Feeling a little quezy from the catamaran ride, we arrive in Morro. Morro is an Island without cars, so the taxi service is a bunch of ripped locals with wheel barrels that charge 5 Real ($3) per bag to carry luggage to your hostel. The taxi service guys bombarded us as we got off the boat. I am always a little hesitant to hand over my belongings, so I decided to carry my own things up and down the hills to the beach.
Always having to watch my back and not being able to trust people straight away can really take away from meeting cool people or enjoying certain situations. I feel bad sometimes for not trusting people, especially when someone is trying to be nice, but just in case they are trying to scam me, I cannot trust people blindly. Toby and I were talking about how people from the United States are filled with stories of robbery and violence when traveling to foreign countries. All of the places I have already visited in Brasil, many people warned me of the dangers of when they went or stories that they heard of travelers being robbed or kidnapped. The reality of the situation is that everywhere in the world (including Santa Cruz and the States) has the potential to be unsafe, but more often than not, the places we travel are filled with genuinely nice people ready to help you or be your friend. It is good to be cautious, but I feel like people are instilled with so much fear, it is often a main reason they decide not to travel.
There are 3 main beaches on Morro. The 1st beach has a zipline down from the hill into the ocean. This beach also has surfing and scuba diving. The 2nd beach is the main beach where all the nice restuarants and hostels are located. On the 2nd beach there is also a volleyball net and two footvolley courts that are used mainly in the morning and afternoon when the sun is less intense. The 3rd beach only exists on low tide and is mainly hostels, we stayed here for the first part of our trip because everywhere else was filled up.
Everyday as the sun sets the 2nd beach starts to transform. A DJ sets up by the main footvolley court, where a crowd gathers and cheers on the local pros as they bet money and play a very intense skilled game of footvolley filled with yelling and long rallies that never ceased to amaze me. The restaurants set the mood with candlelight and live musicians playing rock covers, reggae or local folha and samba music. The boardwalk that lines the beach transforms into an outside tropical fruit bar, where there are tons of exotic fruits I´ve never seen being muddled into vodka concoctions, very delicious.
Morro is a hotspot for Brazilian and Argentinian people to vacation to. Talking to a group of traveling Argentinian people, they told us that it takes them a whole year to save enough money to travel to Morro for one week. I was embarrassed to tell them I was traveling for 7 months.
Aaron tracked down a potential DJ gig at a sushi bar/club called Six. The owner agreed to giving us a set between 2 and 4am, so we spent the rest of the day tracking down blank cds and preparing to drop a hot electro set in Brasil. We showed up early to practice with their equipment, I was nervous because I never used that set up before and only had about 15 minutes to get used to it. The DJ before us played local favorites and other top 40 songs popular in the US. When 2am rolled around, Aaron went up to the DJ booth only to be waved off by a sassy local DJ girl, who wasn´t having any foreign DJ´s stealing her heat. We tried and tried without success to get behind the DJ booth, very dissappointing, but a fun night of dancing to electronica none-the-less.
Aaron´s time to head back to the States arrived, he was sad to go, but also ready to get back because his identity was stolen while he was traveling, forcing him to borrow money from Toby. It turned out that one of his assistants, Aaron is a DP in the film industry, gave his banking information to her boyfriend who stole a bunch of money while Aaron was away. The guy set up a phone number in his name with some of the money, so it looks like he will be caught red handed. We gave Aaron a nickname on the trip ´Digital Dan´, which eventually turned into just `Digital´or ´Dan´. He was given the name by Toby after we realized how much "digitry" he had brought with him. He had: a laptop, an external hard-drive, an external battery for his laptop, an ipad, a camera with multiple lenses, and an iphone which eventually got water damage. His digital gear probably weighed more than all my gear put together.
Toby and I spent the next few days on Morro hanging on the beach, going to one of the main clubs on the hill, eating well and going on a horseback ride with a couple of Argentinian girls who didn´t have a good time. The trail to the beach on the horse was pretty intense and technical and one of the girls was scared of the horse, she was ready for it to be over as soon as the ride started. After the ride, the girls bee-lined it for their hostel while Toby and I ran into some of the local taxi service guys and hung out with them on a side-street sharing beer and listening to samba. The guys ended up giving us their work shirts off their backs, Toby gave one of them his pair of nice sunglasses, they all passed it around with nods of approval. We showed them some pictures of Burning Man on Toby´s iphone, they couldn´t believe what they saw and tried to convience us to throw a burning man party on their beach.
Morro is a very cool place, it was nice not to worry about getting hit by cars, buses and motorbikes for a week. Morro is one of my favorite places so far and I would reccommend it to anyone traveling to Brasil. A quick acai and we caught a motorboat ride to the mainland where we are headed to Itacare for the last part of Toby´s trip and really only the begginning of mine.
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