Sao Luis and Alcântara

When we took our seats on the bus to Sao Luis there was some confusion among the Brazilians because some seat number tags were missing. Since seats were numbered consecutively it was obvious (to us) that the missing ones were numbers 37 to 40. For the locals this seemed to be an unsolvable problem. We helped them out. They were very thankful and seemed astonished as well as admiring. I was speechless facing the fact how poorly educated people are. I also realized that I've never seen a Brazilian read a book.

Due to the stupid air con it was freezing on the bus and the toilet stank.

We were happy to travel with Lukas since he's fluent in Portuguese and has a very diplomatic and open way to communicate with locals.

Sao Luis is another one of those degenerate colonial towns. Pretty, but I've had enough of them and after Colombia's enchanting Cartagena and the ruins of Panama City none of them is really able to impress me.
Its large suburban areas are very ugly.

The next day we went to another historic colonial town called Alcântara. We went by catamaran which was supposed to leave at 9 a.m. but then we were told we had to wait for the high tide to come, because the water level was too low. When we were finally aloud to board we had to climb over two other boats to get to the catamaran. Then the motor broke down. Although the crew consisted of 5 men, only one of them actually tried to fix it. The others were watching or sleeping on deck. "Inefficiency" is a very important word to describe lots of situations here! In the end, after 1,5 hours on the boat, we arrived one hour late.

Alcântara is small, nice and quite. Its buildings are all original, some restored, some deep in tropical decay. The fronts of many houses are studded with tiles to keep them cool inside.
We bought freshly baked coco cookies from an old lady and saw a very pink Ibis.

Our bracelets from the jungle are starting to sprout! :)