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So, we made it to Florianopolis, again without a hitch... first long bus ride! 14 hours in total, it pretty much flew by. Some Aussie tried to scare us before we got on about being robbed and it being really unsafe. I don´t think any of us felt that way afterwards, it was smooth, well organised etc etc.
When we arrived it was already around 30 degrees at 9 in the morning, so we quickly found a HSBC (the first thing we do, EVERYWHERE we go! Carly gets free withdrawals!) and jmped on the bus to Barra da Lagoa, our home for the next three nights! The buses in Brazil were quite irritating... they have turnstils a third of the way in and unless your stick thin it´s hard to get through them. The locals get a good laugh everytime, with 60 litres on the back, a sleeping bag hanging off and 20 litres on our fronts we get stuck almost everytime! The bus drivers solution is to just push the turnstile around an force us thorugh! (Thank god we haven´t seen these in Argentina yet!)
On our arrival we wondered until we found our homestay. A little two story, turqouise house set into the hills of the national park. It was really nice... we think we were one of the first guests as there are no reviews about it anywhere. It was really clean, well equipped and... we had it to ourselfs! So we were basically paying 25 quid between us for our own apartment!
After unpacking and suncreaming up we headed straight to the beach, Praia Mole. It was beautiful! Big granite rocks sculpted by the sea at each end of the beach like you see in the Seychelles. And waves! Alex and Dave jumped straight in and played like kids for about an hour and a half... big mistake! We came out lobsterfied =s! And spent the next couple of days inside and in tshirts because of it!
There isn´t much more to say about the next day.. we were all so red, even Carly got a little burnt after calling us all white boys! We just spent the day playing cards and researching future destinations.
The next day, we felt that half a bottle of moisturiser and a fresh layer of suncream meant we could slowly venture out into the sun again! Alex and Carly headed off to try and book bus tickets to Montevideo whilst Dave and Dan went in search of Sandboarding. Once we had both completed out tasks, we had to barter some sandboard to play on. Initially the guy wanted 28 quid for 1 board for 1 hour! Bloody expensive... so we worked our magic and got him down to 12 quid for 2 boards for 2 hours! And so we hit the sandy slopes. Carly, seen as she has had snowboarding experience started us off... with a tumble =p! We all looked a bit nervous but donned our socks (the sand was HOT!) and made our first attempts with fairly good sucess... we contiuned on for an hour or so, hitting slightly bigger slopes everytime. None of us fancied the final HUGE slope though, so we did it sitting down! Was still awesome fun! After this we deperately needed a swim to shed the layer of sand and suncream paste that had been created! Again, lots of waves to play in. Once clean, we headed to the bar for an ice cold beer... nice end to a fun afternoon. The evening was pretty AWESOME too! The lady who ran the hostel had told us there was a nice walk over to another beach and that they were having some sort of dancing. Anyway, one of her friends took us over there and when we arrived there were about 100 people dancing and 20-30 playing drums and singing! It was so cool, our first proper travelling experience! We watched for a while before Alex and Dave attempted to try their hand at a bit of African dancing, in celebration of the Godess of the Sea! They made it look easy, naturally, as you will se when we upload the videos! We ended with a stroll back to the hostel, reminising over the day and how we had enjoyed Florianopolis!
Next morning we pakced up, headed towards the turtle sanctuary for a quick peek before we left. It was cool, lots of big turtles being bred to be released into the ocean. The whole project releases 900,000 turles a year back into the ocean, which pleased Alex as he loves them so! It was good to see a good cause in the local area =)
We headed through the turnstiles for the final time, picked up some salgados (deep fried meaty treats!) and an ice cream for the coach and settled down for the next 20 hours! A new country awaits us, Montevideo, Uruguay here we come!
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