Petropolis, Buzios & Itacoatiara

After we said a sad goodbye to Dean and Kam, the rest of us picked up our hire car and Pa drove us up and around the winding mountains to Petropolis (the former Imperial Capital).

The town is lovely and very scenic with canals running through it and mountains all around.

We found a great hotel overlooking a lake and a stunning old Colonial building...

We spent a couple of days here chilling around the pool and seeing the sights before heading onto Buzios a couple of hours up the coast.

Bumpy Buzios as we called it because every road has unmarked and sporadic speed bumps that you can only see when you're just about to go over them, which made the journeys pretty funny! It's on a peninsula and we spent some time seeing as many of the 17 beaches as we could - not an easy task as there are hardly any road signs and many are along dirt tracks.

This is the view from a look out point at one of the bays...

When we left Buzios we headed back along the coast in the direction of Rio looking for somewhere to stop for a night or two but everywhere was pretty deserted. We ended up getting all the way to Niteroi which is where the bridge goes into Rio. We didn't have any ideas about where to stay so we just headed for one of the beaches (in the chaotic rush-hour traffic!), but couldn't find a single hotel once we'd got there. We were at a total loss so we stopped and asked some police if they knew of a hotel nearby. One of them drove off to look for one for us, then came back and gave us a police escort to it! It turned out to be a stunning boutique hotel (far too expensive for us backpackers but we decided to treat ourselves with some birthday money I'd got!). The owners made us feel like we were the only people there and we loved it so much we stayed 2 nights enjoying the pool, steam room, garden, food etc!

The breakfast was huge....

Enjoying a nice glass of wine on my hammock....

It was a perfect way to end our trip with Mum & Dad before dragging ourselves back to the real backpacker lifestyle!

We decided that after all of our swanning around in expensive hotels we would do a hardcore bus journey all the way to Belem in the North of Brazil. It was about 2000 miles and FIFTY TWO hours! It wasn't actually too bad, we stopped a lot along the way at some nice per-kilo restaurants (where you pay for your food by the weight) and we saw some interesting towns along the way ....

Plus I was too sad after Mum and Dad left to do anything more than watch films and sleep anyway!