11-12.11.10 Paraty

We'd heard a lot about Paraty from fellow travellers we had met as a 'not to miss location' worthy of spending some decent time there.  Paraty has remained largely unaltered since it's heyday as a staging post for the 18th century Brazilian gold trade, passing from Minas Gerais to Portugal.  The town is full of Colonial Portugese architecture which is really pleasant and pretty - the sort of place to take your mum for the day (sorry mum). 

Example of the pretty town streets

Example of the Portugese colonial architecture

We landed ourselves a tourist map which highlighted all the key 'sights'.  The majority of these were really old churches with entrance fees but we were told that if we took the walk up to the old fort, we would be rewarded with views of the whole town.  We followed the map and found ourselves in someone's front garden, then up a muddy path to a pretty unimpressive fort, over a wall and followed the path to... no-where.

Ryan on the path to no-where with beautiful views of the... ocean.

To give the town credit, it has over 200 islands accessible from the town which we would have explored weather permitting.  As it was raining pretty hard though for most of the time we were there, we could have seen the town in an hour. 

I did get pretty excited about the boats though - Meggi, how about buying a boat and doing it up like this to sell to Lisa??

And so we left for Sao Paulo... the 5th largest city in the world...