Striking gold on the Costa Verde

  Paraty, Brazil
Sunday, March 4, 2007

The bus from Rio to Paraty turned out to be very luxurious; after our bad experience before (22 hours, no air-con, stinking loos etc...) we were pleased, but it was a shame we were only travelling 300kms down the Costa Verde as the seats were really quite comfortable. We arrived not long after dark and walked the short distance from the bus station to our guest house. Paraty is a beautiful town with cobbled streets and whitewashed old colonial style houses. We'd been very organised for us and booked a place to stay on the main square, we'd even asked for a room overlooking the Placa as recommended in our book.

07 Name of our great hotel

On the walk from the station, we both noticed how busy the town was, we knew it was a tourist draw, but the lanes were quite crowded. We negotiated our way among them and arrived at our lovely B&B. We were show our room and as Jim went to register I opened the wooden shutters to see a brass band marching past. It wasn't our usual welcome, but we really enjoyed watching them stomp under our window.

06 Paraty free concert

We ventured out to find some food and discovered fire jugglers and all sorts of street performers. We walked around looking for a nice restaurant (there were lots to chose from) and finally settled on one near our place. Before we went in we spent a couple of minutes staring at the moon, we hadn't realised there was going to be an eclipse, but we had a perfect view of it.

09 View from our window

Dinner was gorgeous and we enjoyed a bottle of wine before setting off for a brief lap of the square before bed. What we didn't count on was coming across a large stage (and even larger sound system) just the other side of the plaza. We couldn't see it from our room because of the trees, but this explained why all these people were here. Our Portuguese hasn't come on as quickly as we'd have liked, but even we could decipher the banner that read "Paraty celebrates 340 years of political emancipation". Quite what this meant we don't know, but it seemed like an excuse for a big party. Actually a big five day party if the dates on the banner were anything to go by.

The band started up and the music was so infectious we had to stay and dance. I imagine any other country in the world where we discovered a big rowdy party going on outside our bedroom window after we'd had a massive night the previous evening would be enough to have us both grumbling, but here we just joined in. It's great to be in a country where randomly dancing in public isn't frowned upon!

01 Paraty street

We were both dead on our feet and so headed to bed at gone midnight. It was actually quite cool listening to the 17 piece band (drumming was their speciality) from our room, it probably helped that we were both so tired it didn't keep us awake. Jim reckons they kept going until about 3am.

03 Paraty cafe

The following day we had breakfast in our guesthouse. It was served out the back in an old flagstoned room that opened onto a small courtyard with flowering banana plants and humming birds in it. After we'd eaten we headed off to walk the short distance to the bus station (vehicles are banned in the historic centre of town) to find out about onward transport to Foz do Iguaçu. There were no direct buses - not really surprising as it's a very long way, so we booked one the following day to Sao Paulo and found a cheap(ish) flight from there.

08 Paraty

The rest of the day was spent dodging the heat - it was scorching. We wandered around the few streets of the old town and had lunch in a lovely art café. Paraty made it's wealth when it became a vital staging post on the gold route from the mining area of Minas Gerais - it was the chief port for export of the stuff in 17th century and a coffee-exporting on in the 19th century. The whole of the historic centre has been declared a national historic monument and we didn't feel as if we needed to do any specific sightseeing to benefit from its charms.

05 Paraty

It was so hot we went back to our room to escape the sun and ended up having an impromptu siesta. When we got upit was 4 o'clock the temperature had dropped so we walked down to the water and round the corner and joined the locals on the small sandy beach for a quick dip. The town looked lovely in the fading light - it looked especially picturesque as many of the cobbled streets are flooded at high tide in order to wash them - an ingenious alternative to road sweepers.

We had another lovely dinner in a deserted restaurant and listened to a bit of live jazz on the square before turning in. We'd really enjoyed our brief stay in Paraty, it'd provided a big contrast to Rio and a place to recharge our batteries (if not our finances with all this wining and dining!) before carrying onto Sao Paulo.