Ilha Grande (BRASIL) - Serene emerald green

Ilha Grande (Brasil)
19 JUNE - 22 JUNE 2015

A sweet, small coincidence occurred when we hit Ilha Grande. We'd been traveling close to three months by then and wandered into a small bar in the area of Abraao on the island. As we entered a pair of eyes looked up from one of the tables and we recognised the person as being one of the guys

that had also completed the Death Ride with us in Bolivia some two months earlier. I enjoy those oddities, those happy coincidences. It shows you that the world is still not big enough to be able to hide and disappear from everyone, well, unless of course it's intentional. Over the years of traveling I'd had events like this punctuate my travels. Sometimes with people that were well known to me, others just random acquaintances. When you think of the chances of those encounters and wonder about the odds you really do get amazed that they happen at all.

Ilha Grande - Brasil

Ilha Grande - Brasil

Crystal clear beaches, luscious Atlantic forest, emerald coloured waters. When we turned up at Conceição de Jacareí to board our ride across to Ilha Grande there was none of that. We boarded a pontoon with an outboard motor that was open to the elements, and then, just headed out into the Atlantic. Pressed down by heavy clouds, relentless, annoying rain and some choppy water, our little vessel of hope cut through the mediocre waves as the spray soaked all on board. It literally felt as though we were heading to the edge of the known world. The shoreline disappeared from behind us and nothing visible in front, there was a certain unease to the situation. Sometimes you just need to place your trust in the people in charge and accept, or at least think, that what is happening at this exact moment is totally normal. The funny thing was, just a few days later on our return journey, under blue skies and calm seas, we could easily see the shoreline and were a little dumbfounded that the journey out to the island felt like a tunnel to the abyss.

Ilha Grande - Brasil

Ilha Grande - Brasil

Vila do Abraão, Angra dos Reis  in the State of Rio de Janeiro is just a small town. Basically a combination of hotels, restaurants and business set up for water activites. It has a population of about 2000 inhabitants and is the largest on an island that has so far remained relatively untouched. The reason for that, up until now, was that it had at one time been a leper colony and also housed a prison where the 'baddest of the bad-asses' of the Brasilian penal system would be dumped. Since the mid-90's its been opened up to tourists and thankfully, to date, has stringent development restrictions that protect it from development. I hope that will remain the case. The island has an abundance of all things - beauty in spades, both flora and fauna. The beaches are untouched, unspoiled, mainly accessible by boat or those intrepid enough to hike the island trails. I say 'intrepid' as rumour still has it that there are still booby traps scattered around the island that were place there to prevent prisoners from making their escapes. It could be just urban legend, but would you take the risk?

Do you think the post came first or the bench?

That's how far the mainland was away 

This is a place where you could easily spend a week or longer, and its in those times of contemplation that you do wonder whether a simple life would be satisfying. Sun, sand, water, tranquility. You ask yourself, 'could I do this every day?', obviously some people do and are satisfied, or even happy. It's in those moments that the eternal thought of 'opening a bar' comes to mind. I wonder how many people have thought of this method as being their out to happiness in such idyllic locations. When it comes down to it though, 99.99999% of the time its those 3-4 days that fill the cup of prospective sea-change. Still, there are those that do it, and they seem happy making caipirnhas for people like me.

Paraty - the pace of life project

Paraty (Brasil)
06 - 08 January 2012

A few years ago I recall reading an experiment that was undertaken by the British Council in which researchers travelled to major cities of the world and measured the average time that it took for people to walk a distance of 60ft (approximately 19 mtrs). The data set applied in each city involved 35 randomly chosen men, and 35 randomly chosen women, with the parameters being that the area chosen to assist in the statistical measurement of the 'pace of life' would need to be a busy street in a major city, free from obstacles and also be sufficiently uncrowded so as to allow individuals to be able to hit their maximum walking speed over the distance set. The hypothesis from the data retrieved was that a pedestrians' measured speed could somehow be a reliable indicator of the pace of life in a city. Additionally the data would also somehow show that in fast moving cities people are far less likely to help others and in one more intruiging quirk, fast paced cities also had higher rates of coronary heart disease.

I often wonder how organisations such as the British Council conjure up experiments that often seem to be quite whimsical and capricious. I sometimes imagine good 'ole chaps such as Winston and his buddies from Carrington Hall, sitting back in their Chesterfields, puffing on their Cohiba Behike's, working their way through a Remy Martin Louis, and coming up with fantastic ideas by which they would be 'officially' allowed to indulge themselves in the realm of exotic world travel for the sake of science and the further understanding of the strange beings which we happen to be. I have the odd suspicsion that a conversation amongst Winston and his dear old chums as to the viability of an experiment might go something like this....

