Ilha Grande

Chris > Approaching Ilha Grande on the ferry crossing we quickly realized how lucky we were to come here. The wooden boats came into view under the lush, tropical island with no roads and only a small human footprint in the form of a village. The stunning beaches and rainforest trails later solidified this island as one of the most perfect places we have seen on the planet.

Chris and I had been soooo looking forward to coming here to Ilha Grande - we'd heard so much about the island's fabulous beaches and couldn't wait to sample some after our dreary, dull week at the beach in Northern Peru.

On the bus from Paraty we'd met two back-packing teachers my age, one of whom works just across the hills from me at a high school over in Rochdale. It was fun to chat with them about the traveling they'd already managed in their summer holidays and was nice, as ever, to have some additional company for this journey by bus then ferry. We arranged to eat with them one night during our stay on the island.

It is worth mentioning that by this stage of our travels, our bags were packed to capacity and our backs were on the brink of breaking. Any souvenirs we had been able to leave in Lima previously (while we journeyed around Bolivia) we were now carting around with us in addition to the new souvenirs we'd picked up along the way: Chris' cactus bin from the salt flats; my huge leather satchel from La Paz; seven alpacas worth of wool for mum's knitting addiction; books I'd read on my journey and couldn't bare to part with; ten tonnes of dvds from Bolivia; various bottles of booze we wanted to bring home; hiking boots; clothes and all the rest of it. It was ridiculous. To add to this sea of souvenirs and luggage, Chris had insisted on buying two crates of bear from the mainland 'in case it's not available on the island'. For god's sake. How on earth we carried all of this remains a mystery to this day!

View from our dorm room at Che Legarto - I definitely recommend this place.

The room we had in Paraty had barely been big enough for the two of us but when we'd brought our luggage in there had been no floor space left whatsoever. We had decided to head for the trusty Che Lagarto hostel in Ilha Grande which, luckily had large dorm rooms with a lot more floor space for all our stuff. Unluckily, it was a fifteen minute walk along the beach (including two mini river crossings!) from the jetty we'd been dropped at. It was more than our backs could take and it took us so long to make it to the hostel. We arrived there to find the hostel in pitch darkness in the middle of a day-long power cut that was apparently island-wide. All we wanted at this stage was a warm bath to soothe our broken backs, a cold beer and a lot of meat. The lady at reception warned us to only eat in a restaurant that had a generator because otherwise the meat would have been warmed all day - good advice which we took. After sharing a caipirihna or two with our new teacher friends Danielle and Jess, we headed to an all-you-can-eat meat bbq. Amazing. We certainly needed that long walk back along the beach to walk it off.

The next day we headed out on a boat to one of the island's more popular beaches. It was a nice walk to and from the beach through the jungle. That night there was a great live band playing at the jetty by our hostel so it was our first proper Brazilian night out (well, a night out in Brazil with non-Brazilians I suppose) and the effects were quite messy as we danced the night away with Danielle and Jess and copious amounts of cachaca! The following day we were certainly worse for ware and it was lucky that the hostel has an amazing veranda because we spent much of the day there before heading to our famous all you can eat meat bbq again with the girls. We had lots of fun in Ilha Grande and, if Brazil weren't so costly and our time weren't about to run out in just a few days, we could have stayed a looooong time there relaxing.

Chris > It kind of brings back the adventurous kid in you, and for good reason. Ilha Grande was once the place of natives, smugglers and pirates, while today only the monkey residents cause trouble on the jungle island.

I'll never forget the palava we had trying to get back to the mainland in order to make our way up to our final destination - Rio. Of course there weren't enough spaces in the mini-bus and what ensued was a typical Latin American drama which involved trying to fit us all in with our many bags on top of us before tying everything to the roof... gosh - too much drama to really explain but such a typical example of the disorganisation involved sometimes with arranging transfers to and from places. We got there in the end though - and so followed the very last chapter of our adventure.

The Caipirinha

One of Brazil's greatest gifts to the world is the Caipirinhia, along with passionate music and football magic.

What could be simpler than the Caipirinhia? Cachaça, lime, sugar and ice. The combination is nothing but delicious. It's also available everywhere in Brazil. However due to the divine smooth taste, there is a risk of loosing count how many you have had. The other problem is that most places use the cheapest brands of cachaca that can hit you hard the next day when all you want to do is enjoy a day in the sun out on the beach.

