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So it was the morning after the storm that was RIO! We were off to Ilha Grande which means Big Island in Portuguese and it has some of the best beaches in Brazil. The previous night i had overheard an English girl Gabriella talking to the hostel staff about the best way of getting to Ilha Grande and that it was her and her friend Harry who would be travelling. I then told her me and Paul were going and maybe they would want to chip in on hiring a car which is what me and Paul had planned on doing anyway.(Its worth noting here that i had done no research on hiring a car in Brazil and just assumed it would be a viable option.) She agreed, and that morning me and Paul set off to find a car. It became apparent after the first few places that this was not as cheap as we had first thought. Place after place and trying many different options we had to face the grim reality that it wasn't going to happen. The price doubled if you wanted to hire the car in Rio but leave it in Sao Paulo. We had now wasted about 2 hours with our eager passengers originally having made plans to leave at 6am and it was now 1130 :-S. We really didn't want to go back with our tails between our legs and break the news that we had just cost them half a day on Ilha Grande but we had no option. We went back and told them and they didn't seem too fussed but deep inside they must have been livid. These guys only had a week or so left, every hour was precious. We ended up having to go for the bus and about 6 hours later we were at the port to sail out to Ilha Grande. Harry had been to Ilha Grande before and knew of an unofficial hostel that is not in any guide and was really cheap. Now i know what your thinking, sounds a little like the hostel from the movie Hostel. Some place off the grid where no one can hear you scream but it was nothing of the sort. It was basically just a guys house who had decided to put some bunks in a couple rooms and hire them out. It We headed out for a meal that night and got to bed early. Tomorrow we were off to try our hand at surfing again!
When we got up we hadn't realised that the beach we wanted to go to was a 3 hour trek. After fannying about in the morning, time was a ticking and 3 hours there then 3 hours back just wasn't an option. After about an hour we hit a small beach where a guy was offering a boat service to the other beach we were heading to. It only took about 15 minutes so me and Paul went for this. The other two decided to trek on. This made no sense to me as by the time they got there it would be time to come home. We got to the beach and the waves were a little bigger than anticiapted. These things were at least 8 ft, defo not the kind of waves we should have been on but we had went all that way now so we we thought, "What would Bodie or Warchild or Jonny Utah do?" COWABUNGA! Turns out it was much like before. Tumbling around for the majority of the time and catching the odd wave, this surfing malarky is seriously hard to get a grip of. We returned back that night and since we had wasted our first day getting to Ilha Grande it meant we'd now be leaving the following day. We decided to head out to a local hostel where a Reggae band were playing and it was here that it came to light that i had more in common with Harry than i first thought. Both him and Gabriella were....well....for lack of a better word...posh! They were both privately schooled and we were... well...for lack of a better word....scum haha. Nah they never made us feel like that or thought they were better or anything like that, in fact Gabriella had bigger balls than all of us. She had just finished doing voluntary work with Pumas! ( Yes the big cats not the trainers) It was in the middle of the jungle in Bolivia and it was for Pumas that needed rehabilitating into the wild. She would take them walks on leashes, feed them, care for them, play with them :-O....defo not for me! She told us how she had been playing with one and it gave her a "playful" bite pfffftt. Safe to say i would have been s***ting myself. A playful bite off one of these meant that it actually broke the skin and she had teeth marks on her arm, f***ing nutcase. She also told us about how one guy really wanted a picture of a Puma jumping on him, i know, the words f***ING IDIOT! springs to mind. So he taunted it until it jumped on him and started attacking him, really should have thought this through eh pal. Not surprisingly he got told to pack his stuff after that. Anyways where was I?.... yes the two of them were posh but by no means up themselves, they were sound, but it turned out Harry was a master at the piano. That was it for me he had opened up the flood gates to a series of questions! He humoured me for quite some time and was actually pretty interested in passing on his knowledge. On top of that he said his ultimate goal would be to become a movie score composer :-O was this guy for real? Does he know i am Hans Zimmer No1 fan. This then led on to lengthy discussions about Hans Zimmer, John Williams, Trevor Rabin, Marc Mancina, Danny Elfman all the greatest movie composers. I bet Harry never thought he be having these kind of conversations with the likes of me, just shows you, never judge a book.
That night along with people from the other hostel we all headed down the beach where Harry broke out his guitar and was also amazing on it, f***ing show off :-P. He could actually sit and play just about anything that was shouted out to him and he hadn't been long playing, he was still learning apparently! I can only imagine what he is like on the piano! The next day we said our goodbyes to Harry and Gabriella and headed back to the mainland where we would be moving on to Sao Paolo for the weekend.....
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