Bad Case of Wanderlust (My Trip Around the World): Ilha Grande, Day 1 (Jan 7th)

At 5:30am the following morning, I was forced to wake the owner of my second Buzios hostel because I had forgotten to check out the night before. He uttered not a word of complaint, which I greatly appreciated, but by the time he had woken, dressed, and checked me out, I was cutting it perilously close to missing my bus to Rio. I hauled ass down to the station, only to find the bus waiting and the ticket office delayed in opening. A group of ten of us huddled outside the the building and watched the staff slooooowly deal with some issue with the air conditioner before they finally admitted us and sold us our tickets.

The bus ride itself flew by, and I slept through most of it. Unfortunately, I snoozed so soundly that my seatmate had to physically rouse me, and in my stupor and my hurry to collect my things and make it to the ticket counter for my next bus, I must have dropped my eye mask. I spent the next bus ride in mourning for my beloved sleep aid, a composite of two manufactured covers which my mother had sewn together for me into the perfect eye mask. And I had lost it. Boo.

I discovered on the trip, however, that much of the loneliness that had plagued me in Rio had dissipated. I still missed the sound of James unconsciously singing to himself, as he so often did on our bus rides together, and I thought of him, smilingly, as I suffered through my second tedious 20-min bus-driver snack stop of the day. "Inexplicable faffing!", he would have said. (Faffing is a British term signifying actions which waste time. He had decided that "Inexplicable Faffing" would make an excellent band name. I heartily agree.) But despite this, I felt far less lonely leaving Buzios than I had arriving there.

Unfortunately, said faffing had delayed our arrival at Armacao de ______, the port town closest to Ilha Grande, so I missed the last ferry of the day and had to pay to take a catamaran instead. I bought my ticket at the bus terminal and hauled my bags to the street to try to catch a bus to the dock. I
asked directions from a young Brazilian couple getting into a pickup truck, who kindly offered me a ride. I threw my bags on the flatbed and squished myself into the cab with them. They were adorable, and seemed to think my my Portuguese was good for an American just because I could say, "I bought a ticket."

They dropped me off at the harbor, with my thanks; I grabbed some snacks from the local supermarket, had some lunch out of a market stall, and finally boarded the catamaran. An hour and 45 minutes later, I stepped onto the dock at Ilha Grande. Sadly, I had missed the blue skies, so prevalent earlier in the day. By the time I arrived, the view was lovely, but decidedly overcast.

I wandered over the dirt roads to Biegarten hostel, where I had a wonderfully sunny room.

That evening, I had dinner with my roommate, who strangely enough had also been my roommate for one night in Rio, and a few of his friends. Afterward, I returned to discover that the rest of our tiny 13-person dorm was occupied by more people from Che Legarto in Rio: a group of eight Argentinian guys.

When they discovered that I was a singer, they insisted that I serenade them, and I obliged. In fact, they proved such a receptive audience that I ended up singing bits and pieces of songs they requested. When the romantic of the bunch (on the right) asked that I close out the evening with a bit of "I Will Always Love You", I barely made it through for giggling at his possibly real, possibly put-on tears.