Days 10 through 16 - Petropolis in a Nutshell

Our original plans were to spend the first two weeks of the trip in Rio. The second week was when Carnival was going on, which meant the hostel (and every hostel, hotel, or other form of accomodations in town) jacked the price up by about 4x the standard rate and, on top of that, require that you stay a minimum of seven nights during the week of Carnival (so not even our prior stay at the hostel would count toward this). It didn't take us long to realize how much of a rip off that was, and just how overwhelming a week in Rio during Carnival would be. So instead, we cancelled our second week in Rio and headed about an hour north to Petropolis.

We found a very cool looking hostel online called The Samambaia, and decided we'd spend two nights there and maybe move on to one more town before heading back to Rio for the Sambadrome and a much smaller taste of Carnival one week later. After we arrived at the bus station in Petropolis, we started to look for a place to use the phone to call the hostel, as the owner had said he might be able to provide us with a ride from the station. We were a bit stressed, in a new place, still not understanding much of the language, and not having any success with the phone, when suddenly in pops a man holding a sign with our name on it. You should have seen the smile on Lauren's face when she said, "Hey! That's us!" Jean (pronounced the same as Jean Claude Van Dam), quickly greeted us and introduced himself as the owner of the hostel we were going to be staying at. He had received my last email regarding the bus we had been planning on taking and decided he would just shown up and hope that he'd find us. It was so nice that we didn't need to find a phone and figure out how to use it.

We loaded our backpacks into the back of his car and he said he would be right back. It turned out he had decided to go into the station and purchase some bug spray for us, just to make sure we'd have some during our stay (as it's a mountain town and rain season). We then began to make our way to the hostel. On the way, Jean told us a bit about the history of the city and showed us some of the major landmarks in the downtown area. The city's history all stems from when the royal family (Dom Pedro II) decided to move the seat of the government here during the summer months in the 19th century, to get away from the overpowering heat of Rio. The current Brazilian President still has a summer house here, so the city has never really stopped having a special importance to Brazil. Jean also made sure to show us the different bus stops that we would need to know if we were to come back into the downtown area from the hostel, which was really helpful.

When we arrived at the hostel, Jean let us know that instead of putting us in the 8-bed mixed dorm (similar to the hostel we had just come from), he put us in a private room, as it was vacant during our stay. This was an awesome surprise. Sharing a dorm room really isn't that bad, and you end up meeting and talking to a lot of people, but having a private room is especially nice because you can leave your stuff laying around and don't need to live out of your pack, and you have all of the wall outlets to yourself!

After we dropped our packs off in our room, Jean gave us a quick tour of the hostel. It definitely wasn't the typical hostel. It had a restaurant inside, an upstairs with a living room and a huge room that contained a giant bug collection, a small chapel located on a large second floor terrace, a big pool outside, a playground, a trampoline, a huge backyard, and a pond. After the tour, we unpacked our stuff and went into the restaurant and had an amazing lunch. We had salad, chicken, roast beef, potatoes, rice, and black beans. It was definitely one of the better meals I have had during our trip, especially because it had that home-cooked touch to it. After we filled up on food, we went upstairs to the common area and read/napped on the couches.

After our brief siesta, we took a quick walk around the hostel grounds. They had a lot of awesome animals around, including the ostriches, a bunch of geese, ducks, chickens, peacocks, bunnies, a toucan, and even a couple ponies.

We had a late lunch, so for dinner we made a bowl of stove top popcorn, and around 10:30 local time we went upstairs to watch some of the superbowl. We were joined by Jean and a friend of his, and awesomely enough, he wheeled out a cart with a bunch of different cheeses on it. He fed us different types of cheese throughout the game. We actually didn't stay until the end of the game because it was getting late and was still only the 3rd quarter due to the half hour power outage delay. I woke up in the morning and read that I missed one hell of a 4th quarter, but there was no way I would have been able to stay awake for the rest of the game, so I wasn't too upset about my decision to call it a night.

