Estamos em Ilha Gande

A relaxing boat ride (after a few hours in a minivan) put us in the mood to arrive at our home on a peaceful car-free island for the next three nights…  This did not take into account that Ilha Grande is a major tourist destination, just a few hours from Rio and it this was a long weekend in Brazil (stupid public holidays!)… did we know this when we booked? No… Should we have planned better… maybe!!!

Lucky for us we booked our accommodation in advance…if we hadn’t, even a camping spot might have been difficult to come by in Abraão (the village where the boats go to and people typically stay while holidaying on Ilha Grande)…

Our accommodation was in Abraão and was in fact very nice 🙂 our balcony overlooked the garden which was teeming with hummingbirds 🙂 and if we looked out onto the horizon we could see the edge of the jungle, which is more technically called atlantic forest.

Abraão is quite a touristy village, but is pretty scenic nonetheless…

There are 2 main reasons that people visit Ilha Grande… the beaches (we’re not that into sunbaking) and the hiking (why we were there!) There are a number of trails that you can explore… we would have done more if the weather hadn’t been so wet and wild – we unfortunately only saw the sun on the afternoon we arrived and on the morning we left!).

The walks we did were nice 🙂 and we saw a few new birds and howler monkeys on the trails 🙂 The longest trail we did (thanks to the crap weather) was to Dos Rios – a village on the other side of the island where there is a nice beach… The trail also had great views looking back on the village of Abraão.

The second trail we did was nice too… but a bit muddier than the first…

Even with the obvious high number of people staying on Ilha Grande, it didn’t feel that overcrowded… and it got the thumbs up from us 🙂