Chapter II - Sick in/of the paradise

Salvador - Itaparica - Valença - Morro de São Paulo - Itacaré - Arraial D'Ajuda

Do you know what's worse than being sick? Being sick when it's 30 degrees warm and you are supposed to keep travelling. Sanni has been a little bit sick for a while now (already before the trip) and has gotten worse all the time. Probably because of the shared waterbottles and the amount of kissing each other we do (hehe), I'm now sick as well. We both annoy people around us with the constant coughing and sneezing. Last night also had a bit of a fever (DENGUE!) That's thankfully gone now. Yesterday we went to the pharmacy and bought some strange-looking pills and pink coughing syrup, which hopefully helps soon. We think the air conditioning is making things worse. We are trying to avoid them as much as possible. We sleep in a dorm now so the nightly ac on/off battle is on. Last night we lost, but Sanni got to use her underwear designed for cold outdoor activities (lämpökerrasto) and her sleeping bag. I slep with socks and long pants aswell. We hate the ac! But hey, on the sunny side, at lieast for now the tourist diarrhea hasn't hit us.

Yummy!

We counted them the other day - 28 only in the legs!

In the negative theme of our resent posts, we have to say that we still aren't loving it here. Brazil is bigger than the whole Europe so the areas are really different too. We are now in the state Bahia, which is full of beaches and tourists. In Salvador a friend of our host was all the time saying what a paradise Bahia is and didn't want to hear anything contradicting to his views. His opinion was that if you don't like something here, you should leave. Somehow I do understand his view about changing your life instead of complaining about it, but it just felt like he just loved the place blindly. Which is weird because he is an economy professor and very aware of the situation in Brazil and also because he has travelled and seen other places. Then again every time someone looks at us with a condesending look, every time we pay more because we are tourists and every time we wait for an hour to get really bad service, we love Finland more and more. Even though there have been places where we have felt very welcome, we do look forward to going more south and to other countries. This paradise is just not quite how ours look like. You can argue that this is the cough speaking and we admit that partly it is, but one of the reasons why we left was the search for who we are and where we belong and so far our search has been pointing towards Europe and Finland.

Suco de goiaba, uma delicia!

First time trying açai.

The deep analysis aside you probably want to know what we've been doing the last days. We left Salvador early in the morning to catch a boat to Itaparica, a beautiful island near Salvador. On that island we felt the paradise for the first time. We were greeted by a friend of my sister whose brother has an adventure firm called D'Aventera on the island. We got to try stand boarding and cayacked while watching the sun set. He has a really admireable business ethic. They neutralize all of their CO-admissions and give jobs to local youngsters giving them a chance in life. All of this was very surprising after the behaviour we had seen in Salvador and which we will discuss in a later post.

The best food so far: ultimately good and cost only 12 euros each!

From Itaparica we headed to Morro de São Paulo, an island everybody was telling us to go to. The trip included a car, two vans, a bus and a boat, and also a lot of trusting in strangers. We had no place to sleep and practically no money, because all of the ATMs (seriously all of them) stopped working during the long weekend. In the end we got into a crappy hostel that was very expensive and had worms on the walls. During the night Sanni got 20 mosquito bites. Because the ATMs didn't work the next day either, we had no place to stay for the next night and because the island was packed with tourists we decided to leave. With 40 reais (13 €) in our pockets we managed to get to the nearest city Valença, found an ATM that worked and got to continue our trip. We heard that the ATM problem was in the whole area, so the 300 reais we managed to get didn't help us much. Our next destination was Itacare, a beautiful town that was also packed with tourists, but that gave us a good feeling from the start. We managed to find a hostel with helpful and welcoming staff. There we met 2 nice guys who were going to drive to our next destination the next day. With the warning "don't trust anyone" in our heads we decided to delight them with our company. Trusting them was a good choice because they let us sleep in their car for the hours before sunrise. They only wanted 35 reais for the drive that would have costed us 60 by bus. We had been smart and reserved a room for the next 3 nights already in advance so now we are here in our hostel in Arraial D'Ajuda. It's a bit rainy so our plans to look less like tourists through getting the perfect tan might not happen. Then again Sanni burned herself sleeping in the shade on a clowdy morning. This place has WiFi but just our luck the WiFi is down in the whole area. But hey! We finally got some cash when the ATMs started working after 5 days. Next up Minas Gerais.

Yay, tourist havaianas (and ipanemas)!

In case you have dificulties identifying the "I" in the posts, check the name on the bottom of the text. We take turns writing (the other one shouting over the shoulder).