Leaving Salvador turned out to be much more complicated than we had planned! We had booked flights to Sao Luis, but as it is necessary to make a connection in Fortaleza, and cheaper to book the journey as two flights, this is what we had done. In true Brazilian style, our first flight to Fortaleza was delayed, so we went for a gourmet dinner in the form of Bobs. DON´T EVER EAT BOB´S! It´s the equivalent of Mac Donalds, only its ten times worse, ten times more expensive, and the portions are ten times smaller (a MEGA fries was actually the size of a small in McD´s!). Rkhee also enjoyed a banana and cheese sandwich, which she practically threw up it was so bad. We got on the plane, a bit worried that we would miss the connecting flight, since we had to pick up our bags and check in again, but after a brief chat with the GOL flight staff, we were reassured that the plane would wait, as other people had booked it all as one journey. We arrived in Fortaleza about 2 hours late and surprise surprise they wouldn´t let us on the plane to Sao Luis as check-in closed about 2 mins before we got to the desk! They put us on a flight in the morning and so we decided to sleep in the airport that night. We found a podium in the middle of all the restaurants where two guys were already asleep, whipped out our sleeping bags and tried to sleep. People were laughing at us quite a bit, but we started laughing too when the floor started VIBRATING with the sound of snoring from one of the guys. We woke up to a SEA of people sleeping around us, clearly we are trend setting in the airport!

We caught the plane in the morning (late AGAIN!) and on arriving in Sao Luis, decided to catch the bus into the city centre to our hostel. Aside from the fact that our bags are three times the size of us, the journey was RIDICULOUS! The driver was all over the place and we were literally jumping off the seats every five minutes and trying to stop our bags falling out of the door everytime it opened to let people on and off! We dumped our stuff at the hostel and then went off to explore a bit of Sao Luis, which seemed a little like a small ghost town as no-one was around, but boy were we proved wrong later that night...

Let us paint you a picture: Imagine big samba bands, carnaval rehearsals, lots of young people, lots of drinking, lots of colours and TONS AND TONS OF TROPICAL RAIN! It was absolutely hammering it down, but nobody cared and there was just a big party in the rain with people samba-ing on every corner getting completely soaked. The atmosphere was ELECTRIC and we were so hyper. We started off a bit touristy in our rain macs, but after a while we were wet anyway so abandoned them to join in with the locals and got completely drenched too!

The next day we woke up early to catch a bus to Parque National dos Lençois Maranhenses, a huge park with sandunes, lagoons and oases that go on for miles. We booked it all through the hostel, but for some reason we were late arriving and the driver just dropped us in some random pousada, where the woman insisted that we couldn´t go into the dunes until 2pm. Since the driver was coming back at 4pm and the tour didn´t return until about 7pm, we were a bit stuck!! We walked into the town of Barreirinhas to see if we could arrange a private tour, but it turns out tours only leave at 9.30am or 2pm. The tour guide promised us that he could arrange a private taxi, for only a little more than what the bus would have cost, so that we could get back to Sao Luis that night so we took it as it was our only option. To pass time until 2pm, we wandered around the town and had some lunch on the river, bumping into people who had been on our bus that morning. As recommended in the guide book, Marisha tried the famous fish in mango sauce, which was DELICIOUS!

At 2pm, we got into a 4x4, crossed a river on a raft and then continued through some scrub for about 40 minutes until we reached the dunes. The scenery is literally breath-taking, the dunes just go on for miles and miles, and the lagoons are so clear and clean that you can go swimming in them. We stayed in the park to wait for sunset, which created amazing shadows in the sand and really pretty colours. We made our way back to town and the guide tried to find us a taxi back to Sao Luis ( 3 hours away), but this proved to be highly unsuccessful. We were so angry that we refused to get out of the 4x4 until they found us something, especially as Marisha wasn´t feeling too well, and all our stuff was in the hostel in Sao Luis and we didn´t have enough money to pay for another one. We argued in very bad portuguese for ages, and the guide drove around the town about four times, eventually begging a friend of his to drive us back, for which we had to pay a stupid fare, however he had to pay him some too. We sat in the guys house with his family while he got ready, which was littered with flies, mosquitos and flying ants of all shapes and sizes and tried to make conversation. Ten minutes later Marisha went running out and was sick (it may have been the famous fish in mango sauce!), but the wife was really sweet bringin tissues and water, and even asking if we needed to go to a pharmacy. We finally left around 8.30pm and had a delightful trip back, most of which we slept through. We arrived back in Sao Luis exhausted, and too tired to explain to the woman in the pousada that her driver had messed everything up!

The next day we went around Sao Luis properley, with Sandra, a german lady who was staying in our dormitory. It is a really pretty little town, full of cobbled streets, but not many tourists or really too much to see. In the evening we (including Sandra) were catching a 12 hour bus overnight to Belem at the mouth of the Amazon. We jumped on a bus to the rodoviaria(Bus station), which was RAMMED with people, so we had to stand with our backpacks on our backs for about 40 minutes, whilst people insisted on squeezing past and generally making life more difficult than it had to be! The bus didn´t stóp where we expected it to and went flying past the rodoviaria and when we finally got off we were about 2km up the road from where we were supposed to be. A lady helped us to cross this death-defying road (about 4 lanes) and warned us that it was a dangerous area and told us to get a bus back in the other direction rather than walking. We finally got to the rodoviaria and settled onto the coach. It was freezing cold and uncomfortable and generally a bad night (worse than the airport night!).