Ilha Grande adventures

Hi there! Rhia typing:

We´re on Ilha Grande now! I tried to upload some pictures this morning, but the internet kind of crapped out not far into the process. I see that a few of them got there though - they´re of our Favela tour and of the place we were staying in Rio.
I wanted to put more on tonight but the guy at this internet place says I can´t connect the camera.

Anyway, this is where I do the big update on everything, let me pull out my little book!

October 3/4:

Slept surprisingly well, considering. Actually the panic didn´t really set in until we were about to head for the airport, coming to a head shortly after clearing US customs. They seem to go out of their way to make the process intimidating.

Still, we made it to the plane and to New York. Unfortunately apart from the TVs everywhere broadcasting CNN, we could have been anywhere in the world. The food options were a bit disappointing - though I had a pretty fabulous seaweed salad. We sat and played a bunch of games of cards in the airport, and peered at the New York skyline and felt a lot like we were in limbo instead of on the verge of a giant adventure. The airport was really cold.

(There is a medium annoying girl talking really loud on web chat right next to me.)

We slept decently on the plane, surprisingly, and woke up to the view of the Brazil countryside and the absolutely incredible sight of Sao Paulo from the air. Before the houses even look like individual houses, it´s impossible to see the borders of the city. In Sao Paulo, even though we were just about to do a half-hour flight to Rio, we had to disembark, have our luggage x-rayed, and wait at a new gate.

The flight to Rio was basically up and then down again, and we passed through immigration, luggage collection and customs pretty quickly, only to walk out into a hall where a half-dozen taxi salesladies were clamouring for our attention. We selected one at random and were spit out immediately into a whirlwind that bustled us into a cab with a driver who had no idea how to find the address we were heading for. He did eventually find it, with the help of some local police. But when we tried to check in for our B&B the person whose house it was wasn´t home, so we couldn´t go over. We were starving, so after tehy gave us tehir schpeil, we headed down to get some lunch in the neighbourhood. Turns out that Brazillian beef is as good as afvertised and the chicken was pretty darned good too. Most exciting though, was trying the fresh juices. John had acai, and I had goyaba(guava). An interesting food item we discovered here is farofa - a sort of toasted meal flavoured with, in this case, bacon.

We went back to the B&B offices and our host still wasn´t there so they reassigned us to a house with six cats and four tortoises. We took a nap (on a 2-inch mattress) then got a bit kerfuffled as we didn´t think we could make a long distance call from a pay phone, so were trying to get downtown to use the central phone/internet place. The little streetcar we wanted to catch never came, and then, just as we gave up and were about to board the bus, our host drove up and told us to go inside and use a service that let her know how much our call would be so we could call from her house. She told us all sorts of things about Rio after that - Brazillian ecology, favelas, politics everything.

Then we walked back down the hill to the triangular square fro dinner and sampled local beer. We had a bit of currency problem when it turned out we were a cuople dollars short for the bill and they didn´t take VISA, but they were reluctantly OK with it. We experimented with a seafood joint for dinner and got this huge and strange salad with cold cooked broccoli, hearts of palm, and cold cooked peas. We also had Bobo shrimp, which is kind of bizarre and orange and creamy, but tasty. They told us the dish served 2, but 4 could have easily eaten it. We turned in pretty early, it had been a long couple days.