Pedra Azul

March 2023

Our Airbnb retreat and the Lizard Rock

After 2 weeks on the farm, our tired bodies needed some rest, so we treated ourselves to some luxury: 2 nights in a beautiful, remote, and tranquil Airbnb in an area called Domingos Martins. However, as usual, our journey wasn't so straightforward...we dragged Pedro up steep, cobbled hills, full of tyre-bursting potholes, then down 5km of dirt road. Justin was also recovering from sinusitis and Em had sudden onset "I think fluid is going to come out the top or bottom end" syndrome. We arrived in one piece and crossed our fingers that there wouldn't be any heavy rain while we were there which would turn the dirt road to mush and make it very difficult to leave again. 

Our Airbnb had a pool, terrace, outdoor kitchen, and amazing views. It was easy to decompress. We ate well and were finally able to capture some photos of a clear, dark night sky. Justin also managed to get his clearest shot of a Glittering-bellied Emerald hummingbird. Ironically it just appeared right in front of him and let him take the shot, unlike the many others to date that he patiently waited to snap as they wizz around at a million miles per hour.

We were sharing the common area with a Brazilian couple that kept to themselves, so we got the peaceful retreat we were after. As a bonus, while we were there, we managed to tick off a few maintenance tasks that were very needed - fully cleaning out our grey water tank, wee tank, and washing clothes (in the shower!).

As we left, refreshed and rested, the lack of rain meant a smooth exit the same way we came in, and we headed off on the next leg of our trip, further inland to Pedra Azul.

Pedra Azul - Lizard Rock

The national park was the main attraction in town, but we weren't aware of the booking system, so without any free slots for the next 2 days, and a lot of rain forecast, we had to entertain ourselves another way. Turned out this was quite easy. Although a very small town, it was well equipped with one of everything. We went to Pepe's Patisserie, an amazing French cafe in the most unlikely of places down a dirt track for coffee and cake for lunch (we're adults, who's going to stop us?). Our time waiting in town was spent shopping, working out at the very poor free outdoor gym, sampling coffee shops, visiting an animal conservation zoo, and visiting nearby waterfalls. We tried to go strawberry picking which is a big draw for this region apparently but that wasn't in season. Our nights were spent parked up at the edge of a well-equipped Petrobras gas station, with a free shower, the town's fanciest restaurant attached and with a great view of the Pedra Azul rock. The staff became very familiar with us over the 4 days we spent there!

The conservation zoo was a pleasant surprise. They rescue injured animals/circus animals/exotic pets and rehabilitate them, however, most are in a state to never be released into the wild. The best part was a huge enclosure full of exotic birds, like toucans and parrots, that you can go inside and they fly right past you. The animals that can maim you like pumas, jaguars, caimans, and monkeys thankfully are inside their own enclosure. The stars of the show were the jaguars, one of which was black and absolutely stunning, its spots only visible when the sun shone on its fur. We are hoping to see wild jaguars (and much more wildlife) in a few months when we return to Brazil to tour the Pantanal!

Finally, a blue sky morning arrived and we rushed up the 2km track to the park entrance for Pedra Azul. The weather was still forecast to be stormy which must have put people off as we had the park to ourselves! The hike was only 2km to the top, about 400m of which was a climb assisted by a rope anchored into the rock. We saw Gilt-edged Tanagers, Guans, and lots of lizards. As we walked through the initial dense jungle, the rock peaked out at us from different angles showing its many faces. At the top, we were rewarded with natural pools with a view over the town below. After a soak in the cool water, we descended back through the forest, happy that we eventually got up the rock! 

That evening we tried out a nearby brewery, and at dinner, we had one of the best Google translate errors yet. For context, Em had ordered a steak, and the waitress showed us her phone that read "the Lord who has the best roast meat". Not being able to control ourselves, we burst out laughing whilst breathlessly trying to explain that we weren't laughing at her. We think she was just asking if the steak was cooked as desired. Yes, yes it was. 

Parque Nacional del Caparao

April 2023

We finally left our Petrobras home to head to Parque Nacional do Caparao. The last 17km of the drive was dirt road, but it was in very good condition compared to what we've driven elsewhere, and it was a good job it was because the hills were incredibly steep (as always). We arrived at our home for the next few days, a lovely little forest campsite with a crystal clear river running through it that we immediately jumped in. Pedro, being slightly thick-set, didn't quite fit where they recommended we park, so after our protests they did some landscaping to clear a path for us to park. People really can't do enough for you here.

