Ilha Grande 3

Most of the island is an ecological reserve and it’s managed to stay so well-preserved (in spite of being on the developed south coast) largely because of its history. It started as a pirate’s hideout, then became a leper colony and quarantine area for mostly European immigrants entering Brazil, and finally a prison for only the most dangerous and deranged criminals. The prison functioned until 1994, also serving as a political rival, erm, retreat for some time, so development has only happened quite recently.

There is still a part of the hospital/quarantine area left and it’s quite a creepy place. It was called Lazareto and you could expect to get stuck there if you were a new-comer to Brazil and you had a cold (or worse). Hell, even if you didn’t when you arrived, you’d probably pick something up before you were able to head to the mainland. Cholera was the main concern. Here’s what’s left:

There was also an aqueduct, built around the time of the hospital, which still runs through the jungle.

After pondering the ruins, we walked past a small waterfall with a pool filled with fat, speedo-clad men, took pictures of butterflies, and sat on the beach until it started raining.

We had an amazing dinner on the beach that night, Brazilian seafood and a bottle of wine, proper honeymoon stuff. 

Ilha Grande 2

Ilha Grande is a popular place for people from Rio, looking to escape the city for a weekend, so we tried to avoid the weekend crowds but we were still plunked right in the middle of the cruise ship season. Every day, at about 10am, two cruise ships come into the bay near the town, bringing throngs of people who wander aimlessly around the tiny town for about 4 hours, buy ice cream and head back to the ship. There is an absurd number of people in town at peak hours; you can barely walk through the streets. The good news is, if you are happy to romp through the jungle for an hour and a half or more, you can find several great beaches and lots of other cool things, that most cruise-shippers don’t have enough time to get to. The bad news is, if you just want to amble down to the pleasant beach ten minutes from town, you’ll probably be sharing a tiny space with a bunch of fat rich people.

We woke the next morning to an incredible feast of a breakfast, definitely the best of our trip. Our pousada was a properly German affair, run by a properly friendly German couple. (Nothing should be dirty, everything should be organized and no one should start their day without at east five or six sausages.) On our first day, we put on our damp bathing suits and went in search of the closest beach. We were still, jet-lagged and waking up early so we hadn’t hit the tourist tidal wave yet.

Here’s a shot of the beach near the town:

We still had to fight for a place to lay our towels though. I did a bit of masculine posturing and sent this fellow on his way:

It started spitting rain pretty soon after we sat down. My wife brought an umbrella so we read for a bit, lying underneath to keep our books dry, but eventually felt a bit silly and went back to our hotel. We sat on the balcony and watched humming birds and cruise ships come and go for the rest of the afternoon.

Hummingbirds are difficult to photograph:

The next few days were still a bit rainy so we took a couple of walks, to escape the cruisers herding through town. Our first trip took us on a short route up a hill near town and down the other side to a small beach. The forest is dense:

Ilha Grande

Hoping for good weather, we took another bus a couple of hours up the coast in the direction of Angra Dos Reis, which is a stepping stone to get to Ilha Grande, an island near Rio. There were a lot more waterfalls on the way there, just cementing this in my mind as a key feature of the Brazilian cultural experience. Angra is not pretty but the photo below shows an interesting element shared by a lot of the towns along this stretch of the Brazilian coast – they are built up the sides of hills. That’s another theme we’ll come back to regularly – things built on hills.


We got there in good time, and after some confusion while wandering around in the rain, we found a small, open ferry that was headed to the island. Fortunately, we had picked up some umbrellas before leaving Paraty so we didn’t get soaked finding the boat.


See the rain. :(

While we hung around and waited for the boat to fill up, I read a bit about Ilha Grande in our guide book. They call it a “pristine island retreat” that “owes its pristine condition to its unusual history.” I’d say, that’s about three-quarters right. They also say that during high season, it can get a bit claustrophobic in Vila do Abraao (the island’s main town). That’s a massive understatement. Still, there’s fun to be had, even at the peak of tourist season.

