Ilha Grande

So after our quick ferry ride to the island we again ignored the few touts and started strolling about the small town checking out accommodation. Everywhere seemed very expensive though, especially compared to the great price we had gotten in Trinidade (R30 per night for a great ensuite room right on the beach). But eventually we found a nice place down one of the side streets who was prepared to haggle and so we settled in.

The island is famous for its many beaches, but it has no roads or cars at all (hurray!), so access to the beaches is either by hiking or by boat. So the following morning we head off on a hike, but we find another hostel offering cheap rooms. Sarah checks it out, and we decide to move as it´s a good bit cheaper. Turns out though that Sarah had misunderstood the owner (the price was per person, not per room!), and only after much fustrating negotiation we managed to get the same price as the first place. Anyway, after that wee debacle we hiked the 3 hours to one of the island´s most famous beaches, Lopes Mendez.

It was a great hike through lovely forest, and the hilly parts gave great views of the small offshore islands and the beaches. It passed by 3 or 4 lovely small beaches, each with a local hut or two selling cold drinks, so these were great resting points along the way during the heat of the day (the walk back only took 1 hour 45 minutes). These small beaches, and the main town, were all on the landward side of the island, and so all have very gentle waves washing the beaches. Lopes Mendez however is on the seaward side of the island, and so has stonger waves, making it difficult to land boats apparently, but much better for frollicking about in the water.

It´s a great beach alright, but I think I preferred the isolated beach at Trinidade. It was busy too, but not overly so, as the beach stretchs on for miles, so if you wanted isolation you just have to walk a bit. The beach has no development whatsover though, due to the restricted access, so it was very nice in that regard. And just after starting to hike back we came across a group of wild marmoset monkeys, and even though I know it's bad form, I couldn't help myself and just had to dig out a few crumbs from the wafer biscuits from our day bag and hand feed one of them (as they are definitely one of my favorite creatures, and this was the first time I'd ever encountered them in the wild (so another tick off the list)).

The following day I did a couple of scuba dives on the shores of a small offshore island, while Sarah came along for the day out and to do a bit of snorkeling. It was a long boat ride out, well over an hour, but the scenery was lovely and there were only 2 other Dutch divers, so the boat wasn´t crowded at all. Boths dives were very good - Lewis the divemaster was excellent. Although the other two divers were very inexperienced (one of the them frecked out completely and only managed to dive for a few minutes on his second attempt - he seemed very disappointed with himself afterwards, poor sod), Lewis would just send them up when they ran out of air and then continued diving with me.

Got to see some lovely rock formations, and a small wreck with a huge hermit crab living under it. We did a really cool cave swim through (the other inexperienced Dutch diver doing really well here I thought, as caves can be quite daunting), and a great cliff wall covered in small green coral growths, but by far the highlight was the totally mad looking rosy-lipped batfish, certainly the most usual looking creature I´ve ever seen, above or below water - it kinda walks on two legs and has a mad snout! Lewis was quite cheeky though, in that he would handle the animals, which of course you should never do. But it was amazing to get such a close up look at the batfish, and a brilliant tiny spider crab too (Lewis gave us all a CD with loads of photos he took during the dives, so hopefully they´ll capture something of their unusuallness).

So our last day on Ilha Grande we did some more hiking (trails T1 and T2). This time we went all the way to a cool waterfall, passing quite a few people who gave up looking for it and had turned back, although of course I would never do that! It was an impressive waterfall alright and worth the search, and we could have abseiled down it for a few quid, but we´d both now done-that-been-there. So after lunch near the waterfall we hiked back to some more small beaches before heading back to the town for dinner.

So all in all Ilha Grande is another great spot with great hiking options, but the town is a bit big for my liking and if I had to make a choice I´d definitely opt for Trinidade if I was looking to just chill out and relax for a few days.

So getting the morning ferry back to the mainland I had thought that it made more sense to make our way to Sao Paulo and from there get a bus directly to our next destination, Campo Grande (originally I was going to go back to Rio, but looking at a map it would have meant a bit of unecessary backtracking). So back in Angra it was time to check out buses to Sao Paulo.