My Last 2 Trips...in Bahia

The last weeks have flown by in a mix of fun and cramming (for school). My last two weekends were spent at a festival at a country town and in a jungle beach town respectively. In the first town, the have been having this huge party that was supposedly about something religious but I didn’t see any pious activities going on. The party started at 5:00…in the morning and was still raging when we left around lunchtime. I was out for the count by 10:00 Am. It was literally a bunch of people packed into the streets dancing and following a band around playing music. When everyone reached one side of the town, the just turned around and went back the other direction. There was also dudes painted red running around everywhere trying to get paint on you and, of course, and the abundance of cross dressers that appear at every festival here. The highlight of this trip for me though was wiping my eyes on the steps of the hotel at five in the morning when one of my professors came up like “You guys are missing the party come on!”. We followed him as he took his shirt off and started spinning it in the crowd and informed us “I can’t really speak English right now, sorry”. It was a wild time.

The next weekend proved to be even cooler. Some friends and I went to the aforementioned jungle beach town of Itacare in the south of Bahia. Itacare is one of the last places where the forests along the coast weren’t cut down and the trees came right up to the beach. The beaches were white sand, practically deserted, great for surfing and overall beautiful. The first day, I didn’t have a surfboard and a lifeguard tried to save me while I was boogie boarding. I was trying to explain to him that I didn’t need help and we were just arguing in the water until a wave came and I went in and he followed me and was still trying to save me. It was pretty funny, but regrettable on my part because the same thing happened to my friend Carlos twenty minutes earlier and I was making fun of him pretty bad. The next day I went on a river rafting trip through the middle of the jungle. The rapids were way more intense than I thought they would be and we stopped to jump off high rock cliffs and go ziplining too. It was an awesome trip. Our final day there, we hiked through the jungle to a beach an hour away. I felt like I was in the rainforest café, it was SO cool. There were vines hanging down and waterfalls going off right next to the little path cut out through the trees. Sometimes the path would disappear over big gapes and we crossed walking along the water pipes. The beach was awesome; I rented a surfboard and stayed out all day. Another thing that made this trip fun was that a dog from the hostel we found followed us around all weekend. We had some intense hikes but he always came, it was kind of cool. I only wish I didn’t have to leave.