'Rodrick, listen to this idea, we'll put to the council that we travel to say 50 cities around the world,we'll sit in cafes having macchiatos for the afternoon and just time how long it takes say, 70 people to walk past us' ...

'Why Winston, what a wonderfully scrumptuous and mischievious idea. I'll get the heads of the Council for Arbitrary Nonsense together at once, tally ho!'

Still, if you want to know the outcome of that experiment, it goes a little something like this

Top 5 for SPEED

1. Singapore (Singapore)  10.55 secs

2. Copenhagen (Denmark)   10.82 secs

3. Madrid (Spain)                   10.89 secs

4. Guangzhouu (China)         10.94 secs

5. Dublin (Ireland)                   11.03 secs

Bottom 5

5. Damascus (Syria)           14.94 secs

4. Amman (Jordan)             15.95 secs

3. Bern (Switzerland)          17.37 secs

2. Manama (Bahrain)          17.69 secs

1. Blantyre (Malawi)          31.60 secs

Seriously Blantyre, what's going on in your world? When did your entire population 'check out' of life? I recommend that you find something to do, collectively, and spice up your society. I'll write to Winston and Rodrick, I'm sure they have a project that they're just waiting to unleash on you....aside from all of this garble however, what the hell does it have to do with Paraty you're asking yourself? Well to me at least it was quite noticeable that Paraty operated on Island Time, or should I perhaps restate it to, time in accordance to the Blantyre factor. The pace of life on the Costa Verde was S-L-O-W, but the type of slow that embraced you and drew you into its pervasive and all conquering ways. This quaint colonial town located on the Bay of Ilha Grande, had that charming and casual sensibility that somehow infiltrated your own cells and forced you to slow down through the enforced changing of your own internal fabric.

View out onto the Bay of Ilha Grande - Costa Verde - from the Resort Croce del Sud

JJ & Jetson - pace of life at a stand still - Paraty - Brasil

Historic town centre - Paraty - Brasil

Historic town centre - Paraty - Brasil

Paraty - Brasil

Walking around the well worn cobble-stone streets in the historic centre, appreciating the colonial architecture and getting moderately beaten by the humidty and heat, our pace of life was frequently truncated by our need for alcoholic refreshment and inspiration. Not that any of us minded the challenging framework of Brasilian style being that we set ourselves. With increasingly slower movement we managed the purcgase of seafood and wine for an evening fiesta and made our way back to the Southern Cross where we watced the sun fall away over the rainforest covered hills. I think that if someone had taken a measure of my rate of movement in Paraty during those days they would have quickly followed up with a check of my pulse!

07 January

Sunrise from the Croce del Sud

If our previous day didn't quite live up to the all pervasive chilled vibe that we expected from Paraty, well, the next day almost put us into a euphoric coma (is that a contradiction? Probably, but I'm sticking with it). On this day we jumped onto one of the many local boats/yachts that depart on daily adventures of Ilha Grande Bay from Paraty and spent something close to 6hrs gliding across the emerald green waters of the surrounding bays.

Yeah, I'm on a boat! - Paraty - Brasil

'Oh sh*t! Get your towels ready because it's about to go down!'

The colonial town of Paraty - Brasil

Being out on the water of Ilha Grande just made you appreciate the Costa Verde for all that it was worth. I don't recall a place that I have ever been to previously where I've seen rainforest simply cascade from the surrounding hills into the majestically coloured water. Not only was it completely tranquil and peaceful, and not only were we now graciously being served by the weather which had decided to support us in our cause, but the water of the bay was a perfect temperature that allowed you to get your swim on. Additionally, I don't think that I ever recall seeing water equivalent to the brilliant emerald green of the bay of Ilha Grande. It was breathtaking.

Ilha Grande Bay - Brasil

Emerald Green water of Ilha Grande (magnificent) -Brasil

When you're travelling, they're the types of days that are the exception to the rule. Not so much for the fact that other days don't match up, because they do, but more due to the fact that creating a day without expectation and being surprised by what it ends up delivering is always a golden reward. To quote myself, from a line that I wrote in relation to Madrid, 'Sometimes planning things can be the death of enjoyment because what you end up deducting is the very aspect of surprise and chance that you searched for to begin with' -  I think our day out on the water absolutely caught me by surprise in what it offered, and also for the fact that I saw Frichot get out into the water also! What the? Unexpected much!!?

Ilha Grande Bay - Brasil

Splish-splash - Rockin' the emerald waves of the Costa Verde!

