The 15th of November is in Brazil national holiday. This year it was a Tuesday and if there is a national holiday on Tuesday, it normally means that Monday is free too. When my company sent a round mail to their employees telling that there will be long weekend, I was sure that we have to organize something, to go somewhere which is more far away and where it was better to go for some more days. The choice was Floraniopolis at Ihla Catarina, around 800KM north of Sao Paulo. I knew that it was necessary to organize something if we want to go there, because normally on the national holiday almost the whole city tries to escape to the beach and to their families.
Over croweded bus station in Sao Paulo
Finally we were 9 trainees going to Florianopolis: 4 Germans (including me) 2 Venezuelans, 2 Colombians and one English guy. We traveled in two groups to our destination because we could not manage to get in the same bus, due the very so fast booked out. Our bus was supposed to leave Sao Paulo at 23:16 but as I said, the whole city tries to escape, so also by bus too. The bus terminal was super full. The English guy arrived according some communication problems one hour before us and he said that it was almost impossible to walk. On our platform we realized that our bus will be probably late, because it was full of people and one bus, which was supposed to leave at 21:30 was still boarding. Our bus was leaving Sao Paulo with a delay of 90 minutes and after a while we stuck in a massive traffic jam that it was sure that we won’t arrive at 9:30 in the morning in Florianopolis. Instead we were at 9:30 still 300 KM north of Florianopolis. On a bus stop I watched out the window and realized that someone but my backpack from our bus to another bus. WTF! Whats going on?! But our bus had some problems so we changed to another one.
View from the bar to the bay Barra da Lagoa
We arrived at 14:00 in Florianopolis. Our hostel was on the other end of the island, so we needed to take some local bus, but I showed some navigation skills and I helped my group finding the hostel easily. The weather was not that nice, it was super cloudy. But the hostel was awesome! Right next to the beach with a great with to the big beach Praia Barra da Lagoa. The best thing was, that the hostel had surfboards and wetsuits free for rent. Wetsuits were necessary due the water was more cold than the water of the beaches of Sao Paulo and the sun should not come out for all of our stay in Florianopolis.
So we went almost every day to the beach for surfing. On the evening we enjoyed the free Caipirinha on the bar with view to the bay and after that the delicious dinner of the chef of the hostel. After dinner we most of the time played some drinking games, or made our own Caipirinha. Even when it was not allowed to bring their own alcoholic drinks to the hostel, but the staff was very friendly and was not caring about that, if we at least were cleaning the mess after it. Once I was loosing a game and the penalty was to go naked to the ocean. I thought, okay well, the beach is kind of far away and dark so nobody would care. Well when I was undressed there was a big light wit moving sensor was turned on and I realized that I was right next to a restaurant and naked 😀 So I was running as fast as possible and hope that the water is not that cold it looks not that poor when I going to leave the sea… The restaurant turned out to be a Samba bar were we went later on, but I changed my shirt and nobody was laughing at me. Instead I was dancing whole night long with my friends…
Maria Alejandra, Daniella, Me and Maria Fernanda (left to right)
The best way to avoid a hangover on the next day is to start the day with a bath in the sea. I was the only one, because it turned kind of cold and rainy. But I didn’t care and after it I was feeling like new born. Well and if you stay on the beach you become kind of lazy, that we most of the time didn’t do more than surfing and chilling on the beach. Or we had some nice shrimp meal. Sometimes there was a touch of some that I got at least a bit brown skin…
We only try to discover one day the island. But this day was the most rainy and cold one so that we most of the time caught random local buses and went from one bus terminal to another one to have lunch in a restaurant on the other end of the island. This day was also our last day and we had to hurry to catch our bus back to Sao Paulo. So we were pretty happy that we caught the right local bus back to our hostel, but when we’ve been inside we realized that one of us was missing. Maria Alexandra was still in the bathroom and we almost forgot her on the bus terminal, so we screamed stoop to the bus driver and we could enjoy some more beautiful minutes on a random terminal in the middle of nowhere 😉
We arrived in Sao Paulo only one hour late at 7:30 the next morning, so there was only time to get changed at home, put all the dirty stuff in the laundry and went straight to work. I was very tired this day but I really was happy when I was looking back to our trip. Even if the weather sucked a lot, I had a really great time with my friends and decided that I definitely should surf more in my next weeks in Brazil…
Mathi,
Make sure you will go back to Floripa when it is warmer! And just spend a few more days at Ilha Santa Catarina and compare it to the Carribean you already know … should be close…
Abraço