Although we were only in São Paulo airport and bus terminal, it is impressive. This is where much of Brazil's money is. It's impossible to count the number of huge sky scrapers across the city, some even with helicopter landing pads - with a population of 19 million, those who can make use of helicopters where possible can. The vast majority who can't creep along in traffic.
We needed to get from the airport to the bus station. We didn't take a helicopter this time so joined the rush hour traffic for a slow tour of the city. Over an hour worth of transfer, but this gave us some time to read up about a little on what São Paulo had to offer - pretty much the best of everything for a large city.
At the bus station, we learnt we'd missed the last but to Paraty. Instead of spending the night near the bus station, Mands organised for a bus to the small beach town of the Flintstone sounding Ubatuba. We'd arrive at midnight, so booked accommodation from an Internet cafe. Big discount for the booking, looked good and close to the bus station - perfect. All booked, but the confirmation address and the website used for the booking (booking.com) had completely different locations mapped, with the latest address a few km's from the bus station. Arriving at a small beach town at that time and trying to get to the hotel was going to be interesting.
The bus transfer was 2 hours and noticed people asking the bus driver to stop alomg the route for them to get off, before the end of the journey. I spoke to the driver, mentioned where we were staying and a couple of minutes later, we stopped at the door of Hotel Navada! Great timing!
The reception man was on his back watching a movie on his laptop when we arrived. He seemed overly excited to check us in and show us our room. He proudly opened up the curtains of our room - we were on a side facing room that opened on an empty car park, so not too sure what the fuss was about.
My Portuguese is bad, super bad. I tried to explain the next morning that we want to catch the bus to town so we can go to Paraty. I could see a bus stop, but for whatever reason we were directed to the beach. We followed this anyway and the holiday houses made way to a picturesque beach with glassy water. Maybe he was showing off what his beach had to offer, but we were still going to head on to Paraty. We headed back to catch a local bus to town so we could take the final transfer.
We waited and waited and no busses came. Finally with nerves a little frayed, a bus arrived. It ended up that we were a good 20 minutes outside of the town!
The coast is something to behold. Mountain ranges run along the coastline, covered in lush green trees and plants. The sea extends as far as the eye can see with deep blue shining out. Many islands are off the main land. They protrude out of the ocean, some small others large enough for a few towns. We'd be staying one one, Ilha Grande, in a couple of days.
We didn't know what stop we were to get off and didn't know if we'd perhaps missed the stop as we'd been travelling a while. We asked a lady where we'd get the bus to Paraty and she was't sure, but news spread and soon there were 5 people on board trying to help. We'd red about Brazilians grouping together to make a plan, and now we'd got to see it first hand. After much discussion, a boy said he was going there so could help us.
Finally we were able to catch the final bus on our trip to Paraty, the scenic colourful town with cobble stone roads that modernisation forgot.
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