Ilha Excelente

As we pop-popped over the waves to Brazil’s Ilha Grande I sat knees knocking, watching as my bag inched its way towards the small gap separating it from the sea. Tom was grinning from ear to ear enjoying the belly-churning surf, while I was white-knuckled praying that my worldly goods might not be fish food. Will and way, they say, knuckles returned to pink as we pulled up - bag intact - to Abraao harbour. The boat was full of honeymooners, stoners and 20-something female friends hungry not just for food, which gave us an immediate indication of what the island might be about. We set foot with some trepidation.

Abraao town is the jumping off point for most tourists and our first discovery was that about one in twenty people here carry a boom box. It’s noisy, hot and reminiscent of Malaga in the early 2000s, except with telegraph poles tangled in wires and people pushing carts. Just a short, backpack-laden walk out of town and we went beyond the telegraph poles to find Pousada Mata Nativa (Mother Nature guesthouse) where we will spend the next three nights. Oh, Mother Nature was around for sure; house-size cacti, tutti-frutti birds flitting to and fro and fleshy orchids hugging tree trunks. Our room was very close to nature as well, with gaps around all doors and windows providing easy ingress for all things with more than 4 legs - reminding us of the importance of our no doubt ongoing love-affair with DEET [see previous blog].

Bags dumped, we walked back to town, not talking much as we tried to fathom Abraao. Majority Brazilian tourists filled the bars which spill on to streets, watching football and not wearing a lot. We immediately understood the quiet social instructions: take off 15 layers and get a drink. This in mind, we found ourselves a sea-front bar attractively adorned with tree lanterns and relaxed with, of all things, beetroot hummus and freshly baked bread…and of course £3.50 caipharinias. Bliss.

Breakfast at Mata Nativa was a fast highlight. Not just because I could restart my chair/buffet cycle (Tom this time joining me, cake beckoning), but because within five minutes of sitting down, I had spotted a hummingbird in the cactus. I shrieked to no one, Tom lost to the buffet, so excited that a neighbour had to get his teenage daughter to translate for me. ‘Hummingbird’, I said, pointing. Ah yes, she said sympathetically, we’ve seen loads of those, shrugged and returned to her breakfast. Beija Flor - humming bird in Portuguese - ‘flower kiss’.

Ilha Grande has two main attractions: hiking and beaching. We had landed on the island with every intention of hiking everywhere and leaving the taxi boats which circle the island to the amateurs. Sadly, we discovered that the hikes are almost all a minimum of 5 hour roundtrip and in 33 degree heat; it was just a no - so not sadly, we opted for taxi boats. After navigating the ‘rush hour’ of 10:30 at the Abraao harbour where the world, his wife and his 5 million relatives try to negotiate day trips, we somehow by apparent coincidence ended up on a boat going to the beach we had intended to: Lopes Mendes beach. Google it. It has accreditation as one of Brazil’s finest beaches (no doubt one of the many), with 3km of cloud-like white sand and the clearest, saphirest sea. It is so long that you can actually almost find solitude on it (save for a distant boom box or two which follow you like a bad smell), and you can starfish in the sea for hours without disturbance. A short hike from Praia Pouso gives access to this beach, and the walk is also pleasant; we spotted hand-sized Marmoset monkeys and blue manequin birds warbling in the trees. A final tip is that the pontoon at Praia Pouso serves lunch suspended over the perfect blue sea, where you can watch trumpet fish and dorys flit about whilst (ok, sacrilege) you eat their finely cooked relatives. Sorry about that observation, but it’s true and delicious.

We booked in another boat trip for day 2 to Las Ilhas Paradisicos (paradise islands), which lie 30 minutes by boat from Ilha grande. The first and best stop was Dentista beach, a truly remote desert island beach only accessible by this boat. We geared up in snorkels and flippers, and clopped fully-clad past the Brazilian insta-bootybabes and muscular trophy men taking shot after shot after shot. We thoroughly enjoyed watching the zebrafish and angelfish in the shallows, warm water wafting us to and fro with the gentle waves, and decided to go out a little further than the other bathers: call it a hunch. There awaited us a turtle, majestically scouring the rocks for nibbles, his intricate dinosaur skin purples and greens captivating us as we followed along. The beauty of the situation was enhanced only more by the fact that when we got back, the insta-crew were still at it, no one else had seen him. Truly a ‘put your phone down and switch off the music’ moment. That is what we are looking for and, in that moment, we had found it.

The rest of the paradise islands were pleasant, if a little oversubscribed. A notable highlight was Tom finding the (my) GoPro that he had dropped into the coral five minutes earlier. This was followed by an hour on another tiny (50mx50m) island which boasted a small beach bar from which we purchased two ice cold Brahma beers and sipped them waist deep in the sea. The boat then took us home via a predictably expensive restaurant where we invested in mocequa, a local coconut milk based fish stew.

For our final day on Ilha G, we finally mustered the courage to do a hike, and lo and behold, we were not let down. Leaving the town from the east side, we wound our way through the incredible hot box of a jungle, climbing a few hundred metres up and down to find a waterfall; a beautiful, idyllic place inevitably teeming with posing instagrammer (sort of) power couples, who don’t find the time to actually pause to look at the thing. In this moment, we came up with the title ‘instagram ruined reality’, coming soon to a blog near you. Thankfully instagram has yet to find Feiticiera beach; a little slice of paradise at the end of our hike. A beach just 50m long with a bar selling idyllic iced coco verde (green coconuts with a straw), and having not packed our swimmers we stripped to underwear, craving the waters to cool us off. We then did some hard earned relaxing until a taxi boat came by to take us back to Abraao where we began our wind down toward leaving the island that evening. Ilha Grande you performed, and we enjoyed the show. Thank you.