Florianópolis

Greetings from the south coast of Brazil.

Bloody hell it was a real mission getting here. The 15 hour bus journey turned into a 19 hour epic, followed by four local buses to the place we are now staying.

We turned up at the bus terminal in Foz and hour before the bus left for Florianópolis and booked our tickets out of there. We thought there would be loads of room on the bus given the lack of gringo´s in Foz. So you can imagine our surprise when we were told there were only two pairs of seats available, both of them near the toilet. I could sense a competition unfolding - could this surpass the last trip as the worst bus journey in Brazil?

Nevermind, we wanted to get out of Foz and didn´t want to spend another couple of hours there waiting for the next bus. So after a beer we went to the platform to board the bus. Joy oh joy. It was a beauty with fully reclining seats and TVs. There was even a huge photo down the side of the bus of a happy Brazilian family. It filled us with confidence. The toilet situation didn´t seem to matter. Things got even better when the bus left and there was only a handful of people on it. The seats would obviously fill up at different stops along the way.

So off we went. After a while we made our first stop and people began to board. Now, in Brazil and you travel with young children it seems to be the done thing to not buy a seat for them, but instead to travel the journey with them on your lap. This is obviously a money-saving idea but it did get ridiculous. When we started the trip the two seats in front of us were empty. After the first stop there was three people sittin there, a mother and her two yound kids. Fine. No problem. I was sure they would go to sleep. Well they eventually did when the mother decided that she was going to take over as many empty seats as was needed by her kids - fours seats!! Now I am rambling but get this. At one stop in the night this guy got on and walked to the back of the bus. He looked at his seat, then his ticket, then back at the seat. The little boy was fast asleep. No worries, surely the mother would do the right thing for this man who had bought that seat. NO! Nothing was said, he looked very confused, and then walked to the front of the bus to find an empty seat there. H and I were pretty shocked at this. I peered over the seat in front of me expecting to see the mother fast asleep with her daughter. She wasn´t there. Interesting. "Where is she?" H asked me. "I don´t know" I replied. "Hang on, she´s kopping off with the guy in front of her". Amazing, there she was getting jiggy with this random Brazilian bloke, whilst here two kids slept on four seats. Shocking. Bloody hell I sound like an old man here, but when you are on a very long bus journey in the middle of the night you tend to notice these things.

This got me thinking. Maybe these people who travel with children shouldn´t bother. Maybe they should get their relatives to come and see them. Controversial?

There was a full moon during the trip and I spent many minutes staring out over the landscape as we drove through Brazil. A lot of it looks like England. Whilst I was staring into space I also got thinking about the bus driver and how we all put our lives in the hands of this guy who likes to overtake a lot. Back in England I never travelled anywhere overnight so it is definitely something I am getting used to again as there will be plenty more on this trip. At least in Bolivia the bus drivers chew on cocao leaves to help them stay awake. I am sure they are fine here.

So night turned into day and just after sunrise we were stopped by the police for the second time on the trip. During the first stop they seemed to take interest in everyone else on the bus except H and I (we were the only gringo´s). During this second stop the first people they came to were H and myself. H was woken up by this and we both had to hand our bags over to them to look through. Now some of the police are quite corrupt over here so I was thankful that he didn´t produce a bag of cocaine or grass from somewhere (ie his pocket) and ask us why we had it in our bags (expecting us to pay a bribe so as to avoid being taken to the cop shop).

We evetually got to Florianópolis at about 11am, 19 hours after we had set off. We had stopped so many times, more often than not in the middle of nowhere, or in some hicksville town where noone got off the bus, and noone got on. As soon as we entered the bus station we got collared by some tourist guy who was trying to sell us accommodation in a place called Barra da Lagoa. Having done all this before, we were wise to the ruse, asked him for the cost (just to find out what the going rate was in this place) and then told him we were going to make our way to a place called Campeche that we liked the sound of. Half of Floripa sits on the island of Santa Catarina and it was the beaches that we were most interested in. So after 19 hours on a bus we made our way to the local bus terminal and eventually found a way to get to Campeche, which sits on one of the 42 beaches. This involved changing at another bus station. We were taken to Campeche on a bus full of school kids but it looked really quiet so we stayed on the bus and decided to go to Barra da Lagoa instead. This involved getting two more buses, again with lots of school kids. Eventually we turned up, and on the last bus we got chatting to a local who conveniently knew of a room to rent. We were both knackered by this point so decided to give it a look, and after we had done so we decided to go for it. It costs half of what we have been paying so far so we were pretty happy. And it is a 3 minute walk from a beach which goes on for miles and miles.

Bloody hell, I have written too much. If you are still with me then great. I´ll stop soon. To cut things short, we had our first cockroach incident last night. H saw one run out from the bottom of my backpack (where me stinky trainers are). She screamed. I beat the shit out of it with a shoe and threw it outside. I then commented on how amusing it would be if another run out as I looked at my trainers in more detail. Sure enough a baby cockroach ran out. H screamed. It ran onto the bed. H handed me a spatula (we have a kitchen in this place). I hit it, spilling cockroach guts onto the bedsheet. You can only begin to imagine the cockraoch paranoia that went on as we tried to sleep.

So that leads us to today. After a decent kip given last night´s incident, we spent the day on the beach. It was another scorcher, not a cloud in the sky, and I hired another surfboard. This was much bigger than the one I hired in Ilha Grande, and I had a much better time. I actually managed to stand up on a few waves for a decent length of time. I can´t wait to buy my own board in Sydney.

When we got back to the pousada I saw a cockroach eating the dead one I through out last night. I battered it with a broom.

Sorry again for rambling. I´ll post some pictures of this place in the next post. You may be surprised to read that I haven´t taken any since we arrived here.