Well, the last two days were basically spent on buses - and lots of them! Well... 4 to be more precise...
We left Buzios in the morning and first caught a local "onibus" to Campos Gara fori, which was about an hour´s bus ride. (The bus conductor guy obviously thought we had a bit too much in our packs too becuase we had to pay an extra Reas for the pack to get through the turnstile!) How discriminatory! What if you were pregnant?!
Anyway, then we caught a bus to Campos which was another 3 hours north, only to find ourselves at the wrong Rhodiviaria - because the bus took us to centro (the town centre) but we needed to get to the larger rhodoviaria to find out when buses went further north. Well, with no-one speaking English, we found some really nice girls in one information centre, after the 7 of so of them all talking loudly in Portugeuse to us, trying to make us understand directions, they decided to walk us to the right bus stop and wait to put us on the bus too! They were very kind and made it a bit more fun, trying to exchange our few words of Portuguese with their few words of English.
We were lucky to make it in time for a next bus to Ilheus that would go overnight. We had wanted to travel less far, to Porto Seguro, but didn´t want to be waiting another 8 hours at night, so we jumped on this one further north when it came and that was a 15 hour bus ride, with 2 main stops to stretch our legs. The long-distance buses are really comfortable, and feel extremely safe. We had a few comedians on board from the sound of things too, playing a few jokes with the bus driver and friends.
I had a woman with a 2 year old next to me, so my lap became bed for most of the trip, which was okay. I was just wishing I could have spoken some more Portuguese or had access to the stickers and koalas in my backpack that I´d brought for the kids at Porto Allegre.
Once we arrived in Ilheus at about 9am, Tanya and I were really lucky to have run into a brother and sister (Vitor and Simone) who were travelling here for holidays and who could speak English and have been so helpful. They persuaded us to come on yet another bus to Itacarč, which is about another hour and a half north, and is another cool beach village, way better than Ilheus apparentlly, which is a bit of a hole. Their friend also met us at the station and his dad runs a HI hostel here - they only had places left in the boys dorm but Vitore and Simone walked us to another Pousada and found good accomodation for us. They were so helpful and we´re meeting up with them again while we´re here so that´s pretty cool. Oh - even more coincidental, two of them are studying law here.
Well we are on our way to the beach. Oh yeah - I bought a Brasilian cozzie last night! Tanya made me do it!! Don´t worry mum - it´s not the typical Brasilian style, much more modest than that! So I´m on my way to test it out and get rid of some other tan lines!
Tchau! (goodbye)... I hope work´s not too tough for you all over there ;)
xo