I won't recount every day, because they kind of ran together and were pretty similar, but we did end up extending our stay from two nights to seven nights, if that gives you a hint on whether or not we were enjoying ourselves. We spent a few of the sunnier days lounging by the pool, which was amazing. Lauren got through a few books and worked on her basic Portuguese (we have Rosetta Stone on the computer) and I did swimming workouts and listened to podcasts. It felt really good to just let all of the stress from back home melt away and feel like we were truly on "vacation."

We did decide one day to be a bit more active and ventured to the nearby National Park, Serra dos Orgaos. Lauren had read about a three day trek you can do in the park between Petropolis and a nearby town, Teresopolis. Although we didn't feel like we were quite ready for multi-day hiking, we thought it would be good to get into the mountains and see how we faired on a day trek. Again, Jean, the owner of the hostel, was way too nice and offered to drive us to the park. He was even the one that suggested that we try the Veu do Noiva route, a pretty easy trail around 3k each way. The main vantage point of the trek is looking out onto a 40 meter waterfall (the Veu do Noiva, or veil of the bride). Another couple, from Holland, decided to come along as well. The husband, Marc, works at the Dutch Consulate, I believe in the Democratic Rebublic of Congo. They had recently adopted a seven month old baby girl there and had taken time off to travel and spend some time as a family, visiting the mother's original homeland in Peru (she was adopted herself by a Dutch family as an infant). They were extremely active, as was evident by them bringing little Florence along on the hike and Ivon, the mom, hiking for three hours, over rocks and across streams, with her infant daughter strapped to her chest in a baby bjorn. It was quite impressive. Little Florence had seen more of the world and done more hiking than I had! The couple was also really nice and very intersting, so we enjoyed sharing the trek with them and appreciated feeling like we had someone knowledgable of hiking on the trails with us (even if it was a faily simple route).

There ended up being quite a few waterfalls to see and we were surrounded by mountains pretty much everywhere we looked. It was gorgeous and probably one of my favorite things that we've done so far. It felt great to make it to the top of the route and relax eating lunch while surrounded by nature. Although, to be completely honest, we didn't quite make it to the Veu do Noiva; we had to stop just before it, as one of the branches of the river you had to walk across was flooded and would have required a bit of a swim. Never-the-less, you'll see from the pictures that we didn't feel like we missed out on anything.

Other than lounging around and hiking, we also went into town a few days, walking four miles to get there the first time and then taking the bus every subsequent time. It was a pretty nice walk, but you can never be sure when it's going to rain, and of course it poured for a few minutes during our walk. Aside from the hiking and the walk into town, it was an extremely relaxing week. We didn't really get a chance to unwind in Rio, as there was so much to do and see, so we used our time in Petropolis to relax and take a vacation within a vacation. I'm really glad we did, because we won't have many opportunities in the next few months to lounge around. Most places we'll be going, we'll either be hiking or sight seeing or there simply won't be a good place to lay and read a book, so I'm glad we didn't try to guilt ourselves into doing more while we were there.

In a way, it was our first big sigh of relief in several weeks. We thought our last days of work would be when the stress would melt away. But then after that, we basically switched over into full-time preparation mode. So then, you think maybe once you get on the plane, that's when you'll have your moment of being able to relax. But of course, being on an airplane is hardly relaxing, especially when it's an eight hour flight. And then you get off the plane and you're greeted with signs you can't read and people you can't understand. And then you get to your hostel in Rio, but you're in a busy city in humid weather and you're trying to figure out how to get where you want to go and how you're going to see everything that you want to see. And then when we got to Petropolis, we had our own room, a beautiful pool, and no itinerary. We were finally on vacation, at least in the traditional sense. The whole week felt like one big sigh of relief.

It was an amazing experience, and I was very sad to leave. It was incredibly relaxing, and it's unlikely we'll be in a similar position on the rest of the trip. When I look back and think that we had originally planned on staying in Rio for seven more days at four times the cost, I am so happy that we changed our plans. It was the perfect week for 25% the cost of Rio. If not for the Sambadrome being on Sunday night, I'm not sure Lauren could have gotten me to leave there. Thankfully the Sambadrome was also amazing, but I'll save that for the next blog post.

'Til next time

- Bob