Honeymoon day 5: Paraty

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Up until now our internet time has been filled with booking buses and rooms - hence the delay in posts. Anyway...

As I mentioned in the previous blog we bailed out of Rio early due to bad weather and inflated prices from the holiday. Holidays can get realllyy pricey in Rio, after talking to some folks I found out during Carnaval rooms are up to $200 USD per PERSON for a crappy dorm in a hostel. Heresay, but I believe it after the prices we saw for the Nov 15th holiday.

Anyhow, the holiday was still going strong as we tried to leave Rio, and since we hadn't made any reservations we had a tough time deciding where to go next. We had originally wanted to go to Ihla grande next, but it was fully booked everywhere we looked. We ended up finding one small room in Paraty, which was also on our potential hit list, so we headed there.

The room was super small - the bed took up nearly the whole thing. But the caretaker Emerson was nice, spoke English (a rarity), and it had a good location so it became our home for the next few nights.

Paraty is a colonial town, with a whole area sectioned off with no cars. The cobblestones are legit - one wrong step and you will get a sprained ankle for sure. Very touristy, especially with the holiday. The first night we wandered around town a bit and had a nice romantic meal with live music.

The next day it rained all day. We decided to take a trip out to one of the local waterfalls, and save beaches for a sunny day. We had to wait a while at the bus stop but finally one came through. 30 minutes later we were at the waterfall, which was really just a sloped rock. Some locals were sliding down into the pool below. It looked fun but we were not dressed to swim, due to the rain. Stephanie got her courage up and went down to feel the water - but she screamed and ran back to me. Sure enough there was a decent sized snake in the water, right where she was about to put her hand. She didn't touch the water the rest of the day. We ended up just walking around the area a bit, got lunch and drinks at a local restaurant, and headed back in to town that night.

Luckily the weather improved the next day and we took another bus out to Trindade, about 45 minutes away from Paraty. We were armed with a hand drawn map that Emerson gave us. It ended up working fine. We saw the sun for the first time since we got to Brazil, and lounged on the beach a while. We then hiked 2-3 miles along a long stretch of beach, past big boulders and streams of water. On the way we saw a pretty funny car crash (picture below). People were surfing but the waves didn't entice me enough to try and get a board. The water is semi-cold, similar to late summer in San Diego.

Most beaches in Brazil (in the south at least) have lots of bars with picnick tables and umbrellas set up along the beach. The beers come in big bottles, in a plastic coozie that keeps them cold. It's a genious design, I wish they would bring it to the states. We stopped at a place along our hike for drinks on the beach (I had beer, steph had a caipirinha). We had lunch in Trindade, then got a bus back to Paraty.

The whole time we were in Paraty, we were trying to work out the next leg of our trip. There are a lot of cool beach towns we wanted to get to, but it has been more difficult to get rooms and transportation than we were hoping. We finally decided we'd make a bee-line for Florianopolis and stay about a week. The only problem was getting there. The most direct route was to bus to Sao Paulo, then an overnight bus to Florianopolis. But buses were booked solid to Sao Paulo due to the holiday. We finally worked out a strategy of going to Ihlabela for one night, then getting a bus to Sao Paulo, and taking a sleeper bus overnight to Florianopolis. It ended up being a great decision. More in the next blog.

Here's some pics from Paraty:

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Comments

[Samy]

cachoeiras
Hi! I just found your blog while looking for some info on ilha bela, I stayed in Paraty last year and went to the cachoeira do tobogã, and couldn't help to tell you, there are like 3 or 4 other waterfalls just 5 mins away from that one and there's also like an abandoned pub right in the middle of the jungle that's kinda cool, it's such a shame... the local people gave me a bunch of info on my trip, if you ever get there again, just go to the hostels in praia do pontal, the Misti Chill and Geko Hostel are cheap, the receptionists are very usefull, they even told me how to get to praia do sono by foot (an amazing beach), they all speak english (or almost all) and you get to have breakfast in their beach bar. It's a cool thing for a low price. And one more thing! the snake creeped me out! Cheers!