The next day we relaxed around the campsite, swimming in the river, birdwatching, and trying to befriend all of the owners' dogs. In the afternoon we visited Poco do Egito, a beautiful river, and natural pool that we were supposed to pay for but we had no cash. Thankfully they let us in anyway. Then we walked another kilometre uphill to Cachoeira do Rogério, a more significant waterfall with great views over the valley. 

Later that evening, Em was in the shower at the campsite and the electricity cable exploded with a big bang filling the room with smoke. She was lucky to not get electrocuted and ran outside with shampoo in her eyes to escape. She nervously finished showering in the men's bathroom hoping this one wouldn't explode as well. Luckily that was our last shower there! 

That evening the whole village seemed to have come to the campsite for a party. We eventually gave in to one particularly excited guest, Daniel, who was insisting we joined them. A hilarious experience because Em's phone was connected to our speaker so as Daniel tried to speak into Google translate, he kept getting interrupted by 'Superstar' by Jamelia. We had some awkward English/Portuguese conversations and, eager to please our hosts, shoved some of the huge pot of chicken and palm stew in our faces, despite having just eaten a huge meal. 

Pico da Bandeira

The main draw of this area is that it has the highest mountain in the south of Brazil, Pico da Bandeira, at 2,890 meters. We had to be up and out of our campsite at 6 am to get to the park entrance for 7 am and catch a 4x4 taxi up the 6km crazy steep dirt track to the start of the trail at 1,900 meters altitude. Pedro definitely wouldn't have made that trip in one piece.

The view even at the start of the trail was epic enough, but we set off on a very steep 14km round trip, burning our glutes and calves to reach the summit. Up there in the clouds, we congratulated ourselves and took in the different views that appeared briefly as the cloud shifted. Our jumpers were no match for the cold and we headed back down the knee-crunching path, with a brief stop halfway to soak our swollen feet in the freezing river and finally tuck into lunch. That evening, we stayed in the town of Alto Caparao, very confused by the sheer number of dirt bikes flying around the town as we tucked into our huge pizza reward.

After some research, we found out there was a motocross event the next morning, so we got ourselves to the start at 9 am to see hundreds of bikes hurtling through the start gate and up the hill. Or at least attempt to...after the first twenty or so, people started to fall off and from that point, there was a huge pile-up and a queue of bikes waiting to go up! There is a satisfying feeling that comes with stumbling across something cool like that by chance, so feeling chuffed, we set off on the road again.

Sanctuary Caraça

April 2023

After a brief night in Barao de Cocais, a run-down town that left us feeling defeated by hills that Pedro tried and failed to climb, we drove to Sanctuary Caraça. The drive was 30km out of town, into the middle of a protected area, where the only building is an 18th-century monastery. This is where we were staying for the night and for a very good reason. The monastery is in the middle of a 12,500-hectare protected area, and besides incredible nature and scenery, the main attraction is the Maned Wolves which we were hoping to see that night. 

In the 1980s, the priest discovered these wolves in the area - after initially thinking they were foxes - and befriended them by starting a ritual of leaving meat and fruit at the top of the steps in the courtyard outside the church. This amazingly worked, and now when guests stay they have a chance to see the wild wolves come to the sanctuary for their supper. The wolves are still wild, and this hasn't yet affected their hunting pattern. They simply turn up occasionally for a snack, and they are very nervous of humans - as they should be - so they are easily scared away. 

Since there is nothing else around, the stay is all-inclusive, with breakfast, lunch and dinner provided in a canteen. The dinner spread was incredible, a variety of home-cooked Brazilian deliciousness (vegetables, cheesy baked squash, a variety of soups and stews, fish, chicken, lamb) all served in an old hall that reminded Justin of his antiquated, Catholic high school. The entire building showed its age, was very drafty and damp, and had an interesting history of surviving fires, being a college, a museum, and a place for religious teaching. 

At 7.30 pm, meat and bananas were put out in front of the church spire, and a few people quietly wait around for a wolf to hopefully appear. At 8.30 pm, Justin spotted one coming into the grounds and motioned to people to stop whispering. It crept up to the top step about to enter the courtyard, just showing its head, then an annoying woman waved her arm to call her husband over and scared it away. After that, until 10 pm, the few people in the courtyard decided they weren't bothered with being quiet anymore so we were surrounded by annoyingly loud Portuguese conversation which wasn't going to be enticing any wary wolves anytime soon. 

This was becoming very annoying, but finally, they gave up and went to bed leaving just the two of us left outside. We could finally enjoy the peace and quiet of the night and wait for the wolf to hopefully return. 

Then, at 10.40 pm, we saw the dark figure creeping through the grounds and we sat back not making a sound as it crept back up the stairs. After a look around, it moved to the food and started eating. It has disproportionately long legs, which awkwardly bend as it eats, and it constantly looks up eyes darting around to make sure no one's moving. It left and quickly returned again for more food, then it crept away again, walking like some mystical creature from Harry Potter. 

