Ilhabela - Jan 20th-22nd

Ilhabela (Beautiful Island) is about 4 hours South East of Sao Paulo. It has lots of mountains, waterfalls and beautiful beaches and about 85% of the island is a national park. Building is only allowed on the West Coast, facing into the mainland. There's a beach on the eastern side of the island which you can only get to by boat or by 4-wheel drive car along a track that goes through the centre of the island. Ilhabela is very popular as a weekend and holiday place for Paulistanos (people from Sao Paulo), like my friend's family who I went to stay with. 

We left Sao Paulo on Friday afternoon and came back on Sunday.  There was a lot of traffic leaving SP, so we arrived quite late on Friday night, but we had a full day on Saturday and the weather was great. We went to small (and quiet!) Veloso beach first for swimming and kayaking, then to Curral beach for Lula (squid) and cerveja (beer) at Papagaia bar. The options were squid with garlic or deep fried - I tried both but thought deep fried was best!

We played a couple of games of badminton when we got back to the house. You have to watch out when you're on the grass as there are these horrible bugs called 'borrachudos' which live there and bite you if you don't put on copious amounts of insect repellant (I had none on when I started playing badminton and it didn't take long for me to get a good few bites on my feet and legs!). 

My friend's family is English-Brazilian and it was nice to do some British things eg. drink tea in the afternoon, mixed up with other traditions - we had brownies (in true American fashion) with the tea and, in keeping with Brazilian tradition, we had a 'churrasco' (barbecue) in the evening.    We were invaded by bugs partway through the barbecue, which turned out to be quite funny - particularly when trying to get rid of the bugs with a tennis racket type thing which fried them on contact (not sure about the morality of this). 

We went snorkelling in the morning on the Sunday – there were a couple of turtles but I wasn't fast enough to see them sadly. Couldn't flip the flippers fast enough. Then we headed back to Sao Paulo, stopping for lunch at a restaurant which served traditional food from Minas - heavy food with lots of meat, beans, rice, mandioca but perfect given that I was really hungry following the snorkelling.