From here on the deck hammock overlooking the beach, feet in the air, and probably as good a place appreciate the Caipirinha. Few beach drinks go down sweeter. - Photo courtesy of Flickr

Cachaça means firewater in Portuguese and fuels passion in Brazil. It is distilled after being extracted from crushed sugarcane. The harvesting of sugarcane originated from when the colonial Portuguese put the local slaves to work. The whiskey-sipping middle and upper classes have long looked down on cachaça as a drink for the poor. Accordingly, the name Caipirinha means poor little peasant girl.

A Caipirinha recipe from Brazil's Beaches

- Cachaca

- Limes

- 1 1/2 Tbsp Sugar

- Crushed Ice

> Quarter the limes into small triangular wedges. Mash them together with a wooden pestle in the serving glass, then fill it with crushed ice to the brim. Add the cachaca and shake or stir vigoruosly.

An unhealthy amount of Brazilian feasts

Time was short to try all Brazil had to offer us on our plate. Luckily it was not hard to find the foods on my hitlist.

Haddock Lobo serving up Pao de Queijo - often rated the best in Sao Paulo and all of Brazil.

With Feijão out of the way in Sao Paulo, the country's food mecca, we could explore beyond ethnic cuisine and boiled black beans with pork. Steph and I proceeded swiftly to the Churrascaria where charcoal grilled meats come in endless varieties.

Picanha – Lumps of sirloin steak covered in rock salt and cooked high over a barbecue to perfection. They were brought out on huge spits to our table, even during the multiple power outages.

The Churrascaria - I had learned that the picanha cut of beef is the most celebrated in the land – homework pays off sometime. The carne do sol was equally tasty with it's surface covered in flavoured salt. The table is covered in side dishes. The grillmasters return as soon as there is space on your plate to offer sausages, steak, chicken until you are almost dizzy with delight. Some good advice I was also given from a friend was to refuse the early cuts of beef until they bring the good stuff. Dan also advised to go either late for lunch or early for dinner, so as to avoid being knocked out into bed by a beef-enduced coma.

Like in Argentina, the grillmasters here have their techniques down to a science.

Chips? Obvious. Rice, potatoes? Pass. I was saving most of my room for gloreous meat not sides. However there was one curiousity. Then there was Farofa. The owner told me it is a kind of 'stuffing' that's more used as a topping or garnish from what I could see. It's an undoubtably tasty breadcrumb-like topping mixture of corn flour, bits of bacon and onion.

STREET FOOD

Acai – This fruit is special. Elsewhere in the world açaí (a berry-like fruit) is criminally expensive and normally exists as a powder mix or concentrate. In Brazil, it can be found on every corner, available as an ice cream snack (or juice and smoothie).

Topped with a dizzying aray of sweet brown sugary garnishes. Brazillians put sugar on everything, and sometimes use a liquid sweetner that comes in what looks like a dish liquid bottle on the coffee counter.

One new-best-friend Brazillian man at the corner juice shop advised me to try the smoothie version the way he liked it best (blended up with granola, bananas and crushed ice). It was equally delicious, filling and maybe even healthy? Depends how much sugar they put in, I suppose.

Pao de Queijo - famous cheese bread and the classic accompaniment to the famously Cafezinho puro – hot and strong coffee by the glass. These two just go so well together as a pit stop on any street. I can't honestly say where the bread ends and the cheese begins in these beautiful little savory morcels.

Pastéis - While waiting at bus stops and the like I tried the pastels (battered and fried pastries) with meat, cheese or shredded chicken filling (which sometimes seems to be the only method of serving chicken here).

Empenadas – Finally I must meniton the very unhealhily fried Brazillian version of the Empenada. They can be bought on the street dirt cheap but can also be bought in restaurants. We've tried beef, veg, etc elsewhere. In Paraty I found them especially good with catupiry (a Brazillian cream cheese), which is sealed inside the coxinha next to the potato. Our extreemely tourist-patient driver from Isla Grande encouraged me to try one at a pit stop along the side of the road. It was salty and delicious as the greasy texture promised. One of these is enough to keep hunger at bay for a few hours from the service station all the way up to Rio.

