After her memorable barbecue in Itaunas, Brazil, Iris and her overland group
\nmake their way to Caravelas.<\/p>\n
We moved on to a place called Caravelas which was right by the sea, a nice
\nlittle Pousada (hotel) as they call them in Brazil, with a little dip pool and
\nnice little rooms, with the sea just seconds away. It was here that I decided
\nto get rid of a load of outstanding postcards and so took a trip into the
\nlittle town to find a post office and send them off. I do hope they all arrived
\nsafely because I was advised it might be better to wait until Salvador as rural
\npost offices are notoriously sleepy places, but when I got to the post office,
\nI found it very efficient and the staff of two extremely helpful, and I was
\nable to get directions to a stationery shop so that I could buy more envelopes
\nto post off the rest of my postcards at a later date.<\/p>\n
I dare say recipients who receive the postcards initially noticed that the
\nenvelopes were stuck down with sellotape in a very haphazard fashion! Well, it
\nwas only after I had bought the envelopes and came to stick them down that I
\nrealized there was no sticky on them! Apparently this is the norm in Brazil and
\none has to either buy a glue stick to stick them down or use the facilities at
\nthe post office! We have decided that this is probably because it is so humid
\nin Brazil that any sticky on the envelopes would soon deteriorate and stick
\nthemselves down before they were used, if you see what I mean.<\/p>\n
We stayed in Caravelas for just two nights and then moved on to Caraiva,
\nwhich is a small island just the most incredibly small boat journey from the
\nshore, it took the boatsmen all of two minutes, I would think to row us across.
\nAnd this again was an unspoilt place with no built up roads, and the island
\nitself was on a coast line which was reached only by a very basic mud track
\nroad which sent us all lurching and bumping around inside the truck as it
\nnegotiated potholes, ruts and ridges in the road and at times had difficulty
\ngetting through narrow openings and sharp bends and some bridges that looked as
\nif they wouldn't take a horse and cart, let alone an enormous truck!<\/p>\n
Anyway, we spent an enjoyable three nights there. I wasn't prepared to
\nenjoy it to begin with because we had such a trek round the island to find our
\naccommodation only to find the place we were supposed to stay at was
\ninexplicably closed, and so it was a race to find the best accommodation
\navailable and as usual, Judith and I got left behind in the crush and rush by
\nthe younger members of the group to get themselves sorted (there’s no
\nconcession on this trip for the aged among them) and so in the end it meant
\nthat we were housed in a small Pousada across the road from the rest of the
\ngroup, but we did pay Reais 5 less than they did per night and got a really
\nnice two-bedded (one double bed and one single bed) room and it took us quite
\nsome time to assure our landlord that Martin, who had come to act as
\ninterpreter for us, didn't want to share the double bed with one or both of
\nus!)<\/p>\n
We also found our landlord had donkeys who came by to spend the night just
\noutside the grounds of the Pousada in a square area formed between two
\nbuildings. During the evening, we went to the landlord’s restaurant for a
\nmeal and noticed the gate to the Pousada and its grounds had been shut, so we
\ncarefully closed it behind us. We met a Brazilian lady at the restaurant, who
\nseeing our difficulty with the menu, came to assist us. It turned out she had
\nspent time in USA and spoke really good English and she turned out to be an
\nartist of sorts, her speciality being designing patterns for materials, and her
\nhusband’s speciality was making jewellery and they travelled around on
\npublic transport selling their wares. We spent a pleasant evening with them
\nbefore going back to bed, and then as I looked out over the grounds, once we
\nhad got to our room, I noticed we had inadvertently left the gate open and the
\ndonkeys, who had arrived to spend the night in the lee of the buildings, had
\nentered the garden and were about to feed off the plants! Well, some of my
\nfriends and family know I am not too happy dealing with large animals, but
\nwithout thinking I went straight down and shooed these three big animals out of
\nthe garden and they obeyed me so willingly, I felt quite proud of myself as I
\nclosed the gate behind them. (I didn't want to have to pay for all the
\nplants they might have eaten and that spurred me on, I think)<\/p>\n
We spent a pleasant couple of days in Caraiva, exploring the beaches and
\nfinding everyone so friendly and helpful. Most of the group descended on a
\nparticular restaurant for breakfast and to spend the day there while they
\nfrolicked on the beach and in the sea, and I just wandered from place to place,
\nstudying my Spanish and just contemplating the ocean. There were plenty of
\nplaces to eat in the evening, mostly serving fish, and we met our Brazilian
\nfriends each evening and spent some pleasant times with them. They were in
\nCaraiva to display their wares, and weren't too hopeful of selling much as
\nthey were relatively expensive compared to the normal tourist junk, but the
\nlady was just pleased to practice her English and we were relieved because we
\nweren't too keen to learn Portuguese. I had studied it a year or so ago,
\nbut I had then decided to concentrate on Spanish and so forgot most of what I
\nhad tried to learn!<\/p>\n
We then went on to a place called Porto Seguro, which is in the middle of
\nthe mining area of Brazil where many precious stones and metals are found and
\nwhilst there visited their museum with exhibits from all over the world
\ndepicting stones in their raw state and in their polished state, and showing
\nall the various minerals and metals extracted in the region together with the
\nmachinery etc to do it with and it truly was a very fascinating exhibition and
\nI spent a couple of hours there. Porto Seguro is an unspoilt town with narrow
\nstreets and colonial buildings, unfortunately many of them in bad need of
\nrenovation, but it also made a pleasant stopping point for us on the way to
\nSalvador.<\/p>\n
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…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":7,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","css_class_manager_body_classes":"","css_class_manager_use_in_post_loop":false},"categories":[2,3],"tags":[60],"class_list":["post-1197","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-archive","category-main-article","tag-november-2003"],"yoast_head":"\n