Big Adventure Island with Free Dog Rental (And Samba Part II)

L to R: The sea, Caxadaço

I want to write all about the weekend, but I already talked about samba night, and I don’t want to re-hash anything. Still, let me give you some videos, OK? This is how I kicked off the weekend on Friday night.

Samba! (avi)

Potato chip machine! (avi)

Samba with flute! (avi)

You can see more pics of the whole evening here. Somehow, I forgot to report last week that my friend Andrew Shansby is in town. He’s been enjoying the beaches while I’ve been at work, and we’ve gone out to dinner while he’s been in Rio, but he and I just shared one of the adventures of our lifetimes on ILHA GRANDE! BEHOLD!!!

Bamboo

If there’s a soundtrack to anything like this (and there always is), it’s this:
“Jacknuggeted” by Manitoba

This is an island whereupon Andrew and I walked all weekend. We’d occasionally foray into the sea to cool our hides, but we spent most of the weekend hiking through the jungle. Also, I took a nap on the beach.

Day one (Saturday) of the trip to Ilha Grande is called the day of four naps. The first nap lasted from a little after midnight to 3:00am. Andrew and I awoke from 3 hours of sleep following an evening of Samba. We grabbed our things and bolted out the door to get some 24 hour cake at a place near my apartment. It was boomin! Then we walked past a street full of prostitutes and waited for the bus to the bus station.

The bus was taking too long and I thought we’d be late (boy was I wrong!) so we took a cab that ripped us off by driving too far. When we pulled into the bus terminal, we noticed some burning garbage out on the sidewalk. It was a smokey fire and a long steady plume flowed easily into the terminal, filling it. It could have been put out with a splash, but no one did anything about it. We quickly learned that the bus we meant to take at 4:20 am didn’t leave until 5:25. So we got to sit in a smoke filled bus terminal with no hope of sleep. I read.

Then! Nap #2 was on the bus. I don’t remember this bus ride, but the sun was up when we got to Mangaratiba where we got on a ferry. By this time I felt well-rested. We got a room in a hostel, bought some water, bananas, apples, and granola bars and started walking. We were to hike from the main town (it’s called Abraão or Abraham) up through some hills and down to some beaches. We got to Praia das Palmas (or something like that, it means Beach of the Palms), swam, talked to people, and then before I realized I was tired, I was face down drooling on my towel. That lasted about half an hour, it was nap #3.

We continued on to another beach and stopped to eat muscles with the boat guys along the way. They asked me if I liked the muscles and I said yeah, this is the good life. Then one of the guys said in broken English “I likee my life!” I said, “yeah, I likee your life too.” Jeez. Then we got to another beach called Lopes Mendes that had waves and surfers. We swam until we had to run and catch the last boat back to Abraão.

We were thinking about going on an evening boat trip out to a fancy restaurant and had some time to kill. This is when I took nap #4. We didn’t take the boat ride and ate a massive seafood stew instead. The heavy food knocked us out by 11pm. This wasn’t a nap because we had big plans for the next day.

This dog saved my life (and Andrew’s but he doesn’t seem to care)

We got up early, got breakfast, hiked! I wasn’t about to take a nap yesterday when I had so much ground to cover. We were to hike to Caxadaço (Cash-a-DASS-oh), a lagoon that I’d heard superlatives about the day before. Supposedly the water was a beautiful color! It was huge! Stupendous! Crazy! So we decided to go, never mind the hours of hiking it’d take to get there.

It wasn’t that great, but getting there was awesome. Here’s what happened. We first went to Dois Rios, which is something of a town that used to be or still is a remote campus for the University of Rio de Janeiro. It felt creepy and abandoned. Before we left Caxadaço, we met these two dogs. The gray one is a boy dog and is named Ernie and the other dog is a girl dog named Shasta.

Ernie started walking with us just before we started out of Dois Rios and Shasta showed up chasing after him as we headed out. At first I thought they were going to run off into the woods and make love, but they never did. Instead, they followed us ALL DAY.

They followed us through the thick jungle trails that lead to Caxadaço. I didn’t realize they had kept following us until I felt something furry and wet brush my leg as Ernie passed me. It scared me and I yelled in terror (he’s wet because he always sits down in water when he sees some). Once arrived at Caxadaço, I tried to play fetch with them, but the concept seemed entirely foreign to them. All they wanted to do was keep following us.

So we went on. This is the scary part. We wanted to head back to Lopes Mendes where we could catch a boat taxi back to Abraão instead of backtracking the whole huge trail. The problem with that is that there’s no official trail. We’d heard about a trail that was sometimes hard to follow back there, so we decided to find it. We found it, but there was one moment when we were almost lost. This folly, combined with me venturing into an abandoned house in Dois Rios makes me the foolishest boy scout in Brazil these days. I couldn’t wait for Andrew to use his first aid skills.

We’d lost the trail, thought we’d found it, realize we hadn’t found it, found it again, backtracked, made circles, etc. Until we ended up again at the point where we knew we couldn’t find the trail anymore. At this point, Ernie led the way and we continued on. Bless that dog. Until that moment, I had been relishing in my ability to recognize traces of humans (footprints, knife marks on trees, etc) whenever we were unsure of the trail, but it was Ernie who carried me when I was too weak on my own. It felt good to commune with the earth like that, deep in the jungle, interfacing with the soil through a dog who could smell what I couldn’t smell. Too bad I was too afraid of bugs to pet him.

The rest of the trail was long, humid, sometimes rough, never too steep, but mostly long. We saw a monkey. I scraped my wrist. An ant bit my little toe and burned! We sweated buckets (literally! just kidding). Then, we got to the beach and both drank Cokes which had never tasted so good. We left Ernie on the beach (Shasta disappeared at Lopes Mendes) and took a boat and a ferry back to the continent. There was a bus waiting to take us home, and it did.