(June 28, 2010)

Oi amigos!
All is well with Teegs and I in Valadares. We've continued to spend our time with family and walking about the city. The weather has cooled down a bit, but it's still a very comfortable temperature. Tiago and I have been keeping up with our never-ending futebol game. The most current score is 10-9, but that will soon change because we plan on playing another game today.

So, we climbed Mt. Ibituruna on Monday. It took five hours and it was a wicked hard! My lungs were aching and my heart was pounding. We took the worst route up it too. We went on this long road that circumnavigated the mountain before we started heading upwards. The road we took was directly in the sun which was beating down on us the whole way up, and we didn't remember to bring sun screen so we both have crazy looking tans from wearing our backpacks with all of the straps. We stopped at a stream along the way to eat some fruit that we brought, and afterwards I washed my hand in it (the stream) and when I pulled it out it was covered with a ton of tiny little sluggy bugs! It was horrifying. We took another break at one point in a nice shady area that we soon discovered to be a huge spider nest! All bugs aside though, it was a great trip. We camped at this little club near the top of the mountain that Tiago's grandmother got us a camping pass for, which was very sweet of her considering she was really scared of us going. As far as food, we had only brought some fruit and some hotdogs, which probably wasn't the wisest choice since mountain climbing makes you pretty hungry. The next morning we spilt a mango for breakfast and started off down the mountain. Now the hike down probably would have been a lot easier had there been some more time since we hiked up, but we didn't have enough food for that. We spent about an hour of painfully trudging down before we agreed that we were both comfortable with hitchhiking. Only a few minutes later, a car passed, so I stuck out my thumb and we were able to bum a ride. We met a very nice young fellow named Juninho who lives very close to Tiago's grandmother. He was very friendly and gave us a ride the whole way there.
The whole experience was awesome. The view from the mountain was amazing the whole time. It was very beautiful. The mountain is covered with palm trees and a bunch of different farms that have their gorgeous horses grazing about the whole time. It was absolutely wonderful. I'm going to attempt to include a few pictures so you don't have to take my word for it.

Tomorrow morning we will be leaving for Teresopolis. It's a very mountanous city two hours north of Rio de Janeiro. We're planing to stay there with Tiago's cousin Diogo for a some time, we don't know yet how long. From there we're planning to go to Rio de Janeiro and explore the city. We've also been trying to contact a WWOOF farm that's right in Teresopolis and stay there for a week, if possible. If that's not possible, we're going to look into some other WWOOF farms in the state of Rio de Janeiro and southern Minas Gerais.
I'll try to continue with updates, but it might be more difficult for us to get internet. I hope everybody is well, take care of yourselves and keep in touch.

Love,
Tiago and Lena