Ilha Do Mel: 21-27 November 2011

The penultimate stop on our world tour was the small forest-covered, sand-fringed Ilha Do Mel; a small island a couple of miles off of the south east coast of Brazil. With less than two weeks left of our trip, it was time to hit the beach one last time for some tan-topping before travelling up to Rio and our flight home.

Ilha Do Mel (or Honey Island) was a bit of a mission to get to - another overnight bus, a long wait for a connection to the coast and then a short ferry ride. We used our time in the bus stations to sort out our onward journey, so by the time we arrived on the island we had all of our travel and accommodation booked for the rest of the trip - quite a strange feeling!

It was well worth the effort to get here though. Most of the island is given over to a rainforest reserve and there are two settlements of any note on the remainder - the main 'town' of Brasilia and the smaller Encantadas where we were staying. We arrived on the Monday along with six other people on our small ferry and checked in to a nice hostel right on the beach. Despite this being the beginning of the high season there was next to nobody about. We walked the length of the beach, passed the four or five bar/restaurants and had the pick of any of them virtually to ourselves.

The first two days were bright, hot and sunny and we spent them lazing on the sun loungers on the front deck of the hostel looking along the beach. Very relaxing. We did get up occasionally for a cold drink, an ice cream, or to sample a 'Coco Loco' or Caiprinha cocktail. It's tough. The beach faces west back towards the mainland, so is sheltered from the Atlantic proper, though the sea was freezing - the Caribbean this is not!!

Our third day on the island was overcast which gave us an excuse to look around a bit. Encantadas is situated on a kind of peninsula at one end of the island, so it's only a short 500-600m walk across the island at this point to the eastward facing coast which is made up of long wild sandy beaches with big waves crashing onto them from the ocean. There's a small cave at the end of the island which made for somewhere to walk to and we passed back and forth through the village itself a couple of times while trying to find a path up onto the headland. The buildings were mostly wooden shacks with the occasional brick house. There were lots of guest-houses dotted around giving us the impression that it gets a lot busier during the high season proper.

The last few days were sunny too, which brought an end to our brief explorations and saw us back on the sun loungers. The Friday and Saturday brought a lot more arrivals to the island adding a bit of atmosphere to the beach bars, but not so much that you were ever going to have trouble finding a table.

So that's about it for now. One more long journey to go to take us up to Rio and our final stop!

See you all soon,

Dan & Sue