Brazil

We spent one day in Sao Paulo. It was a really cool city and we felt much safer than we had originally anticipated. We explored as much as we could of the enormous city and bought our tickets for our bus ride out to the coast the next morning.

Paraty

In the morning, we headed out to Paraty from Sao Paulo. Our bus booked it along the coast blasting Abba (VERY loudly) the whole way. The Brazilian coast is so beautiful...colorful little fishing villages scattered the coast while the rainforest ran from the shores up into the mountains. We arrived in Paraty at our cute little hostel on the beach and met the fun owners of the hostel and their family. They gave us tons of information about the town and the surrounding beaches and suggested we go for a free drink to a restaurant down the beach. We did and the food was great. We sat on the sand and listened to Brazilian music while we ate. We headed to town for dinner later that evening and learned that if you eat in a restaurant where they play live music, you're helping pay for them to be there...that was a little extra that we didn't expect to have charged to our bill!

Paraty is a stunning little colonial town on the coast of Brazil that has been left mainly untouched by the modern world. There are cobblestone streets (that were nearly impossible to walk on) with stark white buildings next to bright colorful ones. Off the coast, hundreds of little islands are scattered about and you can take boats out to them, which we did.

Our second day there, we headed up the coast to a little beach where we hopped a boat out to one of the islands. The island was tiny and beautiful and we spent all day relaxing, eating, drinking passion fruit drinks, and soaking up the sun. It was wonderful, and a much needed break from the traveling.

On day three, we all headed out on a boat tour of some of the other islands. I think we had about five stops. We did some snorkeling, listened to live music, and laid out in the sun.

That night, we didn't want to walk far from our hostel for dinner as we were tired, sunned on, and coming down with a cold, so we headed out to the restaurant down the beach hoping for a quick yummy meal. Unfortunately, it was closed, along with many of the others, so we ended up eating at the only open restaurant at one of the hostels down the way. The food wasn't bad, but it took so long for us to get served that we didn't get out of there for over two hours! We were so tired, it was awful. Also, our food came in reverse...first the main course, then our drinks, then the salad...then we laughed really hard when we got the fresh bread along with our check. Backwards dinner.

The next morning, we woke up around 5am to catch a bus out to Rio...unfortunately, the times our hostel gave us for bus departures were wrong and our bus left 30 minutes before we got there. We stood there, groggy and tired with all of our bags at 6am, realizing that the next bus wasn't going to come for another 3.5 hours. Fortunately, Brian saved the day when he suggested we take the city bus to a town close to Rio and try to look for a bus from there to Rio. It was a bumpy ride, but it worked great, and we arrived in Rio before that second bus would've picked us up from Paraty.