Next up followed with 5 days sea crossing. A bit rocky in retrospect. We are such good sailers we didn't even notice but apparently the stabilisers were not operating properly so it wasn't as smooth as it could have been. Oh well, we made it.

Today we are in Recife, Brazil.  It was like Groundhog Day.  It was the exact same tour that we did in January.  You step off the ship to a dock with broken concrete and unpleasant acrid smells.  Perhaps in January we were brighter eyed at the start of our big adventure but it now felt like the city was so dilapidated.  There are new high rises which shoot up and give a sense of a more prosperous future, but for now there are so many dilapidated buildings covered in graffiti and needing repair you feel a great sense of depression and poverty.  I saw almost no one with any shoe other than flip flops another sign of the lack of wealth.  And on this visit I noticed the shanty town across the river’s edge.

And there isn’t much to see.  We visited the pleasant beach with pretty waters across from some nice high rises, but we had to step over cans and plastic in the sand.  The sidewalks in this most posh neighbourhood are crumbling and they are redoing them, but it looks like a slow process that will mean that they will be forever repeating the process.

Then we went to Olinda, a separate city just 8 kilometres away.  It is a UNESCO World Heritage site.  We had to move from our moderately sized bus to a mini van to traverse its streets.  We went by Convento de São Francisco (Franciscan Convent) which has blue tiles on the wall and gold painted woodwork in the chapel.  Here too they are trying to repair the woodwork but the work looks sloppy, and I expect it will be never ending.  We stopped by a market with the colourful umbrellas as shelter from the sun, just as we did in January, but this time we skipped the coconut water. Then we went across the street to the Basilica and Monastery of St. Benedict.  It’s a pleasant space and I included more information about its history in my blog earlier in the year.  David enjoyed the simplicity of the church which he said felt quite spiritual.  We went upstairs for the views over the sea and city.  

Are we jaded or was it because we were here so recently and the tour followed a very similar agenda that we felt that the city lacked a good reason to visit.  Should we dock here again on a future cruise I think we will stay onboard and relax.