Scratching the Surface

Jan. 6-8

Finally some sunny weather! We spent three days in Paraty, which is a small beach town about 4 hours from Rio. Back in the day they used to bring gold to Paraty to put on ships to send back to Portugal. We were initially underwhelmed by Paraty...the cobblestone streets were more like multi-sized rocks strewn about (not good for a clumsy girl wearing flip flops), the beach in this so-called ¨beach paradise¨ was dirty with brown water lapping the shores and every pousada (guest house) we stopped at was expensive. However, we later learned that sometimes you just have to scratch the surface before you find out what a place is really like.

Since we didn't have a reservation our first order of business was to find a place to stay. After walking around with our heavy backpacks we finally found a quirky hotel that was nice but pricey. We checked in for one night and planned to look around that evening for a better spot. Hoping to find something near the beach we headed in that direction. That's when we learned the beach in Paraty proper was a little on the nasty side. There was a river through the city nearby which seems to be a bad sign at the beaches in Brazil...some places don't have much in the way of sewage systems, if you catch my drift. After a few hours of roaming (tripping my way through) the town we found a cute little pousada on a quiet road . We liked the guy at the front desk (and it was half the price of the hotel). He seemed cool...even though our Portuguese is limited to a few words and he didn't speak a lick of English. Sometimes you just know.

That night as we walked to dinner we could tell that Paraty was a different place at night. The streets come alive with people selling food and performers doing marionette shows. A lot of the restaurants have live music and it pours out onto the street. You really start to notice how pretty the old colonial buildings are. Each building is painted white and they all have different color trim - blue, red, purple, etc. Maybe this Paraty place isn't so bad.... The deciding factor was Margarida's. It all goes back to the sun-dried tomatoes. For some reason they are better in Brazil than anywhere else I have ever had them. I was craving them. Margarida's had the perfect salad on the menu. We got a table and the atmosphere was amazing...local live music, cool building, awesome lighting. It was just fantastic (and the food was incredible...best darn sun-dried tomatoes ever!) and was a really nice end to the day. We looked at our watches at 9:44pm and thought about how lucky we were...it was 5:44pm in Austin and we very easily could have been pounding away at Dell instead of hanging out at the beach in Brazil. Sometimes you just have to make things happen...

The following day we took an open air jeep tour to a beach about 30 minutes from Paraty and then some waterfalls. The roads through the mountains were incredible - so steep, curvy and unforgiving. The scenery is absolutely amazing. We found out that where there is gold there are pirates. Our first stop was in a town called Trinidade, which was a pirate's refuge and also a really beautiful (clean!) beach. We spent a couple hours there, had lunch and then headed north to take in some waterfalls. The highlight of the afternoon was definitely when Matt rode the waterfall. The pictures tell the story best. I was too chicken to do it but he had so much fun he had to go twice.

We had dinner at Margarida's again. I think there is a rule against this but the food was so damn good we had to go back. We even sat at the same table. Our waitress recognized us and laughed. It was so embarassing. The food was even better the second night. We talked about coming back again but decided we had to draw the line at two visits. Dessert was at an ice cream bar where you scoop your own, add toppings and then pay by weight. I think this was Matt's favorite place in Paraty.

On Sunday we took a boat trip on a schooner. This is a really popular thing to do and a friend of ours had recommended that we just head to the dock in the morning and pick out a boat rather than book ahead. This was excellent advice (thanks, Marcia!) as we were able to procure a sweet spot on a boat that held 90 but only had about 20 on-board. Everyone had cushions and pillows to fully recline on. As the schooners that had ads at the hotels pulled out we could see that they were jam-packed full of people with standing room only. Score! We motored to our first stop and were amazed at the natural beauty of Brazil. We were even happier when we stopped at a pristine beach, jumped in and were able to frolic around for almost an hour. We had three more stops that day and had more of the same experiences. We were really pleased to see that the Brazilians (and tourists) were taking care of these natural resources. We had been disappointed on a similar boat trip in Thailand where there was so much garbage and gasoline in the water we didn't want to get in. The boat trip was fun and relaxing and a great last day in Paraty. We were sad to go.