But WHY won't the beer boat let us hitch a ride...?

A nice, welcoming start to my non-totally-zonked time on Ilha Grande - breakfast at Overnativa being the usual Brasilian combination of rolls, ham and cheese, cereals, fruits, coffee, tea, juice (and many places also have cake...). After feeding myself up, I joined p with Paula and Marija for the walk we had decided on the previous night - we were going north out of Abraao town, up to the Cachoeira de Fetceira, a waterfall in the hills outside town, and then on to some of the beaches furthere north from there, where we would catch a boat back to town. And that's largely how it all worked out - we grabbed some supplies from the little supermarket in town, and headed out, past the beaches of town and on into the hills (for Ilha Grande is nothing if not hilly). Having made the amusing discovery that Marija hates going downhill about as much as I hate going uphill, we first hiked, then scrambled up to the brink of the waterfall. And it was pretty, albeit perhaps after all the effort to get there I was left with the treacherous thought that perhaps it could have been a teeny bit prettier. After a bit of a swim to cool off, and a quick semblance of a back-rub from the waters, and a brief goggle at the intrepid souls abseiling down the face of the cachoeira, we headed back off, down the hill towards the beaches.

We had a gloriously chilled out hour or so mucking about on the beach, before deciding to walk on to the small village of Saco do Ceu, at theend of a long bay on the north side of the island. Only when we got there, and Paual got involved haggling with the local boat captains, did we realise our error, as this is not on the usual boat routes so anybody taking us back from there would be going out of their way and would charge accordingly. So we trudged back a couple of beaches (and half an hour or so) to Praia Defora, where we unfortunately failed to hitch passage on the boat delivering beer to all the settlements on the island (I was deeply distressed at this) but Paula did manage to get us on another little boat which was heading back to Abraao, at a cost of the princely sum of 10 Reais each (about 3 quid).

That evening, we availed ourselves once again of Christina's home cooking at the hostel, I watched part of Troy (which was surprisingly good, although taking rather a lot of liberties with the timeline of the original Homer...), then we headed out so that Paula could get some braidwork done in her hair and the other girls could browse the souvenir shops by the pier (the downside of hanging around with a group consisting very heavily of girls...), made a brief detour into a bar that had a band playing some live samba music, and ended up back at the hostel, where Paula, Angela, Camila, the nightwatchman and I ended up watching Mamma Mia (also better than I had expected it to be...).