Brazil part 1

Morro de São Paulo

General Impressions

This doesn’t have to do with general impressions but is about how we got to Brazil. The flight to Brazil was the longest flight yet: 10 hours 30 minutes. I watched 4 movies and 3 episodes of my favorite tv show. I also did school work and lots of starring into space. Ok, Morro de São Paulo is a little beach town off the coast of Brazil. To get here from the nearest airport you had to do an assortment of transportation, like this: taxi, ferry, bus, boat. Let me tell you, it’s not that easy. The ferry was blazing hot, and once it was getting very bumpy and a baby couldn’t hold his cookies. When we got off the bus, someone told us it wasn’t the right stop but the bus driver said it was. We kept on going, following some people from the bus. We asked them for clarification if this was the way to the boat terminal. They all said no. There was one taxi driver there. It was our only option because the bus was already driving down the road. We got in the car. The seats were torn and the paint on the taxi was coming off. The taxi driver accelerated and sped us down to the terminal at what felt like 100 miles per hour. Once we got there, we were stuffed into a speedboat. I had never been on a speed boat but when we started it was the best time ever! We finally reached Morro de São Paulo.

Morro de São Paulo was so awesome. It’s a very small town but I wouldn’t have been more happy had it been larger. The water was a brilliant turquoise blue and was never cold. Every day we would walk or, for me, skip down to the beaches and have an awesome day. Yes, there were multiple beaches. In fact, there were five.

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First beach

First beach was not touched by us more than to walk across to get to second beach. It could have been cool, and we will never know, but it really just didn’t look as interesting as the other four beaches.

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Second beach

Second beach was the ultimate party beach and by far my favorite. People were always there partying, laughing and having fun. There were restaurants alongside that could provide needed shade and were a good place to get piña coladas and coconut water. Also, there were courts for a Brazilian sport called fut volei. It’s like volleyball but played with your feet.

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Third beach

Ughhh! Third beach was such a disappointment. We read on the internet that it was great for swimming. I don’t know why they wrote that, maybe just to give it something. However, it was simply a parking place for rusty boats and, in general, the beach wasn’t as clean as the others.

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Fourth beach

We never really stopped at fourth beach. We could tell it was popular but we were in a hurry to get to fifth beach. And at high tide 19/20ths of the beach was immersed in water. Although, we did get coconut water there once.

Fifth beach

I think my parents liked fifth beach the best. Fifth beach was very long so we never explored all of it. At low tide a tide pool formed and their were tons of different kinds of fish in the pool. They would swim around you and you could feed them. My mom and I once explored further down the tide pool, when we reached the end we realized there were two little silver fishes swimming around us. We started heading back. I turned around to look back, and to my surprise the same two fishes were following us! They followed us all the way back to the start. In some parts on fifth beach, the water temperature was blazing hot like a hot tub. There were also horses pulling carts, galloping across the beach. We had one spot on the beach that we particularly liked; there were no rocks and it was calm. The first day we arrived at fifth beach, we had sought out this spot and had stayed there until the fruit carts started packing up. Finally, we got out of the water. We started heading back to fourth beach, but like I had said in the paragraph above, at high tide 19/20ths of the beach was immersed in water, not calm water but big waves slamming and crashing into the bank. There was no other way to go. Razor wire was at the top of the bank. So, what did we do? We took off our flip flops and headed in. We could all touch, but when the waves came crashing down they came uncomfortably close to my head. We finally made it through. Next time, we left before the fruit carts started heading in.

More

The dominant language in Brazil is Portuguese. One time when we where at second beach a boy came up to me and motioned to the fut volie courts. I followed him and he got another one of his friends and we attempted to play. He could do a bicycle kick but I could not. When he went home I tried practicing the bicycle kick. Then I got my first injury of the trip. I hiper extended my elbow. I was doing a bicycle kick and landed on my arm. It was better though the next day.

The inside of the city was very small. There was music and food at night. We also had a delicious meal multiple times called moqueca. It was a fish stew that was limey, salty and delicious.