Have found paradise... Don´t try to find us.
Trip Start
Dec 15, 2006
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Trip End
Feb 05, 2007
Trancoso and Caraiva, Brazil
Friday, December 22, 2006
In England people talk of having ´guilty pleasures´ in terms of music - usually cheesy eighties tunes. I´m quite open about liking cheesy eighties music so my guilty pleasures involve hard house and trance. Trancoso is also known as ´trance´coso so I thought this was really going to be my kind of place.
Well, hippy hang out it may have been five or ten years ago but these days if the average Trancoso punter were rocking past about nine thirty I´d have been very surprised. This is a very well-heeled (and middle-aged) crowd.
Still, it is very much a lovely place. We have a gorgeous room in a pousada (guest house) which includes a pool and nice garden. The town is centred on the ´Quadrado´ - a grassy square with a church at one end and surrounded by boutiques and restaurants. The beach is genuinely idyllic with lots of people walking past selling you beer, oysters and... toasted cheese?? Yup. You can keep your brighton rock and candy floss. A staple of the brazilian beach experience is cheese toasted over hot coals kept in a paint tin by a man who will stoke the flames by (alarmingly) swinging the paint pot at speed over his head.
It is unfortunate that my years of travel experience, wisdom and knowledge do not extend as far as knowing when Christmas is and that a lot of people go on holiday at that time.
Well anyway in Brazil they take it to a whole new level. Everyone, and I mean EVERYONE in Brazil goes on holiday between Dec. 27th and Jan. 3rd.
Had I read up on this fact before we left and perhaps made reservations in advance? Had I maybe planned ahead thus avoiding being without accomodation and / or paying a London mortgage for one night in a rat-infested shit-hole? HA! HA! HA! You´ve read this far - surely you know better than that.
Well anyway, it´s all a bit strange. Our hotel in Arrial was basically empty on arrival. Ditto our lovely guest house in Trancoso. You can stay Dec. 24th, 25th and 26th pretty much anywhere for a very reasonable price but come the 27th, you cannot find a hotel room for love or money anywhere between here and Paraguay. The woman who quoted us 55 realis a night (about 13 pounds) on the 18th is now cheerfully quoting us 500 realis a night for the same room after the 27th. I am not making this up.
So we have to high-tail it. A bit of a shame really.
The next day we take an unbelievably bumpy bus ride 30 km south to Caraiva. The bus ride is brilliant. All of it on a dirt track which twists and winds all over the place through farmland, reservoirs and (I mean literally through) rivers. At the end we take a ´ferry´ (a man paddling a dugout canoe) across a river to Caraiva.
If only we´d discovered it sooner! It´s paradise! There are no cars on Caraiva and the streets are sand. There is no electricity except for what is provided by generator.
We have a room almost directly on a pretty much deserted beach. The only other building is a ramshackle wooden structure - the bar! It definitely makes it as one of my top five bars in the world. Ice cold beer, great food and it even has a deranged parrot!
Well, it is the nature of travelling and venturing into the unknown. You win some, you lose some. We´d found this amazing place that we both loved but had to leave the next day. Oh well. It wasn´t exactly like we´d been suffering in some sort of gulag in Trancoso.
Well we´ve had a brilliant few days on the beach which is good as life is about to get a bit more stressful. We don´t have reservations anywhere and it is by far the busiest time of the year. We are travelling hard and fast for Salvador da Bahia...
