Wilcox Family: Morro de São Paulo

On the third day of our trip we left Salvador for Morro de São Paulo. Our island paradise. We had to go though some challenges to reach paradise, it it was definitely worth it.

Here we are with all our luggage. I began to despise all of our luggage. I think this is a story worth telling. It all started because we were too nervous for a 2 hour boat cruise out to the island. We instead chose a 3 hour drive ( which ended up being 5 hours) and a 30 minute boat ride. Scott negotiated a ride on a decent looking boat. The captain took one look at all 7 of us with all of our 9 pieces of luggage and decided that his boat was full. Three boats later, we are all loaded up, or so we thought. We take off and all of a sudden the boat stops, timings off. We wait for a new boat. In the middle of a huge bay we transfer our 9 bags to the new boat, well make that 8 bags. One ended up missing. After some fervent counting, we determined that yes, a bag was still at the dock. We talked he captain and other passengers into returning to the dock. Luckily it was still there. Scott and I proceeded to make a huge scene arguing with people that wanted money for "looking after" our bags and the guy that we had paid R$50 for loading our bags. Then, our boat did not leave...after some time we were told that our current boat was too weak, and we would need to change. Finally, on boat number 3 we took off for the island. This went great for about 15 minutes. Then we hit a large piece of wood. After an inspection and some tinkering we were back on our way to the island, still in boat no. 3. Finally, we arrived on the island with only a 20 minute walk (with our 9 bags) and a 20 minute wagon ride to our pousada. Ahhh paradise at last!

This is the beach by our pousada during low tide. There were all kinds of little fish, crabs and coral that the kids had fun playing with. Karen made it fun for them by giving them little "challenges" like Amazing Race.