After events at the weekend, I couldn´t help feeling that Rio was telling me something: to get away from it for a few days. So that's what I´ve done, with Nicole and Julian, Australian friends I met earlier in the trip.
We travelled out of the city by bus for three hours, along the Costa Verde, a beautiful jungle-cloaked coastline of mountains, beaches, bays and islands. A further hour and a half by boat from the harbour of Angra dos Reis and we reached another world.
Ilha Grande is a mountainous, tropical island of unspoilt beauty. Its history as a pirates' hideaway, a leper colony and a prison for the country's most dangerous, means it was never developed or its resources exploited.
Ilha Grande is a mountainous, tropical island of unspoilt beauty. Its history as a pirates' hideaway, a leper colony and a prison for the country's most dangerous, means it was never developed or its resources exploited.
Today, it remains almost entirely covered in protected virgin rainforest and, with 102 pristine beaches (one of which is regarded as the best in Brasil), is a little piece of heaven. Wisps of cloud cloak the tops of the peaks, eagles soar overhead and hummingbirds whirr outside the window of where we're staying, sipping nectar from the orchids growing wild opposite.
With no cars, the pace of life is barefoot, sand-between-the-toes sleepy, and it's bliss.
With no cars, the pace of life is barefoot, sand-between-the-toes sleepy, and it's bliss.
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