language we don´t understand!
Now I´d been getting pretty good at Spanish...I could understand most of what I heard, my accent was good enough to trick that I knew even more and I felt like I was only a month or so away from really nailing it. And now here we are in Portuguese speaking Brazil and it´s all Dutch to me. On paper it looks like Spanish, but it sure as hell doesn´t sound like it and it doesn´t really sound like european Portuguese either. Brazilian Portuguese developed to include some dialects and sounds from indigenous languages (there were over 700 languages spoken by the indigenous population before the Portuguese arrived) as well as African dialects spoken by slaves (they´ve estimated that around 3.6 million Africans were shipped to Brazil before slavery was abolished here in just 1888...shockingly recent.)
My first few attempts to communicate are met with good natured incomprehension. People then turn straight to Ritch as he looks like a local, but he confuses them even more with his Spanglish. This is going to take some practice!
We manage to get ourselves into a hostel on our chosen beach, Praia Jabaquara, which is 2km north of Paraty. It´s stunning...a long stretch of beach surrounded by those jungle covered hills which make the calm water reflect green. We can see the boats and bright coloured colonial buildings of Paraty along the bay, which is filled with 65 islands and 300 beaches. We don´t have time to visit them all, but we´ve struck gold with Jabaquara and are more than happy to spend a few days lounging here.
We have our first sundowner Capirinha, a cocktail made from crushed citrus fruits, sugar, ice and cachaça...a sugarcane spirit and a big pot of moqueca camarão, a prawn stew made with dende oil, coconut milk and spicy peppers, at a beach baracca. It´s all fantastic, but not cheap...we´re quickly discovering that Brazil is our most expensive stop so far and we know it´s going to be budget blowing. But this is the good life and when in paradise...don´t look at the bill too closely :O
We do manage to get a bit of a discount on our room from our eccentric host who, everytime he speaks, reminds me of Roberto Benigni accepting his Oscar for Life is Beautiful. He proudly appears each breakfast-time with his new English word of the day ¨banana!¨ he says triumphantly (I´m sure it´s the same word in Brazil!) You do get a lot for your money here though; the breakfast is huge...platters of fruit, baguettes and cakes, ham and cheese, juice and strong good coffee. Now that we´re shameless backpackers we eat our fill and then make extra sandwiches which we wrap for a later snack...who said there´s no such thing as a free lunch?!
We also decide that drinking in bars is too pricy and only for special occassions (like...sunset?!) This doesn´t mean we become tee-total though, not when we discover that it costs less to buy a big bottle of cachaça in the supermarket than one drink at a bar...woohoo! Credit crunch Brazil style 😊
So we settle in one evening to perfect the art of mixing the perfect capirinha, and by jove I think we´ve got it! It takes a long difficult session, but in this selfless work we perservere towards perfection! The classic capirinha is made with limes, but we´ve discovered (hic!) that passion fruit works brilliantly too! Next on the list to try is strawberries ;P
After a rainy arrival to the coast we´re blessed with 3 perfect hot and sunny days, then a day of monsoon rains again. There´s something very relaxing about swinging in a hammock sheltered from the downpour...we have the luxury of time, we´re away so long that a bit of rain is quite a nice interlude which encouages you to entertain yourself with card playing, reading or writing (or discovering the delights of passion fruit capirinhas!)
But we meet Reef, Em, Jay and Nat tomorrow and the latter only have two weeks...I hope the sun shines on us...
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