Florianopolis Trip

Once again, this took me an inordinately long time to get up... but here we go!

A few friends (Connor, Moriah, Maria, Amanda, Litonya) and I traveled to the island of Santa Catarina (commonly referred to by the name of its largest city - Florianopolis) for a few days.



We (Connor, Moriah, Amanda, Litonya and I - Maria had wisely planned ahead and bought a plane ticket a while before) initially planned on renting a car and making the drive there ourselves, as we figured it would allow us much more freedom, lend to more adventures, be less expensive than bus-ing and definitely take less time than the 18 hours that the bus would. When we went to pick up the car the morning we planned on leaving, we all (except Litonya) found ourselves with pretty cold feet. We realized:

1. It would wind up being significantly more expensive than the bus, even without counting gas
2. It would probably take about the same amount of time as the bus... especially when factoring in Getting-Lost time
3. At least 1 (ideally 2) people in addition to the driver would have to be awake the entire time to navigate
4. The map was fantastically complicated-looking
5. We'd have to drive the length of a very dangerous highway in Rio

We decided to follow our guts, backed out on the car and headed to the bus station. Mind, now, that yours truly was operating on about 4 hours of sleep, having attended a Fatboy Slim concert until near-dawn the night before we agreed to meet at 9:00am. Basically, the day wound up being an absolute mess. We didn't realize that we had to tell the bus driver we wanted to go to the bus station (the placard on the front windshield said he stopped there... apparently this was some sort of special bus), so took a nice 45-minute detour to the international airport; through some sort of mess of mis-communication, we wound up in an illegal taxi with one of the sketchiest human beings I've ever interacted with behind the wheel; we got caught in one of the most torrential rain-storms I've seen since being to Brazil while killing time before our bus left; and the grand finale was when, due to the difficulty we were having hailing a cab to return to the bus station, Amanda and Moriah decided to try to catch a cab in the middle of the street (the torrential rain storm continuing around us) - which they manage to do successfully, despite the angry honkings of the cars we're creating traffic for - but which Connor objects to so strongly that he crosses to the other sidewalk to demand to be picked up there, only to step on a loose man-hole cover and completely soak his left leg in sewer-water.
And then we got on the bus for 18 hours.

Anyway, the rest of the trip was pretty fantastic. We rented a car when we got to the island, so we got to do a good amount of exploring. We slept for pretty cheap ($8US one night) and I saw/experienced some of the most beautiful sights/things in my life.
Most of the pictures in the accompanying album are from the day we spent on the south of the island. The several hours we were there were the highlight of the trip to me, and will stick with me for a long long time.
We went to a pretty abandoned beach at the very south of the island (the south is the least inhabited/touristy - mostly just little fishing villages) - actually the most southern beach you can reach by car. From there we hiked up a pretty well-used path which went up and over a hill and dropped us on a completely uninhabited (and incredibly beautiful) beach (see pictures of me standing on a big rock). The only people we saw actually inhabiting this entire area were a family who lived in a little house overlooking the beach with an attached bar. We chatted them with a bit and found that they live there year-round. An existence I don't think I would mind too much.
Anyway, I think the pictures do most of the talking!

Florianopolis Trip