As the weather was already quite rainy in Rio and is expected to get worse over the next few days, we put our plan to travel to the car-free island of Ilha Grande on hold and head straight on to our next destination: Paraty. A small colonial town and starting point for exploring the bay in which Ilha Grande is located by boat.

The bus takes a little longer than planned, so we don’t arrive until late afternoon, but we find a very cute little hostel right on the small river through the town. From here we could hop on a small boat and take a tour of the bay, the captain happened to be at the hostel and explained the tour to us. As it sounds nice and is not too expensive, we book directly for the next day and then stroll a little through the “streets” – they are more like freely laid stones – in the small town.

The next morning we wait for the captain, as the tour was due to start at 10:30, but no one is in sight. After 15 minutes, we ask at reception and the young lady at the desk is flabbergasted because the tour has been canceled and she didn’t know about our booking (her colleague the day before must have messed something up…). As we had already paid and wanted to continue the next day, rescheduling or refunding our money was not really an option, so she quickly booked us another tour. However, by the time this is all communicated, it’s 11am and we still have to walk halfway across the city to the pier… and the tour starts at 11am (+10 minute buffer)… Well, we try it and “run” in flip-flops across the “streets” to the pier. When we arrive, we see that the boat has already left the pier. We walk on anyway and speak to a local. He whistles twice and one of the employees on the boat hops into a speedboat and picks us up from the pier… It was funny, but we could have saved ourselves the stress

The tour is then very relaxed, we chug by boat to various bays, lie on the beach, go snorkeling or slide down the boat slide into the clear water. We end the evening in a nice vegan restaurant and book the bus to the “alternative island” of Ilhabela off Sao Paulo for the next morning!