Eastern coast of Brazil after Rio

Even though the tour was over I decided to stay in Brazil and jumped on an Exodus overland tour that went up the coast of Brazil.

Ouro Preto, Brazil - So back on another truck with a new group of people we headed out of Rio absolutely shattered and went to the colonial gold mining town of Ouro Preto. The new truck had 18 people on it including the 2 tour leaders, from Spain, Canada, Wales, England, South Africa and NZ.

While in town we went on a mine tour and went 350 metres a hill to have a look. While there me and a couple of others went swimming in an underground pool. The guide advised us not to put our heads under the water due to the massive levels of arsenic. After a 10 minute swim we went on a tour of the town and its churches.



Bahia beaches, Brazil - We then headed back out to the coast where we spent several days camping near the lovely, tropical beaches of the Bahian state. Still trying to recover from Rio, we spent most of the time relaxing on the beach and swimming.



Salvador, Brazil - After a long drive day and a ferry ride with the truck we made it to supposedly the city of most muggings. Salvador has a strong African influence in its culture and capoeira (Brazilian dance/martial art) is very popular. Salvador also has a lot of old colonial buildings so we spent a couple of days walking around town and checking out the markets and we went out on the town at night. On our last night there we went to a local dance show. It was amazing and the guys who did the capoeira were so fast and skilled. They were extremely muscly and capoeira is done topless so the girls were very pleased. We all left Salvador without getting mugged and came away with a lot better impression of it than we started with.



Maceio, Brazil - Back to the beach for a day. Most of us went on a morning boat trip 2 km out to a reef with ‘natural swimming pools’ where we went snorkelling for about 10 minutes. After seeing the few small fish that were out there we swam over to the floating bar that followed us out and started drinking cheap caipirinhas (Brazil‘s national cocktail: limes in a glass and crushed, sugar, ice and cachaça which is a spirit made from sugar cane). For the next couple of hours we sat in the water as a storm came through and drank caipirinhas until we were quite drunk by 11 a.m. When it was time to go back I stupidly decided to swim the 2 kms back (possibly brought on by the alcohol). So I swam back with my mask and snorkel on. With a short way to go to shore, I stood up and stood on a sea urchin getting 8 spines in my toes. I made it to shore, got the spines dug out and we jumped on the truck to head north again.