Paraty is indeed a beautiful colonial town, surrounded by green mountains, white beaches and clear blue seas. It is also wet. Very bloody wet. During our stay it made North Yorkshire seam like a desert, which was a tad disappointing. Luckily we had booked a fantastic guest house called the Pousada Guarana and were wonderfully looked after by David and Jimena, so didn't mind whiling away a few hours sitting on the veranda, drinking beer, reading and playing with the 6 dogs and 4 cats that David and Jimena have rescued from various places around the world (they had met in San Fransisco, then moved to the Virgin Islands before coming to run the Pousada built by Jimena father.) We did have one sunny morning and took advantage of it by heading off on a schooner trip around the islands off Paraty, which was a great day out, largely due to some of the other guys staying at the Pousada who also took the trip. Illse and Lola, two beautiful Latvian girls were on a 10 day holiday, the lovely Jennifer was from Canada and doing a study on enlarging the G8, and Eduardo was a engineer on a break from Sao Paulo and had hidden talents. The islands were lovely but so were the Caprihinas and we got more and more 'boisterous' as the day went on. We discovered that Eduardo was not only a dab hand at getting hold of passion fruit from the islands to make our Caprihinas more interesting (more interesting than Cacahaca 51 (the local spirit which costs about £1 a litre in the supermarkets) some squashed lime and a load of sugar), but was also a musician in a former life. This made him was perfectly able to steal the guitar from the on board entertainer and knock out a decent tune (thank God; there are only so many times you can hear Pink Floyd or Simon and Garfunkel songs sung by a man with a goatee and a face screwed up with heart felt sincerity, in his second language, without thinking bad thoughts about hungry sharks). Between singing and Caprihinas was a little swimming (how very responsible) and Jodie even braved the waters. At one stage we could see quite few Turtle heads (if any of you have swum off the coast of North Bridlington you may think that you are familiar with this experience) and I managed to swim reasonably close to them, though the choppy water prevented seeing much of them.

The following day we met a Estonian couple who put our trip to shame. They had decided to take the opportunity to travel before they settled down to have children and were spending three years going around the world………….on a motorbike! I think that he was keener than she, but they had their lives in a set of panniers, a tank bag and a small back pack, were taking the road less travelled, mending their bike as they went and were having a great pile popping adventure. Maybe a plan for later!!

We managed to relax, but have little else to report as the weather caused us to head off to Sao Paulo early, not stopping along the coast along the way.

My only concern at this stage is that I have a little bit of a holiday tummy and the evidence is that bulk in is not keeping up with bulk out, so I may just waste away (unless the beer and Caprihinas keep me healthy). On a better note, Jodie's cough is on the mend. Hurrah.