Ilha Grande Bay - Costa Verde - Brasil

08 January

Each morning at the Resort Croce del Sud we were delivered an amazing breakfast which consisted of fruit juices, various types of breads, and combinations of sweet and savoury offerings from the Lucas's wife, offerings which the three of us could never get through. On our final full day in Paraty I think it was either the enormity of the breakfast, or perhaps the sleep deprivation that finally got the better of Jetson, but he decided to inhabit the inside of the unit for the day whilst JJ and I cruised on into Paraty for a little souveneir hunting.

Now I always find souvenir hunting a chore. Unless something really jumps out at me I hate having to walk around without a real aim and be driven solely by my moral compass. Somehow you feel that it has to be 'shown' that you were thinking of someone whilst you were away and then proof comes in the degree of gift that you manage to conjure up for your peeps hours after your homeward flight has touched down. I think in future I'm going to make my friends and family sign a contract that mutually binds us to strict terms of not having to purchase gifts unless the gift bought is absolutely 'legendary'. That is the only fair way of getting off the program,saving pain, time and unnecessary funds whilst on holidays for items that really won't ever be utilised again. There's only so many 'I love Uruguay' t-shirts that I can buy! REALLY!!

With the mind numbing task of souvenir harassment out of the way JJ and I got ourselves into the 'primo' mode of lunch, chased down by a few bottles of wine. It was just the the trigger that we needed, as our wanderings after this lead us to an exquisite wine bar where the service was impeccable, if not disarmingly odd. JJ and I sat at the bar for hours, with JJ blabbering to one of the staff in English, the staff member responding to her in Portuguese, and me understanding only the common bits of Spanish that I knew but the both of them somehow getting totally in depth about life,love and all things female. At one point the Brasilian lady took it upon herself to give me a stern talking to for calling JJ 'loco'.....'C'mon lady, you've been talking to her for the last 3 hrs! You KNOW that she is, give this man a break!!!'

Several hours later we slipped out of the bar into what was already early evening. I recall looking around and simply thinking, 'Hey man, where has that sun gone!' and then automatically feeling sorry for Jetson because he was going to have to put up with two drunken upstarts when we got back home who when affected by alcohol love to argue! It's just in our DNA, what can you do!?

Sunset from the Croce del Sud - Paraty - Brasil

Somehow the night turned into an oddity in  that I manged to rip out what I thought was quite a sensational seafood meal with the goods we had acquired in Paraty, JJ and I held of on any drunken one upsmanship in the argument stakes, and for an additional trick we tried to locate the owner of a mobile phone that we had acquired somewhere along the line. I pity those poor Portuguese speaking bandits that had to try and decipher my guerilla Spanish for the several hours that they continually called the phone in order to resolve its whereabouts. Ah Paraty, you're sensationally chilled, attractive, and have a rebellious dash of good old fashioned pirate in you. I would have loved to have stayed longer but the relaxation coma that you would have put me into may have been something from which I would never have returned!

Paraty - The Southern Cross

Rio de Janeiro - Paraty (Brasil)
05 January 2012

Sometimes I quite like being the isolationist. I can easily allow myself to contemplate and meander through those real, surreal and errant thoughts in my mind for hours on end. I could gaze both longingly and forlornly out onto mountain ranges, desert plains and nautical miles of ocean. I'm totally OK with being in my own space without the need of company, so much so that if I allowed that line of thought to continue for a period of time I could quite easily become the quintessential hermit. I believe that occasionally social butterflies need to be shot out of the sky for the simple fact that their constant need for recognition and attention irritates the living daylights out of me. This outlook, although perhaps slightly warped, is why I can make sense of a man wanting to spend those crucial years of his life building and then sailing his yacht around the globe. Spending endless days on the timeless ocean, allowing oneself to to break lose from economic or social melodramas, I get how someone could fall for the solitude of the ocean. This in fact was the life of an Italian man (Luca), who was the owner of the resort Croce del Sud - (Cross of the South or Southern Cross), that we were to stay in over the next 5 days, about 20kms outside of the old colonial town of Paraty. I'll get back to Luca and his story in a little while.

Our time in Rio had unfortunately come to an end and whilst the rain had damaged its obvious potential there's nothing that could damage its glorious reputation in my mind. It didn't quite pull me into its web of seduction in the same way that a Buenos Aires can and does,nor did it wrap me up in a cloud of mystery in the manner of a Marrakech, but Rio is attractive, laid back and obviously knows how to get its party on when required. I've ticked you on my future 'to do' list Rio, and I'll be back with reinforcements sometime very soon.

