Ilha Grande & Paraty, Brazil
It´s been an interesting week. On the last day or two of Rio I caught a bug which got progressively worse and worse and resulted in a trip to the hospital yesterday. I´ll spare you the gory details. Yesterday when we got to Paraty the tour leader, Martin, took me off to the hospital. Seeing a doctor who could only speak Portuguese was rather amusing and resembled a game of actionary. Luckily I am on the tour now so I had Martin to come with me. He is fluent in Spanish and can get by in Portuguese, so that did help a lot. The hospital was a converted house, the waiting room was a row of chairs outside. I waited my turn to see the doctor who suggested an antibiotic and a drip. I then waited again for the nurse who after much prodding and pricking managed to find a vein and get the IV line in. Once again I caused some amusement at the hospital when I asked to check the needle as I just wanted to check that it was sealed and hadn´t been used before. The doctors and nurses found this very funny. I was sat down on a chair where they first injected an antibiotic and then connected me to a drip. Who knows what was in the antibiotic as I suddenly felt completely nauseous and faint, and my vision vanished. I honestly thought I was going to pass out. They came running and two nurses and a doctor lifted me and moved me to a bed. It took about 10 minutes to pass, and then I just lay there for another half an hour on the drip. Apparently it´s an expected side effect - not that I would have understood if they had told me about it! The good news is that last night I managed to eat, so looks like I am on the mend. It should be 3-4 days until I am completely better.
On Wednesday we met up with our tour group that we are travelling to Buenos Aires with. There are 10 of us - 9 girls and 1 guy, plus our tour leader Martin who is from Peru! There are 5 of us that are going on the whole trip together. The rest of the group will change as we go along, and from BA we will be a group of 15. They all seem very nice so far.
From Rio we headed off to Ilha Grande (which literally means Big Island). We took a bus and a boat to get there. It´s a national conservation site and there are no roads or cars on the whole island. There are only 2 ways to get around - by boat or by foot through the jungle. We stayed in these awesome bungalows at the top of the port town (all 3 roads of it) in the jungle.
On Friday we took a boat trip to the most beautiful beach called Lopes Mendes. We spent the day there, lying on the beach and swimming. On Saturday we spent the day on a boat motoring around the island. We stopped off a few times to swim and snorkel around the boat. We also stopped off at a few different beaches, and for lunch at one beach (it looked really good - all freshly caught seafood, but I of course didn´t eat anything).
All in all Ilha Grande was really great, although I didn´t get to enjoy it as much as I would have liked to.
Yesterday morning we took a ferry back to the mainland and then a bus to Paraty which is a Heritage site. It´s a beautiful old town which I am going to go explore this afternoon. We are staying on the outskirts of the historical centre, which is really quaint and pretty.
Tomorrow we head off on a 24 hour journey to the Iguassu Falls on the border of Brazil and Argentina.
