Paraty

After a week on Ilha Grande we moved 2 hours down the coast to an old colonial town located on the Coasta Verde (Green Coast) called Paraty, with the journey there proving to be a little eventful. As it wasn't too far away, we had the option of taking a local bus or a coach, where the local option would undoubtedly be cheaper. However as we had offered to show some people how to get there we felt bad roaming the streets in search of the local bus and led the way to the coach station, where we found out the price to be R$5 - not a bad price, or so we thought.

Sooner or later a bus arrived and we got on, and were informed that the ticket was in fact R$50! Not having enough money we got off the bus and went to collect our bags, only to be followed by the bus driver who seemed just as annoyed that we couldn't explain ourselves in Portuguese as he was that we had got off the bus after he had written out the tickets. After 5 minutes someone got off the bus and explained to us that the driver was liable to pay the ticket money as he had written out the tickets, we explained that we didn't have enough money to pay for them. The man then offered and insisted that he help us pay for our tickets. Coming from London, we were taken aback by this man's generous offer. Even more shocked when he refused the money we managed to take out once in Paraty and asked that we one day do the same for someone in need. We agreed.... but paid him back anyway!

Once we settled into our hostel, we went to explore the historical center of Paraty. Walking down the cobbled streets (with the only modes of transport being foot or a horse drawn carriage) passing beautiful colonial buildings, we stumbled across and huge tent with some photo exhibitions. We quickly learned that we had arrived just in time for Paraty em Foco- one of Brazil's largest photography festivals.

 

We watched an good open source documentary film about copyright infringement called "RIP: Remix Manifesto", and another which consisted of groups of amazingly colourful photos taken of native Amazonian tribes and their villages. The copyright documentary was particularly interesting as it used Brazil as an example of where ignoring copyrights can have very positive consequences, by far the biggest was the Brazilian government violating drug firm Roche's patent on the AIDS drug Nelfinavir in order to reduce it's cost by 40%.

Aside from the wandering around the photography festival, most of our time was spent walking around town taking pictures and sitting in some of the many restaurants and bars that littered the town. One day, and after a lot of rain, the historic town flooded giving rise to all sorts of reflections from the brightly painted windows and doorways - and you can imagine how all those photographers loved that!

Just some of the 1000's of pictures taken by Thida