The highlight of the day was probably seeing a sea turtle from the boat, although I didn’t have time to get a picture of it. The Brazilian guy beside me, who spotted it, seemed more excited about our excitement than about the turtle itself. A lot of the other passengers really didn’t care. Facts of life in Brazil: waterfalls and sea turtles. Yawn.

The boat ride itself was decidedly NOT fun. We got drenched. It started pouring about twenty minutes in and between the rain and the waves hitting the sides of our small vessel, there weren’t many dry spots to be had. To my annoyance, my “waterproof” pack didn’t seem to keep much water out, but I mean, if I just threw it in the ocean (which is a pretty accurate comparison to the amount of water that washed over our boat), I wouldn’t expect it to keep water out, so I was probably being too critical. We decided to stay on the island until everything was dry at least. . .

Paraty 3

On our last day in Paraty we took a boat tour to some beaches and islands nearby. It was mostly cloudy again and rained on the way back but it was still a very pleasant afternoon. We met an unusual older fellow on the trip. He told us that he used to be an unemployed stone cutter (read quarry man?) in Paris until his parents died and left him quite a lot of money. Now all he does is travel 4 or 5 months of the year and write books about his true passion, architecture. Apparently, he’s just finished writing about the traditional huts of some specific tribe in Brazil but he hopes to start work on adobe architecture in East Africa soon. We talked to him for about an hour and then he ambled to another part of the boat.


On the way back we saw a few good places to buy a personal island. I believe the one in this photo is a fancy restaurant. If you make a reservation, they send a chauffeur in a boat to collect you from town.

Overall, in spite of the poor weather, we enjoyed Paraty a lot. There were a few tourists but it wasn’t swarming (though it will be soon as I just found out that it is a film location for the new Twilight movie) and the old town is just so freakin' charming. We could have stayed happily for weeks. But no, we have a lot of ground to cover. Time to move on.

On last picture, my pasty white self gracefully diving off the boat. No Brazilian sun to turn me into a bronzed god yet. Will that ever happen? Stay tuned to find out! (The water was also a little colder than I would have liked. The Arabian Gulf has ruined swimming for me around the world.)

Paraty 2

Supposedly Paraty sprung into existence thanks to the gold trade. Gold from Minas Gerais, inland, needed to get to Rio de Janeiro. The only way to get it there was over the Serra do Mar (a 1,500 km long system of mountain ranges and escarpments). The only place you can scale the mountains easily enough to cart big sacks of gold is near Paraty. Passing the waterfalls and little villages cramped against the mountains, it’s easy to imagine Portuguese settlers (and their slaves) labouring over the mountains for the good of the empire. Sending me deeper into imaginationland were the guidebook's hints of piracy. Where there was gold, there were pirates and local legend has it that one of Paraty’s churches, Igreja Matriz da Nossa Senhora dos Remédios, was funded by a discovery of hidden pirate gold. People in the town still talk about finding hidden pirate treasure today. We didn't find any despite looking out for big Xs on the ground the whole time we were there.

We arrived in the early afternoon and fortunately it stopped raining long enough for us to find a hotel. It was a beautiful, old manor on the edge of the town’s central square. Our hotel had a view of the pirate church through lush fruit trees and a horse pulling. . . something.

The streets are all rough cobblestones and the city centre is closed to traffic (hence the horse-powered golf cart) so it’s a very pleasant place to wander. As long as you steer clear of the pirates. . . My wife bravely followed Captain Sparrow for a few hundred metres. 

On our first evening it poured rain so we hit the bar next door and got a bite to eat and a beer or four. We poked around town a bit during the next couple of days. Unfortunately, we really didn’t get great beach weather. Mostly cloudy and a bit rainy but at least Paraty was interesting enough to keep us occupied. We did go looking for a beach well recommended in Lonely Planet but it seemed to have misled us so we just explored a bit on our own.

We found some nice views. 