A crazy experience that will not be easily forgotten, as we were both left a bit dazed by the fact that a Maned Wolf had just been a few meters from us! It was made so much better by the fact it was just the two of us with no other annoying people around to ruin it. To top the night off, shortly after, a couple of Crab-eating Foxes thought the coast was clear and came up to sniff the meat. They quickly decided they weren't interested and disappeared again. At midnight we called it a night and returned to our weird little monastery bedroom.

A brief walk to a waterfall the next morning, another great spread for lunch and with that, we left what was one of the strangest places we had ever had the pleasure of visiting.

Ouro Preto

April 2023

We had one night in a nice little town called Mariana before settling in Ouro Preto. Ouro Preto is an old colonial town, touristy and aesthetically pleasing. It's difficult to find a building there built after the 19th century. We stayed at the top of a hill in a church carpark with a view over the town. The view was nice, but it was by no means an ideal place to stay for more than a night, given that it meant we had to sneakily take showers at the back of our van, using our doors for shelter when nobody was around.

Ouro Preto had been on our radar for weeks ever since we read about their unique Easter Sunday celebration in our Lonely Planet guidebook. We arrived on Wednesday, earlier than we had planned, and set off to explore the cobbled streets which take you up and down insanely steep hills. Walking around here felt harder than some of the hikes we had done! We spent 2 days burning our calves visiting museums, sampling the local food and coffee, and getting lost down the narrow cobbled streets. 

We had never seen so many churches in one place, the town is split into parishes, with each having its own huge ornate church. There's a funny story behind the decoration of a few of the churches, Alejaidinho, translating to 'little cripple', was an artist and sculptor who lost his fingers and lower legs to either leprosy or syphilis (depending on what you read), and continued to sculpt by strapping hammers and chisels to his forearms, and working by night to avoid the stares of the public. He developed his own unique style of faces with wide eyes and chubby cheeks. 

Our favourite museum was the Chico Rei gold mine. It has been out of use for well over 100 years and was lost due to cave-ins a long time ago. The woman that currently owns it, had no idea that she literally bought a gold mine because the entrance was concealed and nobody in the town knew where it was. That is until her grandkid's persistent kicking of footballs against the walls in the garden unearthed part of the entrance. It was deemed unsafe for future mining due to the risk of collapsing the town, but you can do a tour of the exposed part which we reluctantly did adorning wobbly hard hats. The passageways were so small, some designed only for children to mine in, we did a 20-minute tour walking through the narrow tunnels and hearing about the history from our guide. This mine in particular has a fascinating history. An African tribe, including their king, was forcefully taken from their land and shipped to Brazil to work in this mine. The mine owner grew fond of the king, who was able to converse with Brazilians and became very popular. After working every waking moment, he had saved enough of his little earnings to buy his freedom. The law made this possible but it was so rarely done that this came as a surprise to the Portuguese crown. Once outside, he made more money to free his son, and they both worked on liberating the whole tribe. Once the mine owner fell into ill health, King Chico Rei bought the mine from him! Turns out he had been hiding some of the mined gold which magically appeared once he owned the mine. Word of this reached the Portuguese crown who immediately changed the law so that this couldn't happen again, such were the times that a black man not only being free but owning something like a gold mine was unacceptable. He also worked to force Chico Rei to leave the area and live out the rest of his life in a much quieter fashion.

The Easter Sunday procession

After spending a couple of days in Belo Horizonte, Saturday night came around and we were back in Ouro Preto, eagerly awaiting the town to burst into life. On our walk into town for a burger, the streets were still empty, which initially had us worried that maybe the much-anticipated sawdust party wasn't happening after all. But then we spotted some bags of sawdust! In the time it took us to eat a burger (which was longer than it should have been as the restaurant's kitchen had filled with smoke just before we arrived), the locals had sprung into action with kids, grandparents, and everyone in between covering the cobbled streets in colourful sawdust murals. 

Some were using huge homemade wooden stencils, others more artistically making murals freehand. We followed the seemingly never-ending path of half-finished murals 3km to the final church, along which people were listening to music, brass bands were playing and wine was being drunk. We headed back to the van at midnight, excited to see it finished in the morning, but we spent most of the night listening to pounding rain on the roof and thinking about all their efforts washing into the gutter.

