(July 24, 2010)

Alrighty, so here's the long awaited update on our whereabouts(sp?). We're currently back in Valadares, we've been home for a week now. I'm quite sorry this update has taken so long. I wrote it a few days ago and it got deleted for some reason so I've been reluctant to rewright it.

So I guess I'll back track to where we left off before. I believe we left off on our third or fourth day in Rio, smoking a cuban cigar. Well we ended up staying there for a whole week. The WWOOF farm in Resende that we planned to go to asked us to come a week later. We didn't think this was possible so we responded to another WWOOF host in Carlos Euler, MG who said that they could take us to their farm at the end of that week. This was still not very good for us since it meant that we now had to kill another 3-4 days in Rio, which is a pretty expensive city. Well we did just that in the most affordable way we could think of which involved a lot of reading in parks and beach futebol.

We left at the start of the weekend, on Saturday July 10th, with Arthur (the owner of the host farm) and his wife Rosi. They live in Rio at Copacabana and they visit their farm on the weekends. It's not really a farm though, it's more like a resort in the making. They're setting it up so that they'll be able to retire there and live out their days at this beautiful mountainside resort in the middle of nowhere (really, as far as I know it can't even be found on a map). It's going to be a guest house as well. Right now though, it's pretty much just their big shmancy house, a small vegetable garden, a duck pond, and a bunch of tree seedlings which they plan to plant all over the property. The call it "Caminha das Ipes" (Trail of the Ipes). Ipes are these beautiful flowering trees that they've been planting all over the place.

"The street" in Carlos Euler

Anyways we pretty much hung around the rest of the weekend and got to know the property. Arthur and Rosi left us alone in their big shmancy house on sunday night, as they live in Copacabana. It was sort of a weird situation without them there. They had a groundskeeper named Mauro and a few other workers, all of whom did not seem to know anything about WWOOF or understand what we were doing there. On our first "work day" Tiago was asked to chainsaw some logs for about an hour, and then we were left alone. After he requested more work, he was then asked to hammer a fence around a dog house. I guess the dogs were escaping and killing the chickens so their pen needed 5 lines of barbed wire. A whole day was devoted to this. I, however was not asked to do anything. I spent the day laying in the grass reading along side Tiago since I was not allowed to use a hammer, because I am a feeble woman. The next day was spent planting tree seeds. After that though, we did nothing. It rained for the next few days, and we were not asked to work at all. We spent our time playing rummy, reading, playing monopoly, and watching the Simpsons (they had a tv). We were hardly spoken to, and the whole situation was really weird. I guess we were Arthurs first WWOOFers, and he wasn't even there, so maybe that explains why this was so strange. After a week of this we were bored and weirded out and we wanted to leave.

We left Carlos Euler with all of our stuff on our backs and set out for Passa Vinte which is the nearest town that shows up on a map as well as the nearest town wih a bus stop. It was actually nearly 20 kilometers away (12 miles) and took us 4 hours to hike there. Once there, we took the bus to the nearest city with a bus station which was Barra Mansa and it's right over the border into the state of Rio de Janeiro. We found that there was a bus to Governador Valadares from there but we had to wait 10 hours for it to show up! It took about 11 hours overnight for us to finally reach Valadares, and then we had to walk home (another 30-45 minutes). We were completely exhausted after this, as you can imagine. We spent the next few days recooperating and we've been lazing around since.

Looking down on the small town of Passa Vinte

Waiting 10 hours for the bus in Barra Mansa... this photo was taken at the bus station

Our next trip is going to be the big one if all goes well. We're planning to start up the coast and travel into Amazonas from there. We're going to take a bit of time preparing for this and saving money in Valadares, so we'll probably be here for a couple more weeks.  I wish ya'll the best. Take care.

snuggles and loves,
Lena and Teegs