Profile
Blog
Photos
Videos
After 5 days in Itacare it was time to skip down the coast to Arraial D'Ajuda, a relaxed seaside village half way to Rio. A coach journey that should take 5 hours took 10. The Brazilians love stopping very frequently and in the most random places (I mean really random, imagine a remote hut in the jungle).
But just to make the journey a little longer ... 3 hours in (Alice comatosed) everyone was ordered off the bus. Us, with our fluent Portuguese didn't understand a word of what was going on. We got off to find the police with machine guns lining up the male passengers (women separated) with their hands on their heads. It was like something out of a WW2 movie. I joined the queue of men against the bus and when it was my time to be searched my fluent Portugese let me down again. The policeman wanted to pat me down and ordered me to spread my legs, me in my half-awake state still didn't understand. What proceeded was some kind of Macarena pat down, I won't lie, it was weird. Alice has been having good laughs about it. They searched all the bags, didn't seem to find anything and we were back on our way an hour later.
Bus journey aside, we had a bit of a mare trying to find our accommodation. The taxi driver took us to be wrong place then started trying to find places for us to stay and charged us a lot of money for it. So after leaving on the pretence of a 6 hour journey, 12 hours later we arrived at our idyllic accommodation.
We booked a place through airbnb run by a Dutch couple. It had a pool and was only 5 minutes from the beach. Ironically an Australian and Kiwi couple Ben and Nicola were staying there, who'd been on the same bus but arrived an hour earlier thanks to not having a crazy taxi driver. We only spent 2 nights there, both days relaxing by the beach and we even managed to get a reasonable priced wine (a rarity in Brazil, role on Argentina) for a wine and cheese night with Ben and Nicola. Ideally we would've have stayed longer as there are small colonial villages along the coast but we still had several miles to go to get to Rio. Next stop was as planned Buzios!
- comments
Laura Oh my gosh! What a journey! Glad you found some reasonably priced wine and had a couple of relaxing days.xxx
Austin Exciting times- your Mum had a heart attack Alice when she read the first few lines...... all ended well though- onwards!
Janet/Mum Didn't tell me any of this Rory! Sounds like a typical journey to me. Glad you both survived it. It just adds to the holiday memories. Can't wait to read about your time in Rio