Paraty

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Hello all!

I hope you are doing well and enjoying the snow..........

We have spent the last few days in Paraty, a colonial town a few hundred kilometres down the coast from Rio de Janeiro (took about 5 hours to drive there). We are now with our tour group which consists of Joaquin (our guide), Alice (our friend we met at the airport from near Leicester, she´s now sharing with Caryl & I), Ruud (from The Netherlands), Milla & Lucy (from England) and Juurgen & Maire (from Norway). It´s a really nice little group.

Paraty is a lovely place with cobbled streets (really hard to walk on in flip flops, especially when it had been raining, and it did rain, a lot) and small white painted houses with brightly coloured doors. We had a little wander around on our first day and then as it started raining had to go for lunch which ended up being the randomest lunch I´d ever had. The place we went into only really did big dinners and they were expensive so between the 6 of us that were there we had two baskets of bread, a papaya each and I had a bowl of beans (they do lots of bowls of beans here). We went out in the evening and had a really cool night at the towns carnival warm up party. The band was playing Samba and didn´t stop all night, never missed a beat. There wasn´t much dancing though which was disappointing, I tried a little bit (you know I love to dance!) but I don´t think I got it quite right. There were street stands selling Caipirinhas though so Caryl was happy!

The next day we thought we´d go to the beach as we´d heard a lot about how amazing the beaches are around Paraty but we didn´t pick the right one. The sea was muddy, I went in for about 10 seconds and then as I was nearly up to my knees in mud got out pretty quick! That evening we went to another nice restaurant (Joaquin helps us pick good ones!) and then stumbled across a Samba band practicing, that was good as not many people were about. We then went onto a Cuban bar (the Che Bar) and they had a chap singing live music, just with a guitar. He was playing stuff like Stairway to Heaven, sometimes singing in English for us and sometimes in Portuguese. I loved it.
The day after Caryl, Alice, Juurgen, Maire and I had a day out visiting waterfalls and drinking Cachaca with a Dutch trio (who were sooo nice) and a Brazilian (who couldn´t speak a word of any language any of the rest of us could speak so we had to use a lot of hand signals). We went swimming in 3 different waterfalls which all had little pools around them. Iva, our guide was absolutely nuts (and loved Caryl, his little Tigresa!) and kept jumping into different bits of water and then disappearing for a minute of so which was a bit worrying. He also kept making us do things we were not keen on......the last waterfall had a natural waterslide which completly freaked me out after my experience in a Rhodes water park last year. I really didn´t want to do it but in the end decided to have a go (the local kids were kind of surfing down it on their feet so I thought I could manage on my bum) and it was great fun but........I lost my bikini on the way down which was so embarassing! I therefore couldn´t go down again so Iva took me into a waterfall. He kept sticking his head in (Iva didn´t speak much English so had to show us what to do), I thought he wanted me to do the same so I stuck my head in and then he was all thumbs up and OK and trying to drag me in. I was like NOOOOOOO thinking I wouldn´t be able to breathe so he stuck his head in again and eventually I realised he was trying to get me to see there was no water behind the initial cascade (which was really fast flowing!). Once I figured that he did drag me in again and we went onto this little shelf behind the waterfall, where we sat and watched the water cascading in front of it. It was pretty cool, never thought I´d be able to do anything like that.

We left Paraty yesterday for a 24 hour journey to Iguazu Falls. It was 6 hours to Sao Paolo (would have been shorter if we hadn´t got stuck in a traffic jam caused by falling rocks!!!) and the scenery was beautiful; lush green fields and trees with purple and pink flowered trees dotted around the place, there were lakes and beautiful beaches (we wanted to get out and swim) that were packed and when we got high up the view was even more amazing. In some parts it looked like the English countryside, all rolling green fields with the odd clump of trees. In Sao Paolo we changed buses for what ended up being a 16 hour bus journey through the night. It wasn´t too bad because we could sleep (the seats fully reclined, the UK could learn a bit from South America about public buses) but by the time we got off my ankles were ridiculously swollen. They haven´t gone down yet, not sure what I´m going to do about that! Mum, I will go to the doctors if necessary.

Anyway, we are now in Iguazu and visited the Brazilian side of the falls today, but I will write about that another time. All I will say is OMG it is breathtaking, I thought this might be one of the highlights of my trip and already it has exceeded my expectaions.

Lots of Love

Rachel

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Comments

[Sam H]

"they do lots of bowls of beans here" Love it! If you lost your bikini, did you walk round naked for the rest of the day? Miss you Rach. Sam

[Marko]

:-)
Hey Rachel, Glad to read that you found us nice :-) It was a wonderful day with you in Paraty indeed and you describe it really good! We have lots of photos! Mail me and i will send them! Iguasu is something else, isnt it! Did you take the boat tour? Would love to see a pic with you surrounded by butterflies! Hope you will post an update soon! x Marko

[Rachel Roo]

Bikini!
Sam, thankfully, I found it again, just had am embarrassing few minutes! Miss you already too Xx