After her memorable barbecue in Itaunas, Brazil, Iris and her overland group
make their way to Caravelas.
We moved on to a place called Caravelas which was right by the sea, a nice
little Pousada (hotel) as they call them in Brazil, with a little dip pool and
nice little rooms, with the sea just seconds away. It was here that I decided
to get rid of a load of outstanding postcards and so took a trip into the
little town to find a post office and send them off. I do hope they all arrived
safely because I was advised it might be better to wait until Salvador as rural
post offices are notoriously sleepy places, but when I got to the post office,
I found it very efficient and the staff of two extremely helpful, and I was
able to get directions to a stationery shop so that I could buy more envelopes
to post off the rest of my postcards at a later date.
I dare say recipients who receive the postcards initially noticed that the
envelopes were stuck down with sellotape in a very haphazard fashion! Well, it
was only after I had bought the envelopes and came to stick them down that I
realized there was no sticky on them! Apparently this is the norm in Brazil and
one has to either buy a glue stick to stick them down or use the facilities at
the post office! We have decided that this is probably because it is so humid
in Brazil that any sticky on the envelopes would soon deteriorate and stick
themselves down before they were used, if you see what I mean.
We stayed in Caravelas for just two nights and then moved on to Caraiva,
which is a small island just the most incredibly small boat journey from the
shore, it took the boatsmen all of two minutes, I would think to row us across.
And this again was an unspoilt place with no built up roads, and the island
itself was on a coast line which was reached only by a very basic mud track
road which sent us all lurching and bumping around inside the truck as it
negotiated potholes, ruts and ridges in the road and at times had difficulty
getting through narrow openings and sharp bends and some bridges that looked as
if they wouldn't take a horse and cart, let alone an enormous truck!
Anyway, we spent an enjoyable three nights there. I wasn't prepared to
enjoy it to begin with because we had such a trek round the island to find our
accommodation only to find the place we were supposed to stay at was
inexplicably closed, and so it was a race to find the best accommodation
available and as usual, Judith and I got left behind in the crush and rush by
the younger members of the group to get themselves sorted (there’s no
concession on this trip for the aged among them) and so in the end it meant
that we were housed in a small Pousada across the road from the rest of the
group, but we did pay Reais 5 less than they did per night and got a really
nice two-bedded (one double bed and one single bed) room and it took us quite
some time to assure our landlord that Martin, who had come to act as
interpreter for us, didn't want to share the double bed with one or both of
us!)
We also found our landlord had donkeys who came by to spend the night just
outside the grounds of the Pousada in a square area formed between two
buildings. During the evening, we went to the landlord’s restaurant for a
meal and noticed the gate to the Pousada and its grounds had been shut, so we
carefully closed it behind us. We met a Brazilian lady at the restaurant, who
seeing our difficulty with the menu, came to assist us. It turned out she had
spent time in USA and spoke really good English and she turned out to be an
artist of sorts, her speciality being designing patterns for materials, and her
husband’s speciality was making jewellery and they travelled around on
public transport selling their wares. We spent a pleasant evening with them
before going back to bed, and then as I looked out over the grounds, once we
had got to our room, I noticed we had inadvertently left the gate open and the
donkeys, who had arrived to spend the night in the lee of the buildings, had
entered the garden and were about to feed off the plants! Well, some of my
friends and family know I am not too happy dealing with large animals, but
without thinking I went straight down and shooed these three big animals out of
the garden and they obeyed me so willingly, I felt quite proud of myself as I
closed the gate behind them. (I didn't want to have to pay for all the
plants they might have eaten and that spurred me on, I think)
We spent a pleasant couple of days in Caraiva, exploring the beaches and
finding everyone so friendly and helpful. Most of the group descended on a
particular restaurant for breakfast and to spend the day there while they
frolicked on the beach and in the sea, and I just wandered from place to place,
studying my Spanish and just contemplating the ocean. There were plenty of
places to eat in the evening, mostly serving fish, and we met our Brazilian
friends each evening and spent some pleasant times with them. They were in
Caraiva to display their wares, and weren't too hopeful of selling much as
they were relatively expensive compared to the normal tourist junk, but the
lady was just pleased to practice her English and we were relieved because we
weren't too keen to learn Portuguese. I had studied it a year or so ago,
but I had then decided to concentrate on Spanish and so forgot most of what I
had tried to learn!
We then went on to a place called Porto Seguro, which is in the middle of
the mining area of Brazil where many precious stones and metals are found and
whilst there visited their museum with exhibits from all over the world
depicting stones in their raw state and in their polished state, and showing
all the various minerals and metals extracted in the region together with the
machinery etc to do it with and it truly was a very fascinating exhibition and
I spent a couple of hours there. Porto Seguro is an unspoilt town with narrow
streets and colonial buildings, unfortunately many of them in bad need of
renovation, but it also made a pleasant stopping point for us on the way to
Salvador.
