The night I left the farm my bus left from Guaxupe, which is about a half hour drive from Fazenda Ambiental Fortaleza and the town of Igarai where I had been staying.
Marcos and Sylvia drove me to Guaxupe and we visited with her friends. We drank coconut water and ate crackers. I tried my best to decipher their Portuguese conversation.
When Marcos and Sylvia were leaving their friend’s English teacher and other students showed up at the house. They were so excited to have a native English speaker in their English class, so Marcos and Sylvia left me there for the class and headed back to the farm.
I never realized how little I think about how I speak, or how little I know about how I speak. I can’t listen to English and pick out the past perfect tense or other tenses, which is exactly what they were doing when I spoke. I felt like they knew more about the English language than I did! It was fun trying to speak how I normally would while they asked me questions about how I speak. For example, they asked me whether I pronounce often as “off-ten” or “off-en,” and I couldn’t figure it out.
There was one guy who was having difficulty with dessert and desert, the meanings and the pronunciations. This is a hard one to teach. Without the right pronunciation it’s difficult to give a meaning to either of these words… I hope that made sense.
After the class they wanted to take me out for pizza and ice cream, but I had to catch my bus! The English teacher brought me to the bus station and said if I’m ever back in Guaxupe I should stay with her (and go out for pizza and ice cream of course!).
While I waited for the bus I saw a horse run down the street and three men on horses run after it. After a few minutes of only hearing neighing and other noises, the free horse ran back up the street and the three men followed. I didn’t see them or hear them again after they went back up the street, but I found it amusing and laughed to myself.
The bus ride took about six hours and arrived in Caxambu at a ridiculous hour in the morning. Before I left the farm Marcos helped me arrange a taxi to a hotel for the remainder of the night, so I was safe and had a place to catch some z’s. Overnight buses are freezing; when they say air conditioning they’re not kidding. Now I know to always pack pants and a long sleeve shirt for overnight buses.
In the morning my lovely taxi driver came back to pick me up to bring me to Baependi, the town the bus to Piracicaba village leaves from. But, it’s the rainy season! It was chucking it down when we arrived at the bus stop in Baependi. The taxi driver asked somebody about the bus and found out it wasn’t running that day because the dirt road had become a mud road. He asked me if I wanted to be taken back to the hotel in Caxambu, but I thought it’d be much easier to stay in Baependi and find a hotel there. I told him to drop me off at the bus station.
At the bus station I tried asking people if they spoke English (I don’t think anyone in Baependi does) and if they knew anything about the bus to Piracicaba. I was in the middle of a sort of conversation with some old men when Rachel and I spotted each other. She had been on a vacation from her vacation with her dad in Rio, and we had planned to meet at the eco yoga village. She was supposed to arrive at the village the day before, but the rain kept the bus from running the day before also. We went back to her hotel room and that is where we spent the following three days waiting for good news about the bus to Piracicaba. On the second day while Rachel and I were eating breakfast the people who run the hotel brought a guy over to us because he spoke English. His name is Jiri, he’s from the Czech Republic, and he was trying to go to the eco village as well.
During our stay at Hotel Catagua we ate many salads prepared in our bathroom with a pocket knife. We also took complete advantage of the included breakfast. I miss breakfast at Hotel Catagua.
Rachel and I decided we should move on. The rain wasn’t ceasing and there wasn’t much to do in Baependi. We booked an overnight bus to Sao Paulo and set up couch surfers for the next leg of our trip. The following day before our overnight bus we received emails from the eco village saying that the bus was running, and that they were going to pick us up in ten minutes…
Unfortunately this didn’t give us enough time to change our plans, and we had already bought our bus tickets. We skipped the eco village and headed off to Sao Paulo.
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