Incidentally, do you know how difficult it is to acquire bus tickets in Brasil from outside of the country? It's a task that nearly drove JJ and I to breaking point before arriving in Rio. Trying to arrange the 4hr transit down to Paraty online was more than a mission, it was a lesson in the mechanics of coping with frustration without unnecessarily fatally damaging your own property. Vexing, annoying and futile! Actually, 'counterintuitive' would be the perfect description. Why Brasil, why do you bossanova bandits make it so difficult for us mere mortals? Still, we found out, as I probably should have realised, that just rocking up to a bus station and acquiring tickets is far less painful.This is what we did for our return leg thankfully. For our straight journey south however we were already locked and loaded, aiming at the once Portuguese colonial town of Paraty which carves out its little niche in this world along the Costa Verde (Green Coast). It's a place that had been recommended to me by my once salsa partner in crime Paula, and had originally been earmarked on my now fatal 2010 tour. This time it was getting taken out!

Overlooking Pararty Bay from the Resort Croce del Sud - Paraty - Brasil

Overlooking Pararty Bay from the Resort Croce del Sud - Paraty - Brasil

As most people who travel with me are aware, put me on anything that moves and I'll inevitably find a way to fall asleep. The four hour run down to Paraty was nothing more than a nap, so much so that when I saw the bus pull up right in front of the driveway to the Resort Croce del Sud I thought I was having quite a vivid daydream. For some reason the bus stopped for a few minutes longer than anticipated and I made what I thought to be the 'obvious' decision, that we should bust out of the bus and forgo the additional 20km run into Paraty because it would only mean having to find our way back. What I was also aware of was that the walk from the start of the driveway (in fact it was a road shared by other estates), to the actual resort was 500mtrs. I knew that. What I didn't know was that the 500mtrs was almost vertical!! It was 2mins into our walk that 'perfect male reasoning' was decimated by the reality of humidity and gravity. We turned up to the actual driveway of the resort in clothes that would not have been fit for Aquaman to wear. When Luca greeted us it was with a glassful of dismay at the fact that these ignorant Australians had decided on attacking the slopes 'freestyle' - 'Oh yeah Luca, we're hard nuts that aren't partial to reading, why would you want to have all the information available when you can find out first hand how much of an idiot you are'. Usually when I make mistakes of this calibre I come out with the line, 'Well, this is how you earn it'. Of course a taxi ride would have sufficed and I would have been happy for the driver to have earned the 40 Riel's which we saved in our 'enterprising' fashion.

The view from the back of the unit - Resort Croce del Sud - Paraty - Brasil

Resort Croce del Sud - Paraty - Brasil

The units/flats, or whatever you would like to call them were amazing however. Not so much for their facilities but for the fact that they had such a commanding view out over the bay of Paraty. The idea of chilling was not a decision that had to be made, it was something that was virtually going to be forced on us. It's a place where the rolling hills and mountains of rain forest effortlessly cascaded into the bay, and where you could hear the receding echo of fishing boats making their way out for another working day. This place was going to be very easy to get use to.

On our first afternoon we managed to walk back down the hill and into the small fishing village of Prainha and then onto the small secluded beach of Praia Grande. Now this beach to me was absolutely perfect. Emerald green waters, completely surrounded by rain forest, pristine sand and a bar not 20mtrs from the waters edge! How we didn't spend more than one afternoon just lazing around or drinking ourselves into a rain forest inspired drunken coma is beyond my comprehension. It's definitely one of my regrets for the time that we spent there but it also leaves the opportunity of having to make it up to myself at some distant point in the future.

Prainha - Costa Verde - Brasil

Jetson and JJ on the beach in Prainha - Costa Verde - Brasil

Now explain to me how we only spent the ONE afternoon on this beach

That initial evening on our balcony, glasses of wine in hand, gazing out over the bay was just E-A-S-Y. The taste of victory from walking back up the hill from the fishing village was captured perfectly in several glasses of white and also in the food that we managed to retrieve whilst down in Prainha. It's kind of obvious but when you're in a fishing village you go with their local produce right! ....and that decision was NOT a mistake. The fish and prawns that we picked up that afternoon was some of the sweetest and most 'delightful' (yes, I used that word), that I've ever had. Thankfully our flat gave us the opportunity to cook up a storm whenever we felt inspired by our environment and the way that it turned out we ended up dancing to a sweet seafood symphony every night.

Afternoon session over the bay - I think that's JJ hitting her head and expressing her overwhelming disappointment as to the situation she was now in!

Evening on its way - Resort Croce del Sud - Costa Verde - Brasil

A score with the local produce!

So, back to the story of Luca, the owner of the resort. Now apparently his life story took a turn when he entered the bay of Paraty. Somehow the Costa Verde had her way with him and decided on his behalf that his being was going to occupy this space for a while. Now this is the part that amazes me, whilst in Paraty he made his decision to stay, found himself a wife, had a couple of kids and set himself up with a ridiculous resort in a 'ridiculous' location. Of course he sold his yacht, the original Croce del Sud, which the resort was named after but what a freakin' sea change! Luca, you're kind of an oddball but much respect for following your instincts!