Enjoyable but perhaps a bit long, it tells of the horrors awaiting the residents of a creepy town where the drains and sewers are suspected to be harbouring the stuff of nightmares and everything has an eerie quality of something not quite right.
Don´t Look Now |
On first impressions, Paraty and our journey there are a bit like that. From the biblical rainstorms, bad luck at the Nacional, the Campo Grande bus station oddbods, to the way the streets of Paraty seem to change shape as you walk around them, getting lost and always ending up back at the bus station...
The town is clearly beautiful: gaily-coloured streets, shops and cafes, shuggy-boat-cute pleasure boats at the water´s edge, colonial cobbles and tiny churches, but as we drank our first beer on the harbourside, the rain came down and we had to wade to the bar to pay.
From then on, the streets started flooding. Apparently this is normal and everything is built at least six inches clear of the cobbles, so we had to wade around town too, often being forced to retreat as a street filled up and became unpassable, leaving us stranded.
The ancient drains, filled to overflowing, left a stench in some streets, and it is definitely the smell of human remains.
What lies beneath, we don´t know, but this was supposed to be a relaxing few days at the beach...
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