We got a lot of insect bites yesterday, either from standing around on the beach at night waiting for the turtle to return to the sea, or from after snorkelling when we were waiting for the shuttle. There's very low incidence of malaria here so we weren't too concerned, just itchy.
It had been a full day of activities yesterday, so we were looking for a half day excursion today. Our friends from Beijing were heading into the Santo Antonio so we thought about joining them, except they were also going to Roça Sundy which we had already seen. So instead we arranged to take quad bikes with a guide to go to Santo Antonio.
We all left Belo Monte around the same time, and our Beijing friend took a bunch of pics and videos of us on the quad bikes (she was in the back of the pickup, in front of us). Later we ran into them at Bom Bom and she airdropped them to us.
So me, Heather and our guide drove into Santo Antonio. It's a cute little colonial place. It claims to be the smallest city in the world according to Guiness, but Google doesn't seem to agree.
We got stopped by the police who asked to see our driver's licenses. There was no bribe or anything expected, they were just checking that our papers were in order. The Belo Monte folks had said it was likely we would be asked in town.
We parked the quad bikes on the street and walked around town a bit. It's not very big so this took about five minutes. Saw the post office, the main plaza, the church. Stopped in for lunch at a popular restaurant. It was pretty good.
Then we were back on the quad bikes. Drove over to see Bom Bom. It's very resort-like, not to our preference, with chalets packed in very close to each other. There was a wedding taking place later that day and the Bom Bom folks were busy setting up. As mentioned above we ran into our Beijing friends.
Our guide asked if we wanted to drive by Makaira and other beaches, said it was a good programme. We were having fun on the quad bikes and wanted to see Makaira, so agreed rather than just head back to Belo Monte.
The path to Makaira was terrible. I think because we had taken the quad bikes out our first day we didn't find it that hard though. We had originally booked into Makaira when we made our plans back in June, but after the regional flights changed we had to reschedule everything and Makaira didn't have availability.
We descended to the lodges. Makaira has by far the best location out of all the places we saw in Príncipe. The beach is capped by cliffs on both ends - it really does feel as remote as you can get. The difficult path down makes it seem even more isolated. The lodges are more rustic than other places, but also a bit cheaper. There's no a/c but they do have mosquito nets.
We then drove back up to cross over to Praia das Burras, and through to Praia Caju and Praia Banana. The latter is my favourite stretch to quad bike - it's parallel to the shore and winds through palm trees and big rocks.
We were back at the roça around 3pm, and cooled down in our room. Dinner was set up in the courtyard. At first we thought we would prefer the normal dining area on the terrace, but they do a great job of lighting on the outside of the roça, and also had a couple fire pits going. Later a group of musicians started playing traditional regional music (a couple guitarists and singer). It was all very surreal, and quite unexpected.
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