Our first proper day in Ilha Grande. Beach bags packed we headed to the beach to catch some rays. The sun wasn’t out but it was still warm so we comfortably sat for a few hours in the sun, ben reading his book, me writing the diary. 

After a few hours, I noticed a lot of people were walking into the woodland area and suggested to ben that we go and have an explore as I had a feeling there would be more beaches! So that’s exactly what we did 😁. 

Sure enough there were another 5 or 6 beaches as you walk further around the island. Each getting more and beautiful as we made our way along the shoreline. 

We saw a local lady looking into the ocean and wondered wha she was looking at, it was then when she told us it was a ‘tortuga’ (turtle)! 🐢 We excitedly got out the phone and camera and tried to take a photo. You’ve never seen excitement from ben like this! He was like a child in a sweet store. He was stopping the locals and telling them there was a tortuga – being locals it’s safe to say they weren’t quite as excited as we were. This was the first turtle ben had ever seen so no doubt a lasting memory for him. 

We made our way onto a large rock in the ocean and took a few photos and took the scenes in for a moment. Just beautiful. 

We then decided to head back to one of the earlier beaches with a bar as the sun was getting strong at this point. It was at this point ben first realised his skin was a little tender… boy oh boy if only he knew. We sat outside in the sunshine with a couple of Cuba libres and took in the scenes and read our books.  Ben was looking redder by the minute and decided he needed to be in the sun. 

We ordered a dish of fish bites to eat from the bar which were delicious. 

After an hour or so we decided to head back but enroute back to the apartment we spotted an amazing beach side restaurant so we decided to go and find out more, turned out it was in partnership with CLH apartments and they were doing homemade hamburger night that evening – perfect! Names written down we headed back and this is where we noticed the true extend of just how burnt ben was!! 

Later that evening we went back to the beach restaurant for homemade burgers, Caprihinas and many games on uno! This is where we met a middle aged fella called Pete, he was a sweet, softly spoken man travelling on his own. We told him we were shortly leaving to meet up with some other friends and he decided to join us. 

We headed out to meet up with our friends Jack and Jemima who we met in Bamboo Hostel and they bought a couple of their friends called Mike and Athena with them as well. We sat in a bar playing games and chatting until the bar shut at midnight. 

We decided against Aquairo the nightclub that evening after seeing the young girls and boys sipping WKDs 😂. 

Lathering after sun into bens poorly skin we went to bed.