Mmm, beaches...

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Faith again here. We drove to Florianopolis on sunday and went right on through. The capital of Santa Catarina, "Floripa" is half on the mainland and half on Ilha (Island) de Santa Catarina. Most of the Ilha is BEACHES and small towns supported by tourism. its the off season now, so we got a room with a porch facing Praia da Joaquina, on the east side of the island and facing open ocean. Praia da Joaquina hosts the Brazilian Surfing championships every year, so every day by 7 or 8am there would be twenty surfers in the water right by our hotel, and that number would grow and top out at about 50 or 60. The beach was pretty long - it took over 2 hours to walk to the end, one way - and there were more surfers farther down.

There are tons of birds here. All different kinds (Betsy you would love it.) Vultures, hawks, gulls, black and white ones with orange beaks, some that look like mini herons with bright yellow stripes on their legs. Our most exciting bird sighting by far, however, was a lone penguin in the waves. Bruno first spotted the small black and white bird, and when we looked closer we were like dude! that´s a PENGUIN! crazy. It sorted of floated like a duck and then would dive into the waves, looking for fish i guess, and then pop back up again after a minute or so. We watched in awe until we finally lost sight of it. Apparently they go as far north as argentina, but as you can guess we were quite shocked to see one in brazil. (see gaia, i told you it was cold.)

there were only two hotels and a handful of restaurants on Praia da Joaquina (and all but one restaurant was closed for the season) so it was nice and deserted. the Beach was backed by dunes that contined inland all the way to a lake inland. The northern part of the island is much more built up. So yeah, great week...we bummed around the beach and ate lots of soup at a restaurant in Lagoa, a small kind of yuppie beach town on the lake...

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