Quite the Adventures

Last weekend we had a long weekend due to a Catholic holiday so we decided to venture outside of our comfort zone. We planned a trip to the island of Ilha Grande with the two other American teachers at the school. The island was about three hours away, two hours in a van and one on a boat. We took some time to just hang out on the beach but spent most of the weekend on a boat touring around. The majority of the island is forest. We did two different boat tours. The first one was of the south side of the island, which is open ocean. These were mostly beaches where we would just jump out of the boat and float around. The second tour we did was of the north side and was only two major stops but the main attraction was a snorkeling area. This is where we spent most of the day and had a lot of fun swimming with the fish. My favorite part of the weekend was the hike we did to the highest point on the island. Our guide was incredibly friendly and clearly just loves living life on the island. Unfortunately it was very cloudy and we could not see the sunrise but it was still 100% worth it to hike up to the top in the middle of the night.

Lucky for us we were also able to celebrate teacher’s day this with a nice day off. I think we should start to make this holiday a big deal in the states…just saying, the kids and parents treated everyone like gods the entire day before. We decided to celebrate by running off a cliff called Pedra Bonita. We went hang gliding to see a bird’s eye view of the coast. I would do this 100 times over again. One of the coolest experiences ever.

This weekend we kept pretty low key to recover from all of our adventures. It also was raining most of the weekend. We did venture out this morning because Erin found a ‘diner’ called Gringo’s café, which served a typical American breakfast, along with other diner like food. It hit the spot. Sometimes we just want eggs and sausage (with a side of mac and cheese) for breakfast instead of bread and butter. Looking forward to some more crazy adventures.

The little tiny peak sticking up in the middle is what we climbed.