WEATHER: Hot and 35C
HIGHLIGHT OF THE DAY: Getting to the coast and beaches
BUMMER OF THE DAY: Rain rain go away
WORD OF THE DAY: Upgrades?
Truck day. Truck day. Truck day. After yesterday, anything shorter than 10 hours is a good day. The night’s sleep was disruptive with trucks coming and going all night, funny that it is a truck stop, and then the truck garage opened at some godly hour and started the pneumatic nut tool thing and pretty much woke everyone up before time. I still think that the facilities from the truck stop out weight the noise from the night. General consensus was not much sleep was had, but we can sleep on the truck, so toughen up people. The nights are also cooler at 22C, so once you have stopped moving it makes for a comfortable sleeping temperature.
So on the road again and still no news from Tucan, but it is still the weekend, tomorrow will be the day and they HAVE to get back to me right? I have flights to book and things to arrange and not knowing is killing me. Geez I hate the whole situation, but the mire I think about the credit the more I am liking my plan B and Mark and the South American manager seem to think it will also be okay, so I think we are going to come out of this okay. Just waiting on the word from the top.
We had lunch by the beach, it wasn’t a great day as it was sprinkling rain, but it is starting to feel a lot like Rio and the Brazil that people think of when you say Rio. We are now starting to see all sorts of body types on the beach wearing all sorts of swim costumes, this is Brazil after all and even though I love the body is beautiful theory, I am just not sure if the larger person should be in a Brazilian bikini, but then this could also be a western form of thinking and what has just been drilled into our society with advertising and self-image. Kudos to them if they are comfortable in their own skin to be comfortable to get into one. The pavement was also the same that you find in Copacabana Beach, so it is getting exciting we will be in Rio in less than 5 days.
I need to also get my head around that I am possibly leaving the tour and not coming back this year. This could be my second last truck day, it could be my last tent pitch and I need to also start thinking about what crap I have on the truck and how I am going to move it all around, send back home and leave behind. To think I still had 3 months on the truck to now only possibly having 4 days is a big thing to get my head around.
Since we had put in some long hours yesterday and getting an early start this morning at 7am we made good time and arrived into Paraty at 3.30pm. There were some ominous black clouds hanging around when we arrived so we got our tents up quick smart so we could get our flies on before the heavens opened. The good thing also doing the 2 long days is we got to the camp site before the other groups to get a pick of the spots to set up rather than taking what was left. Apparently there will be another 2 Tucan trucks joining us, and a few other companies like Kumuka and Dragoman apparently always turn up here as well.
It is a pretty basic camp site, there is no communal room, no Wi-Fi, no pool but the upside is we are 50m from the beach and they have 15 showers and 15 toilets that were all in working order. Tucan is quite friendly with a hostel down the road where some of their other groups stay, so they will take pit laundry for us, 20 pesos for 25 pieces, and we can use their Wi-Fi as well. So what we lacked at the camp site we still access to 10 minutes down the road. While we were here we booked a day cruise for tomorrow. WE would have liked to have done it in a few days’ time, but the cruise was full, so tomorrow it was and we ended up taking the all you can drink caipirinha’s (dangerous) option and included lunch (smart) option. We were just hoping the weather would hold out as we had checked a few days ago and it was supposed to be raining the whole time we were here. Last year everyone upgraded as the rain didn’t let up for the whole 3 days they were here. That would be disappointing. And as on queue the heaven opened and it started to belt down rain. We made a dash for camp and with this in mind 4 people decided to upgrade pre-empting the run for beds should the rain keep up tomorrow.
After dinner some people went back to the hostel for drinks, I couldn’t be bothered it was still pissing down outside, so I curled up on one of the chairs in the truck and got stuck into John Grisham’s latest novel so that I could finish it and give it to Sven by the end of the trip. I just hope the tent was coping with all the rain as it hadn’t really let up all afternoon and by the time we went to bed. We were lucky there was just a small puddle around the base of one of the poles, so the water must be coming in via one of the seams. Nothing a towel didn’t fix.
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