Parati

The small Brazilian town of Parati is similar to my previous port, Buzios. These two ports were both very beautiful, with lush colorful rain forests and crystal clear sea water. One interesting fact about Parati is that once a month, when there is a full moon at high tide, the streets of this small town flood completely. Sounds weird, but they actually do it on purpose! It cleans the streets, but it never gets to any of the houses since they are higher than the street. At the end of the high tide, people continue with their normal lives on their newly cleaned streets. Other than that, Buzios and Parati are alike because both towns run almost entirely on tourism, but Parati has not always been that way. When the first people arrived in Parati in the 16^th century, the small town was used for transporting gold to Rio. The gold was brought down from the state of Minas Gerais, (Minas Gerais was where the gold was mined), to Parati. The trail that the slaves used was about 600K, and took 40 days to walk it on foot all the way to Minas Gerais, and 35 days to walk back (Downhill). Slaves were forced to carry gold the whole length of the trail for 60 years, and then stored it on ships that sailed up to Rio where it was then put on bigger ships to Europe. After 60 years of hard labor from the slaves, a road that went straight from Rio to the mines of Minas Gerais was built. This trail only took 25 days on foot, and the gold didn’t have to be shipped from Parati to Rio, which meant there was no chance of pirates hijacking the small ships. There was only problem with this new shorter trail, Parati was forgotten. With no way to earn money, people slowly moved away. Later, the gold trail was used once more, in the 19^th century, this time for coffee beans. These coffee beans went through the same process of the gold, and Parati was suddenly popular again. When coffee stopped coming to the town, the tourism started. Tourism is the main source of income now. The reason I know all of this is because we stopped at the gold trail on one of our stops on our jeep tour. Some of our other stops were at two beautiful waterfalls, a winery, and a big smooth rock that we “rock surfed” on. The rock had a river running over it and it was pretty steep. We would slide down on our stomachs, backs, sitting down, even our feet! I loved the once in a life time opportunity. The first day in Parati was very interesting and fun. The second day was also awesome. We went out in a boat to three different beaches near the small town. At one of the beaches they gave us snorkeling equipment and we got in the water as the crew threw rice near us to attract the fish. Hundreds of fish swarmed around us, not even caring that we were there. The only thing these fish cared about was food; it was the only time in my life I had ever touched a fish in the ocean. At another beach we climbed up mango trees and picked ripe, fresh mangos that we would later eat. We also picked coconuts and cut the top off so we could stick a straw in the middle where all the sweet coconut milk stayed. It was exactly like in an island adventure movie, drinking directly out of coconuts.