Paraty, Brazil, South America

I had a great day in Paraty today, and it was aided by some absolutely beautiful weather. My hotel serves a very good buffet breakfast, so I went up there and filled myself up for the day, and then headed out. I was going to wait for the bus to get into the town, but it was such a beautiful day I thought I would just walk. I’m glad I did because it was only about a 15 minute walk from the hotel to the historic center of Paraty, and I never saw a bus go by the whole time I was walking. That would have annoyed me if I sat and waited that long.

I walked around the historic center for a couple hours, and it’s really nice. It reminds me a bit of Cartagena’s old town in Colombia, but this one is much smaller, and much quieter. There are a couple of old churches, and lots of shops and restaurants, but a lot of them were closed. I think a lot of places here only open on the weekend because it’s so quiet during the week.

I went out for lunch at a traditional Brazilian place, so I had feijoada with pork. It was very good, and so cheap. After lunch I went to find a dive shop and it looks like there is only one in Paraty, called Adrenalina. I went in there and talked to a dive instructor, and he informed me that it would be R$315 (£80) for all the equipment and two dives out on a boat for tomorrow. The only problem was that I was the only person who had signed up and they needed at least one more for the boat trip to be confirmed.

I came back to the hotel, relaxed here for a little bit, and went and relaxed on Jabaquara beach for a bit. I found out that there was another hostel in a different part of town that also ran a dive day, so I walked over there to see if I could join them for tomorrow. It turned out that this hostel just went through Adrenalina, so that was a wasted walk. It was okay though, it was a nice night for a walk.

I am back at the hostel and had that leftover pizza for dinner tonight. At about 10:30pm the girl from Adrenalina showed up at my hotel and said that they had gotten someone else to sign up for diving tomorrow, so it is on! They’ll be coming by to pick me up at 8:30am tomorrow, so now I’m trying to get all my stuff organized for the dive trip tomorrow. It’s supposed to be great diving here, so I’m really looking forward to that!