The Big Island

Well, what can i say of the adventures since last post. After staying in Diego´s loft, we ended up being booked in at TWO more hostels consecutively that had over booked us and ended up staying at two other random Brazilian houses (one a single mum with the cutest 3 year old girl called Maria ever) and once with a man who rented out rooms in his house. Which is amazing as this actually saved us money and gave for some interesting experiences. We have after a lot of searching managed to book places for the next week, so hopefully this wont happen again, but who knows. In all of these places they had lists with our names on, but then just said sorry your not coming in :(

This also led to Xss and I´s lowest day when we spent over 4 hours on the Internet and making phone calls to try and find places for next week. It seems to take forever, and be impossible to find places even though you know that the whole of Rio is not booked out for one Friday night! It seems more effective to just turn up at the small towns and then look around, but this is simply not possible in Lima or Santiago. Luckily this has passed and after a whole day without this faff, we are back on track and excited about going to Peru, via Chile.

We have enjoyed a week now on Ilha Grande, near Rio, as a last goodbye to Brazil. We were intending to go to Chile quicker as (if you've seen the pictures of Morro de Sao Paulo) we didn't think that this island would be able to compete.


However it has managed to. Despite being bigger its infrastructure is terrible and it is very hard to get around, but this is also a bonus as the island is one big nature reserve with wonderful mountains and forests as back drops for the beaches. Unfortunately it has rained quite a lot, and we spent the 4 hours of sunshine today walking to and from the beach in the rainforest, with a 2 hour break on the beach which was cold and gloomy. Really, it takes 2 hours to walk to the beaches, so we are now fit, but fed up with the effort too.

The view from our walk on the way there, note the sunshine making us sweat.

The gloomy weather on the way home.