“Get up, Juliette! Let’s go to the beach. It’s sunny but—”

“—might rain later, yeah, yeah…”

“I woke up early, it’s noisy downstairs.”

“Told you it would be. Ear plugs, man…”

We moved from Florianópolis, the main city on Ilha de Santa Catarina, to Ingleses do Rio Vermelho, a town at the northern end of Santa Catarina Island.

It’s… another world.

Take the Airbnb, for instance. In Florianópolis, we rented a room with kitchen in the former Mercure Hotel right in front of the city’s landmark, the Ponte Hercílio Luz. The Mercure sign is gone but you’ll still find a working elevator, a front desk (well, a guy operating the door remote control), a gym, magnetic cards, automatic sliding doors and bed sheets that don’t actually fit the bed but that’s a normal Brazilian issue.

Now take the Airbnb in Ingleses do Rio Vermelho. First, we couldn’t find the street. Then, we couldn’t find the owner. “Went out to eat!” someone said. “Will be back, eventually…” someone else offered. Who were the “someone”? No idea. Other guests, just random people hanging out around the pool?

We eventually checked in—well, we got the key, an old-fashioned key—and we unloaded the car. No, Mark, there’s no elevator, it’s a two-storey house. Oh, look, a suicide shower! How many family members do Brazilians travel with? This room is packed…

The place was perfect, though, with two balconies and a bunch of dogs running around. “And my bed! Say something about my bed!” Mark is rating sofa beds and this one is apparently the coolest because it’s a foldable bed bolted to the wall.

But yeah, it’s noisy because even though the beach is just a few blocks away, most guests spend their day barbecuing meat, playing pool, jumping into the pool and barbecuing more meat.

Whatever, we’re never here anyway. We spend our time at the beach.

The closest one is the popular Praia dos Ingleses but it was packed over the weekend. Pandemic-friendly packed, groups stick together, but still packed. So we decided to hike across the sand dunes at the very end of the beach to find another hidden beach, Praia do Santinho.

Hiking across sand dunes is a bit harder than it seems. It was very, very hot and the dunes are actually pretty tall and I know that if you’re freezing in the Northern hemisphere right now I’ll get no sympathy, but still. It’s a wild area too, so we had to take a few detours because I’d rather stay away from six giant hawks in the middle of the way—I mean, I get attacked by crows in suburban Ottawa, not risking it in the middle of nowhere, Brazil.

We finally made it and it was worth it. Praia do Santinho was pretty empty and waves were perfect. We spend a few hours listening to Bob Marley’s entire discography—not our playlist but the small group of beach bums behind us really liked Bob Marley—then we got up, stood up… sorry, hiked back to Praia dos Ingleses.