The Beach

Unfortunately, the hotel doesn't have AC or screens on the windows so we went to sleep in a hot, stuffy, room with a whole family of the terydactyl sized mosquitos I alluded to earlier. I went to bed in my underwear and woke up with my legs looking like I was in a zombie movie. They were covered in bites. I guess good think I was wearing underwear right? How bad would it have gotten if I had been completely naked? I don't want to even think of such an awful thing. We were going to go to "The Beach" today. It was also Sara's birthday. Have you seen the movie "The Beach" with Leonardo DiCaprio? Well,, in this movie, he and his friends go to a tropical island and are told about "The Beach", a remotely located beach that is more beautiful than any beach elsewhere. In the movie, things go sour for them but that's Hollywood for you. Our experience wasn't nearly as dramatic. But getting there still required a 1 hour boatride and a 30 minute hike over a mountain. But when you finally get there, you walk out from the trees out onto a beautiful beach. It's not quite like the movie since in the movie, they were the only ones to find it, but us and a few hundred people I guess is kinda similar. But it was a really beautiful beach. We hung out on the beach reading, tanning, or playing in the waves. Unfortunately, Tom was so excited to jump into the waves, he forgot he had his glasses on and 2 waves later…they were gone. Day 3, Justin's wallet and Tom's glasses gone. We're on a roll. We stayed there until 3pm then walked back over the mountain to catch the boat back to the other side of the island. Well, the weather and water conditions had changed significantly. I personally thought it was fun, but the boat was being hit by 8-10 foot swells. I was sitting with some Canadian girls so we chatted while getting hit with the occasional rogue wave and riding them like a roller coaster. At one point, I remember sitting on the right side of the boat (is that starboard or port?) and as we rode a wave, being able to look across the deck and was looking straight DOWN at the water. But I was still laughing at how fun it was. One of the Canadian girls was scared the boat might tip over, I felt badly that I was literally laughing. We made it back, now sopping wet, but alive. On the way back to the hotel, we stopped in at a local store and bought a bottle of rum to just have handy and went back to hotel to get cleaned up. While people were freshening up on their own time, I took the liberty to take the bottle of rum we just picked up and a bottle of Coke I had bought the day before and head to the pool (which was right next to our room). Along the way, I knocked on people's doors to let them know where I was heading and to join when ready. Elizabeth was already there reading a book so we chatted for a few until others arrived. I think we started at about 5 and 3 hours later, we had finished that bottle, the rest of the bottle from Ipanema we had bought with Sam, and Andrew and I even walked back down the hill to the store to buy another. It was a lot of fun. We sat around the pool, playing songs off our iPods and laughing at each other's "closet" music collections (ie, yes, I really do have Kelly Clarkson and Jessica Simpson). It was during this time that I was introduced to what became my new favorite snack... Baconzitos. Bacon flavored chips. How brilliant is that?

We had dinner reservations for 8pm to celebrate Sara's birthday so we packed up and walked back to town to try some real Brazillian food. Brazillian dishes are large and are often made for 2 so Andrew and I tried a fried fish with shrimp in a tomato based sauce dish over rice. It wasn't bad except the fish had bones in it so you had to be careful. I liked the flavor quite a bit. Dinners down there tend to last for a while (3-4 HOURS) because service is often slow and having a group of 13 doesn't help speed things up any so by the time we finished it was well past 12. I had drank my fair share between the rum and cokes at the pool and the few large beers we shared with dinner so I decided to head back to the hotel instead of going back to the hostel from the previous night (even though I got a text from Lydia telling me the aforementioned Canadians were actually staying at that same hostel and were asking where I was and if I was coming.)