Maceio

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We continued with the easy option and took another cheap flight, 2.5 hours north to Maceio for £30! It was another beach city which we shouldn’t have bothered with!. The beach was ok but nothing as nice as others we have seen in Brazil. Instead of being like a nice quaint fishing village, it was more like Benidorm!

The beach was not the only thing we came for as the place is famous for its low tide reef pools which are about 500m away from the main shoreline and you can swim around coral and see lots of different fish. This was the main reason for coming as we have seen some beautiful pictures.

The next day we sailed to the reef pools on a jangada (rickety little sail boat). Unfortunately the weather was crap and it was all grey storm clouds overhead so not a good day to be swimming in the pools. It didn’t seem to stop people as there were loads of people, so felt like a typical tourist! Could only imagine how busy it gets when it’s a hot and sunny day. After that there was not much else to do with the crappy weather, so Maceio was a big disappointment. One good thing was the wide variety of cheap restaurants with great food, lots of great seafood.

After Maceio we headed north again to Recife, which was a pain in the arse, Brazil really doesn’t make it easy to travel by bus. The day started at 7am and we finally arrived in Olinda a suburb of Recife at 4pm, after several buses and metros, apparently it should have only taken 4 hours! We then spent the next hour wandering the cobbled streets in the intense Brazilian heat for somewhere cheap to stay. Everywhere was full as they were having a festival at the weekend! We then got lucky and found a HI hostel with a nice double room for a bit more than we wanted to pay at £15 a night but it was well worth it as it had a pool. We checked in and within minutes we stripped off our sweaty clothes and took a dip with a nice cold drink. It was pure bliss and just what the doctor ordered at the end of a stressful and hard day. Later we had a wander around this pretty UNESCO colonial place and it would have been nice to stay an extra day but unfortunately they only had the one night.

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Photos

Jangada
Type of sail boat

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The sail of our boat!

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