At 7 am, we left our church car park camping spot and headed down into the town to assess the damage. Thankfully, although a few colours were a bit darker when wet, the only damage was that the lines on their art were slightly less sharp. A few locals were out tidying up their artwork. It turned out Easter Sunday Mass started at 7 am so we waited outside the church with a coffee, and a dog that insisted on howling along with the church bells, for 2 hours in the drizzle waiting for them to finish. 

At the end of Mass, the procession led out of the church with a brass band. The procession was huge with people dressed as angels, Romans, Egyptians, wise men...basically a who's who of the bible. It was very cool to see them walk over the carpet of sawdust murals, and we followed them for a while, thinking how amazing it is that the whole town dedicates themselves to this for one day every year. The guy at the front of the procession was carrying a huge cross and the town is so hilly that he had turned purple by the top of the first hill and looked like he might die. We didn't wait to find out if he made it, and feeling chuffed with ourselves that our waiting around in Ouro Preto paid off, we hit the road! 

Belo Horizonte

April 2023

During our stay in Ouro Preto, we began to feel like we were just waiting around, because we were. So we decided to spend 2 days in Belo Horizonte, Brazil's 6th largest city, a couple of hours' drive from Ouro Preto. We were very glad we did. It doesn't get written about much in the Brazil guides and we had never heard of it before, but it was a very clean, civilised, green, arty city. We visited the Bank of Brazil Cultural Centre, the whole of which was dedicated to an exhibition of 'Osgemeos'. These are twin brothers, born in the 1970s, prematurely and weighing only 4lbs. They were discharged from the hospital basically to die at home, but it became the mission of the whole family to keep them alive, and they did. They became fascinated with hip-hop and breakdancing as kids and developed a cartoon-like style portraying Brazilian culture, as well as social and political issues. Influenced by their mother's crochet art of themselves, they became international, multidimensional artists, have collaborated with Banksy, have had murals on the side of the Tate in London, Time's Square and Japan. (Definitely worth looking up!) 

Em had booked herself in at a hairdresser's for highlights, but had mistakenly booked at one of the poshest, most extra hairdressers in the city, and 6 hours later she was still not done! Due to the language barrier, she wasn't sure what was actually being done to her hair, but the hairdresser kept insisting that they were all very important steps. Her phone was dead and communicating what was being done and the price became impossible. Over Whatsapp, she had been quoted the equivalent of £27 but after all the faffing, they said the price was £100! This had taken twice as long as any hair appointment she'd ever had in the UK, and was now costing a fortune. After a very awkward interaction, they graciously charged her £27 for 6.5 hours of work, and it did look incredible. 

It was now nearly 8pm, and we were both starving. We decided to satiate a craving that had been lingering for a long time, and found a fried chicken shop, before spending the night parked next to a skip in a quiet spot on the outskirts of town. 

On Saturday, after heading to the park, eating acai and watching some skater dudes, we drove to the Inhotim Museum 60km south of the city. This is the largest open-air contemporary art museum in the world, with 23 modern art galleries and many outdoor sculptures in its huge 140-hectare gardens. It also has the world's most extensive collection of palm trees. As soon as we arrived, we saw Toco toucans eating fruit from the trees in the car park! We spent the day wandering around dipping in and out of the exhibits. One of the weirder ones and our favourite was inside a concrete structure where you had to remove your shoes at the entrance and it had different tactile flooring in each room - one had a soft play area kind of vibe where we could throw spongey objects at each other, one had a  crunchy floor, one was covered in mattresses, and one had a swimming pool which we weren't sure whether we were supposed to get in or not. 

Having too much fun, we stayed at the museum longer than intended, so our 2.5 hour drive back to Ouro Preto was completely in the dark. This was far from ideal as we found ourselves on windy, very hilly roads with no streetlights and hundreds of potholes. We had been driving up a fairly steep hill for about 10 minutes and we were thinking it must end soon, but it didn't. It got steeper. Having to drop down to 1st gear, after around 20 minutes Pedro had reached his limit and the temperature gauge started to climb. So did our heart rates. It was a pitch-black, single-lane road, at a 45-degree angle, with cars right behind us and at about 3 tonnes, if the engine had cut out, we wouldn't have been able to stop. Thankfully, with the gauge rapidly approaching the red zone, we reached the top and instantly pulled over in the one place possible. It was a small layby and as we were trying to calm down, a man came over and asked us to move because we were in the background of his wedding photoshoot. Not sure what the plan there was, as it was pitch black and they were at the side of the road, but whatever. We had slightly more important things on our minds, so we told them we obviously couldn't move quite yet to his disappointment. We checked our map to find we had driven up 1,100m of ascent over the last 3km! After cooling off we left them to their photoshoot and set off again, going mostly downhill the rest of the way back to Ouro Preto, thankfully with no damage done.