Some strange tidal movements. (It does this every full moon high tide. I’m not entirely clear why the city was designed to let sea water run through it once a month but there it is. Are we lucky to have witnessed it? I suppose, but it was a pain trying to find a dry way back to the hotel.) 

 An overgrown fort once used to protect Paraty from piracy.

Pirate Bay.

Some hammocks in one of the many tourist shops.

Our dinner, which looks like barf but was really good. Mango fish, our first true Brazilian cuisine at a restaurant called Casa do Fuego.

We found a frog in our hotel lobby; I love its amber eyes.

And discovered some very unusual plants in the garden at breakfast on our first morning. Never got round to looking them up but I’ve never seen anything like them anywhere else I’ve been (except for a few other places in Brazil). 

Paraty

After another steamy night we were happy to be on the road to someplace we hoped would be more suited to the climate. We headed to the bus station early and (in what would become another running theme) the bus turned out to be nicer than our hotel room.

A bit of an aside here. With the exception of Bolivia, intercity buses in most South America are not what you might expect. They are nice. Very nice. They make most airlines look bad and all other buses I’ve seen look absurdly shitty (that’s right Greyhound, I’m talking to you). Imagine, if you can, a bus with A/C, very comfortable, (almost horizontally) reclining chairs, sort of clean bathrooms, assigned seating and even decent dinner service in Argentina and Peru. There appear to be two main reasons for the quality. First, a lot of people use buses rather than planes. There is a huge lower-middle class in Brazil and Argentina (where I'm guessing this trend began) and they need to travel to do business, visit family and go on holiday but they can’t always afford to fly. We were almost always the only tourists on the buses, so the industry is booming and it’s supported almost entirely by the local economy. Second, there is a lot of competition. If a company doesn’t have dinner or comfy seats they’ll have trouble keeping customers.

Heading to Paraty I noticed a few things outside of the bus as well. Firstly, now that we were headed to the beach it was raining and it rained pretty much all day. A good day for a bus ride but a bit of an ill omen for our coming beach days. Secondly, there were cows grazing under palm trees. I tried about a dozen times to get a good picture of this Brazilian phenomenon but I never managed a good shot from the bus window. Thirdly, waterfalls in Brazil are almost as common as trees. One that we passed an hour or so from Paraty was at least a hundred metres high. In any other country it would be a big deal, but in Brazil? Meh, there are like six more around the corner. The few hours on our luxury transport passed quickly, as my wife slept most of the way and I day-dreamed out the window, trying to imagine what it would have been like a few hundred years ago when the Portuguese settled. 

Sao Paulo Part 4

Our walk back to the hotel was much less strenuous but we realized the trek to the subway with our packs the next day would be a brutal start to our back-packing experience. So much for easing into things. Oh well, tomorrow we would be on the beach in Parati, supposedly a gorgeous town just two hours away. It was enough of a carrot to get us up those hills the next day.

We had dinner at a sushi place just around the corner from our hotel. It was run by Japanese (looking) people that only spoke Portuguese. I wish we had gone to visit Liberdade, the Japanese “quarter” of the city. I’ll add that to my list of reasons to go back some day. The list also includes a visit to Daslu, Sao Paulo’s most absurd over-the-top designer shopping emporium. You aren’t allowed to arrive by foot. You at least need a car, though a helicopter is preferable (there is a landing pad on the roof). Since I forgot to pack my fancy shoes, we decided not to go, but next time, next time. . . A lot of people would probably ask why the hell I’d want to visit a place like that. In my mind, it’s sort of like a visit to the Creationist Museum in the US. You have to go just to see if it really exists. The mall is controversial for tax evasion which resulted in a USD$112 million fine. It’s also located right beside Coliseu, one of Sao Paulo’s many favelas, serving as profound representation of the economic inequality in Brazilian society.

On that happier note, next stop: the beach.

I don’t have a lot of pictures from Sao Paulo because we weren’t there for long and I was timid about taking our camera out on the first dizzying day we spent there. Coming posts will be better.

Street art near our hotel

Daslu – notice the helipad:

(Courtesy of wikipedia)