Hang gliding over Rio, haggling private taxies and speeding through Rio, bussing down to Paraty

Just writing this post from our hostel in Paraty overlooking the pool and lovely rainforest come tropical-esque scenery as we didn’t have time last night to do a write up – we went straight to the weekly Monday Samba night upon arrival in Paraty.

This was awesome we had some caipirinha’s in the hostel bar and then danced away with the locals and a live band, drinking brahma beer!

Yesterday we woke up expectantly checking our Whatsapp for news from our hang gliding instructor – he had told us to be ready at 7am, but also not to be excited as the wind in Rio has been a slightly dangerous direction lately and so it may not go ahead. Luckily he gave us the thumbs up for 10am so we got an Uber down to meet Paulo at São Conrado beach. This was the first day in several weeks air space for this kind of thing had been available as it was locked down due to the Para/Olympics. So when we got there it wasn’t the smoothest operation – there were lots of people and not a huge amount of organisation. We finally signed all the documents and went to the top of a mountain in a car with Paulo… He then left us waiting for over an hour as he flew down with the first group and then worked his way back up — we guess anyway… he really didn’t tell us much, he just jumped off the edge and we had no other choice but to wait – I was getting concerned as we wanted to get to the bus terminal by 1pm to collect our tickets to Paraty. He finally appeared again… it was now 12:00 and we hadn’t even been suited up.

My nerves weirdly settled then as he talked to us, as they were mostly revolving around the anxiety for catching our bus not so much for the jump. Our training drills consisted of our instructors doing the test run off the ramp and basically saying, “just relax” – that was all the instructions we needed for jumping off the 600 metre high mountain. The moment you run and jump from the edge is pure bliss though – it’s not really an adrenaline rush, for both Alis and I we agreed that it was strangely enough a very calm glide with incredible views over Rio. You sail high above the beaches, looking down on the caracara’s (birds of prey) circling the blissful canopy of the greenery below and you feel free; just gliding through the air.

We gracefully landed in the lush golden sands about 8 minutes after take off, un-suited, got all our photos/videos transferred to my iPhone and then as the emotions died down, realised once again we had a deadline to meet – 1pm (for a 2pm departure) at the bus terminal and we also needed to go to our apartment to pick up our bags. It was now around 12:55pm. We got Paulo to translate for us as we bartered with a private taxi: “São Conrado to Cosme Velho, 2 minute wait whilst we grab our bags and then straight to the Novo bus terminal” – we got this for a price of R$70 – not a bargain, but seemed reasonable for our requests.

According to Google maps it should have been around a 35 minute drive – we thought we might still make this.

We hadn’t quite accounted for the lunch time and general traffic in Rio — watching that dashboard clock tick away as we hopelessly sat in the back of this friendly but non-English speaking private taxi driver’s car. He did seem to understand our rush though, or maybe he always drove like this – but he certainly didn’t mind taking the fast routes. At one point 2 lanes merged into 1, and there was the typical who’s more manly side-by-side fight with the car beside us; neither our taxi driver nor the blacked out window car to the right was giving in – the silence of testosterone was broken by the other drivers car horn, when instantaneously – almost orchestrated, both the windows of our taxi and the blacked out window car rolled down. Both drivers shouted something incomprehensible at one another in Portuguese and gracefully again, both windows rolled back up like a well timed curtain close on a theatre show.

We got to our apartment at circa 1:30pm and caught the rickety brown lift to the 6th floor, impatiently waiting as it clicked its way up. Grabbed our bags, said a final quick goodbye to Clara (our Airbnb host) and made the descent again, now with nerves racked that our driver probably had driven off whilst we were gone. He was still there, we popped open the boot to chuck in our bags… which was 70% full by a large gas tank (apparently a lot of cars are converted to gas in Brazil), and began the race once again to the bus terminal. Traffic was still not on our side as we lane-dodged our way across central Rio and finally, we arrived at the terminal, our Fitbit watches giving us hope still as they flashed 1:45. Our bus was set to the leave the terminal at 2pm, advice was to get there 1 hour early to pick up the tickets due to it being a busy terminal. I went straight to the help desk and just stood open mouthed with my iPhone pointing to our email, the attendant behind the desk said “Speak”, I didn’t expect him to speak English for some reason. He pointed us in the direction of our ticket point — we rounded the corner and saw a queue of 6 people ahead of us with a ticket attendant that had 1 speed; sloth. It was now 1:55pm, we queued – thumb twiddling, 1:59 we finally got the front of the queue. I had considered paying off the people in front of us to queue jump. Alis and I stood frozen in time as I showed the attendant my iPhone receipt, 99% sure he was going to say “desculpe – você está muito atrasado” (sorry – you’re too late)… he didn’t, our tickets printed out of something that looked more like a 1980’s fax machine – I asked “quantos plataformas” (which platform, [very incorrect Portuguese]), he pointed outside and we ran to our bus and boarded with literally 55 seconds to spare.

The 4 hour journey to Paraty now began, our nerves from the sprint across Rio still took around 30 minutes to subside, but as they did we took in the amazing scenery of Rio’s coastline, the golden light from the sunset cascaded through the Brazilian trees onto the rainbow coloured favelas and houses that dotted the mountainside.

As I mentioned at the top of this post, we’re now in Paraty which is beautiful – and very different to Rio. It’s a welcome change and a much slower pace of life after bustling city life in Rio. We’ve got a few days here – it’s our first shared hostel, last night we shared the room with 3 Polish people and tonight it’ll be 3 new people we assume. In the next few days we’re going to do a boat tour and visit some beaches/waterfalls before we move onwards.