Paraty

Paraty

Chris and I had known to expect huge expense when we arrived in Brazil - in fact, this had been one of the main reasons we had cut our time here short; our remaining budget just wouldn't have carried us through a month here. However, despite so many travellers having warned us of the excessive costs we could expect, it didn't stop our shock at just how much we were spending on mediocre accommodation. The trusty website "HostelBookers.com" that we had used throughout our trip revealed still more expensive prices in the cities of Sao Paulo and Rio when we planned our stay.

We had hoped that such costs would be reduced when outside these world famous, exciting cities and that we would have a greater chance on our mission for cheap accommodation in the cobble-streeted town of Paraty around three - five hours drive away from Sao Paulo: our journey inevitably fell into the longer, five hour category. Following two unnecessary half hour stops a Brazilian passenger on our bus became very ill so we had an additional emergency stop in the middle of the rainforest at a tiny hospital - crazy!

Imagine our surprise when we realised our arrival in Paraty had coincided with their annual international literary festival which was in its seventh succesful year. For a book geek like me, this was just too exciting. Especially when we saw the programme of speakers was full of huge names like Salmon Rushdie, Isabel Allende and Terry Eagleton. Wow. While this obviously didn't help our chances of finding budget accommodation (in fact, this whole town had been booked out months, if not a whole year, in advance) we were both excited to be here during such an important festival. Luckily for us a couple of German girls had converted an old farm into a hostel very cheaply - it was around a 20 minute walk from the town centre and only offered triple-decker bunk beds but suited us just fine on our budget.

Chris: Paraty was once squarely on the gold rush route as the main port where the gold was then shipped off to Portugal in the 18th century. It was also the main hub of the cachaca trail into the jungle from here. When these two booms were to Rio and elsewhere then began it's deep freeze in time. Today it is preserved as wholely colonial, cobbled and entirely stuck in time.

The town was alive and buzzing with literary types. Something of a shock to the system for those of us who had been backpacking for the last 352 days. The cobbled streets and old, colonial buildings would have taken us right back to Colonia de Sacremento in Uruguay except for the fact that there was so much atmosphere here we could never have mistaken this town for it's silent and sleepy sister across the border. After dumping our bags in the tiny room that was supposed to have enough space for six backpackers and their stuff yet whose floorspace wasn't even large enough for our bags alone, we headed into this wonderful town and immediately checked out the schedule. As luck would have it, Isabel Allende was speaking at that very moment and we were able to sit and watch her on the big screens as she was interviewed. What an atmosphere. Everywhere we walked there was some kind of stall with a different kind of bookish theme:

There were children's books hanging from trees the next day outside the children's reading tent...

After wandering around the huge book shop which sold mainly books and novels written by those authors and critics attending the conference, Chris and I headed for our first caipirinha of the night outside one of the many bars whose tables spilled out onto the cobbled street so we could all listen to the music being played by the barber shop band. (It was then that Chris revealed he'd always thought my dad had been in a barber shop band and was convinced that I or someone else had told him this years ago - the image of this kept me giggling all night!). Strolling around through throngs of middle-aged people who were here for the festival as well as the teenagers of the town excited that their town was on the world map (in the literary world at least), we of course had one of our typical hour-long moments of being unable to decide on a place to eat. This time however, it didn't really matter. There was such a great atmosphere and we could easily procrastinate our decision making by going for caipirinha after caipirinha!

Chris: With 65 islands and 300+ beaches at your doorstep, what a laid back contrast this was to the big city.

The following day, I strolled into town to catch Salmon Rushdie speak - unfortunately for me, his interview shown on the big screens was dubbed in Portuguese. It's fair enough, really, just a little disappointing for the anglophones like me. I rushed back so Chris and I could take a bus out to Trinidad beach which we both agreed deserves a place on our 'Top Ten Beaches of the trip" list. Sipping yet another caipirinha in the dazzling sunlight we just couldn't believe we'd be back home in Europe in just one week.

We really wished our budget (both time and money-wise) could have stretched far enough to spend more time in this town so we could have explored more of it's nearby beaches. What luck though to have stumbled upon an international literary festival!