Rain and traffic jams

A few hours south of Rio - a stunning part of Brazil - beautiful beaches, cute little colonial cities - the only problem was the weather was completely against us.  It pretty much rained the entire three days we spent in Parati and Trindade.  The main consolation was that our hostel in Trindade was absolutely fantastic - this town is just gorgeous - nestled between rainforest and the sea - with natural rock pools and stunning beaches - it would have been heaven itself if only the weather had been more inviting.  We spent our time watching movies with other travellers, playing cards, and exploring the area without a raincoat - for once you were completely soaked you couldn't really get any wetter, and it wasn't really that cold.  It was so wet that we don't even have decent photos to do this place justice.  On our final night I did a session of yoga which was fantastic - good to stretch our all those muscles - clearly my year of pilates helped because I was the most flexible and controlled of all the people doing the session.  

We reluctantly left Trindade for our bus to Sao Paulo - we stayed in town for the first night of Carnival - we had hoped to be able to meet a mutual friend and head towards the street parade, but it was raining and the parade started so late (11pm) that our 6am wake up call meant we didn't end up going out - but rather watched bits and pieces on the TV.  We still got to see remounts of the parade at 7.30am as our bus went through town!  Sao Paulo is an enormous city - we spent well over 1.5 hours on the highway just getting out of the city itself.  Rio is well known for its favellas - but I tell you, the favellas in Sao Paulo are on a completely different scale. Our destination was Florianopolis for the rest of carnival.  Florianopolis is on a large island in southern Brazil - with beautiful beaches and fabulous atmosphere.  But during Carnival brazil goes crazy - again you have to take the good (street parties, parades, and spectacles) with the bad (horrendous traffic jams, shockingly high prices for everything).  In this particular instance it took our bus 4 hours to cover a stretch of 40 kms because traffic was that horrendous.  Our bus was due to arrive in town at 6.30pm, but we arrived at 1.30am and then had to get a 60USD taxi to our pousada on the north of the island.  But this is the price you pay for being in Brazil at this time of year.