Our next stop travelling along the coast from Rio to Sao Paulo was a little but lively town of Paraty. Such a picture esk place hemmed by jungles mountains and clear seas. It's a completely untouched historic port of cobbled streets and beautiful houses painted with colourful designs. Even better no cars were allowed but played havoc on your feet walking over the cobbled in the pitch black as we had to one night when the electricity went dead for 4 hours at dinner time.
We were starving and hadn't eaten since breakfast to save money (enter violins) and were dying for a proper dinner, but you could hardly make out the restaurants and when we found one all they could do was salad, so we we had little choice but to wait or go to an overpriced bar with a generator. well my stomach waits for no man so we ended up in the pricey bar ordering our chicken burgers. It was terrible, stale bread overcooked chicken and we would be paying £25 quid for the pleasure. The right thing to do would have been to send it back and ask for them to attempt something better or just walk out after one bite, but we were so hungry we couldn't face it. So when the bill came we were even more pissed off at the automatic 15% service charge! So we agreed to put the money for the food in and leave this off, service was pretty shit too. So we made a sharp exit and were just deciding what to do next when a angry waiter chased us up the street, after explaining he said he would call the police so we had no choice but to reenter the shitty bar. The bar had no interest in what we thought of the food as we had paid and didn't seem worried as the service charge doesn't go in their pocket so we walked out again. As we went to look at the latino Free festival that was going on we kept checking our backs for the police, the power cut certainly added a bit of drama to the evening.
The weather was a hit and miss again but warm enough to lie on the various beaches even though it was mostly cloudy and unlike rio the sea was warm and very calm so we did a spot of swimming too. We went to find another new beach one day and instead of sand we found a beach of natural clay with a bunch of friendly brazillians covering every inch of skin and hair in it. They persuaded us to join in, which was a lot of fun, especially without the tourists or purpose built changing rooms and showers, and this helped fill the rest of our day trying to get rid of it in the sea. It's worse than sand!
We waited it out again for a sunny day and went on a boat trip stopping at various islands and beaches. It was great and we had a 85 person schooner to share with only 12 others. We had a great day and Greg even overcame his fear of swimming in deep water, for the day anyway.
It's definitely a place to recommend and so relaxing. We did it cheap too as we found a very basic but friendly 5 room hostel run by a mad belgium. There are some funny stories to tell about our time in Paraty but face to face down the pub is definitely a better arena for them.
We would have loved to have visited some of the supposedly even more beautiful islands along this coast but after 12 days and £1200 worse off we had to literally run out of Brazil, but certainly vowing to return one day when were miwionaires and do it justice. So we took a loooong 26 hour bus ride to Argentina, and their portion of Iguatzu falls.
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