By: Daan & Lara
While the Caipirinha taste was still in our mouths from the evening before, the group had an early (6 am) breakfast to get the bus to Paraty. The ride to the busstation was done by taxi. In order to fit the people and their luggage into 7 taxis it was necessary to play some kind of a TETRIS game. We had to wait for another hour at the bus station for the bus and travelled about 5 hours to Paraty. It is a small historic town. Once we arrived, we headed to the hostel. That turned out to be harder than expected. The streets of Paraty are covered with cobblestones which makes it very hard to walk with suitcases (even without suitcases it is very hard to walk on those streets).
The streets are built like that due to the high water level when the tide is high (see a picture with the streets on it). At the moment of high water, once every moon cycle, the streets of Paraty are filled with sea water. This the reason why the streets look and feel like river beddings.
After the rough hike to our hostel, we were warmly welcomed by the hostel manager. The hostel beds looked a lot more stable compared to our previous hostel. The only challenge we had was dividing the group over the rooms. So eventually, two guys ended up in the girls room.
The next activity was enjoying the beach of Paraty. But before this could happen, the girls faced another problem: a number locker of a suitcase could not be opened. After trying all the 1000 different possible combinations, the problem was solved by force. In the meantime the boys had time to play soccer in the patio of the hostel. When everyone had a place to sleep, an opened suitcase, a packed beach backpack and a suncream covered body we could start the walk to the beach.
Walking through Paraty felt much safer than walking in a big city like Rio. The people seemed very nice. The beach itself looked a bit different from Rio’s beaches. The sand was more coarse and the waves weren’t that high which makes it easier to actually swim in the see. Unfortunately, we only had 30 minutes of direct sun left but nobody cared about that. There were also a lot of dogs playing and fighting close to our group, that was a bit scary but we were able to compensate it with caipirinha. Some people went back to the hostel to freshen up before dinner. The other part of the group stayed at the beach and played cards.
The dinner was very nice, there was a bbq with plenty of meat and a free caipirinha for everyone. It was a nice first day in Paraty.
