Paraty is a sweet little town that we were all very happy to see after spending over 24 hours on two buses and a couple of riveting hours delayed at Sao Paulo bus terminal.
Rocks from Portugal were used to lay the roads in the oldest areas of town and they’re a hoot to negotiate when you’ve been on the caipirinhas again. The rocks were used as ballast on ships sailing from Portugal and were swapped for all the gold they stole from Brazil. Not a bad trade huh?
Paraty 
Paraty Harbour 
Paraty 
Paraty cobblestone roads
And since a shipload of gold is appealing to the opportunistic types, Paraty was frequently a pirate’s favourite destination. That’s why none of the roads are straight…so guards could hide around corners and knock off the pirates before they knocked off the bounty. Ironically…or is it similarly…our attempts to legally appropriate bounty in the form of Brazilian reals from an ATM were thwarted at every turn.
We scraped off the eau du night-bus with a seafood dinner, a walk around the town and a couple of cocktails in disposable cups, whizzed up by a gnarled-possibly-ex-surfer who had clearly been drinking his profits. We headed to the beach and met up with some of the groovers from a hostel near Tomás’s old stomping ground. They rustled up some chipboard shelving that hopefully was no longer needed and some palm fronds, threw a match at it and walked away so we just had to imagine that we were sitting around a roaring bonfire…because that’s what you want when you can’t remember the last time you weren’t wiping sweat off your sweat.
Blazing sunshine blessed us for our caipirinha boat ride the following day which dangerously gave away unlimited caipirinhas, yet charged for beer…because nothing could go wrong with that! We staked out our zone on the roof and bathed in sun cream before hitting the bar. The views stretched forever over verdant green islands lapped by blue water on superb gold sand. We stopped a few times to snorkel, swim and refresh and have lunch…and of course another caipirinha 😉 Surely the truest version of a booze cruise that ever there was.
I used my best charades, broken Portuguese and butchered Spanish to get “talking” to Renato and his family from Sao Paulo on our way back to the port. In the end we somehow swapped my best cap for his black bandana and our thongs…cachaça es el diablo! On the upside he’s found me on Facebook so I’m making new friends with similar fashion tastes. Bonus.
The oppressive heat flogged us that night so before trying in vain to get some sleep in our dungeon of a room we hit the pool and a couple of beers to really round out a great day. As has become a tradition on this tour, we assembled the next morning with about an hour’s sleep, fogs for brains, reliable-wifi withdrawals kicking in and boarded the bus to start our journey to Ilha Grande, a place pirates and players go to hide.