Stuck Back Where I Started...

So I´ve been gone a month and it´s been... awesome.  Very relaxed places, very interesting people, very non-chalant.  For almost the entire time, I am in no rush to go anywhere, no rush to do anything.  I have the freedom and ability to change my schedule whenever and as frequently as I want, and I´ve been doing just that.

Last Sunday, while being near Porto Seguro, after discussions with my kiwi friend, I decided to go to Vítoria.  No tourists go there as there is no tourism infrastructure.  There are no sites, no things to do really, other than hang out in a fairly large Brazilian city.  I knew that my Portguese isn´t good, which would have made this quite difficult, but the city is halfway to Rio and has South America´s largest chocolate factory: with free samples.  So after getting my hopes real high to do this, I bailed.  After a few more minutes of thinking and some more discussions about where to actually go, I decided on Bella Horizonte.  Bella is another fairly large city without much tourism, but it does have tourists roll through on their journeys to Ouro Preto (the gold rush town) as well as to some great hiking and trails nearby.  This decision, which also lasted 24 hours, actually took me to the bus station and to the vendor needed to buy a ticket, which, much to my despair, was not available.  Having had enough of Porto Seguro, and with no one else there, I jumped on a bus back to Rio because, quite frankly, I saw Swedes (with whom I had had a 5 minute conversation already) and needed to just be moving.

Flash forward a week, and the need to move is back.  Unlike last time here, there really isn´t much touristy stuff to do, and being in a hostel includes constant interactions with new and different people daily.  I´ve gone out a little more - including the street samba sensation of Lapa which is great - and relaxed a lot more than last time.  My brief stop over in Rio - I honestly thought this would be at most 24 hours - became a week so far, and I am either taking a bus tonight or [probably] tomorrow around noon to the Pantanal. Or so I think.

From that area, I might cross into Bolivia, or just go up north, or even down south.  It´s really too far ahead to actually know what I will be doing, or where I will be going (hence why I didn´t even buy a bus ticket at the bus station today).  With crystal clear water in the north, but probable dirty water falling from the sky to supplement it, and insane animal wildness in the Pantanal, but no idea what I´d do isolated over there, and the best surf in Brazil in the south, but not knowing how to surf (yet), it´s impossible to predict what ticket I might buy next.  But as great as being stuck (literally) in Rio has been, all that I know for sure is that I must get moving again.