Visiting Caxias
We're in Caxias now, and have been here for about a week now. We cycled the first 20km from our land via Lava Pes to Lajeado Grande which is the closest place that has buses that go to Caxias. The ride to Lajiado Grande was pretty easy and so next time we're going to try and go the whole way to Caxias which is another 60km of highway! hopefully by then we'll have much better bikes because one of the things we're doing here is trying to find some good second hand ones for a reasonable price. We're staying with our friend Eduardo who knows a lot about bikes and is helping us find some good deals :-)
A couple of his cycling friends have lent us their older bikes (which are still extremely awesome and a lot better than we'll be buying for ourselves!) so we can get an idea of how much better it is to have a decent bike to ride on. Eduardo took us on a ride of about 40km with quite a few hills, and although the last hour was pretty hard we managed it pretty well :-)
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He took us to some really nice places with lots of orange trees we could fill our backpacks from, and to a beautiful little village called Otavio Rocha which is one of the original places where the Italian settlers came to. The village is really clean and tidy and has free wifi for everyone! We went to a bakery so Eduardo could show us a traditional kind of fresh baked bread called Cuca with melted chocolate in it :-)
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We set off back to Caxias from Caminhos da Colônia in the early evening, and still felt pretty good at that point. But the last part of the ride coming in to Caxias was a huge hill which must have taken the better part of an hour to get up, and by the time we got to the top it was dark and we were really tired!
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When we finally got into the main city, Eduardo took us to Parque da Festa da Uva where they have the traditional grape festivals, and it was a really nice view with the full moon over the city. This is actually where Candido took us the very first time we came to Caxias, and we took a photo from exactly the same spot whcih I've included here too :-)
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