Tirandentes hadn’t made it onto our original itinerary. Not because it wasn’t worth visiting, but because we couldn’t determine a route that didn’t have us backtracking between Petropolis, Belo Horizonte (Brazil’s 3rd largest city), Tirandentes and Ouro Preto before making our way to Rio. Fortunately, we were able to set up a trip-planning command center in our Petropolis apartment. With 2 laptops and 4 cell phones between us, we were able to find the right buses in the right order to make it work. While Brazil has been a fairly easy destination to experience, it certainly takes a lot of planning and research to pull an itinerary together. While we couldn’t go directly to Tiradentes from Petropolis we could get to São João del-Rei  (a place we still can’t seem to pronounce because of those accents that don’t exist in English) and hop on another bus to Tirandentes, just half an hour away. Cheryl got excited when she found out there was a train option between São João del-Rei and Tiradentes, but when we realized it would be 13 times the price of the bus, we decided against it. As luck would have it, our big bus from Petropolis to São João diverted to Tirandentes and we were able to hop off just a 10-minute walk from our apartment, skipping all the work of a transfer.

Our apartment didn’t disappoint and even came with a complimentary bottle of Cachaca that inspired the first of many caipirinhas (Brazil’s most famous mixed drink) made on our trip. Our host was away on vacation but his father, neighbour and brother were keen to make sure we settled in and had a good time. We thought it was pretty funny when they suggested that the town’s must-do activity was to take the train from Tiradentes to São João. We had no interest in leaving a place we had just gotten to and the weather was on our side, for the moment at least. We had an orange alert rainfall notification for later in the day and quickly headed out for a one-hour walk to a waterfall with a swimming hole on the outskirts of town. We only had to stop under the cover of trees for 5 minutes during a brief but powerful downpour, hoping that was it for the rain. The town itself, is named after a dentist (Tiradentes translates to pulling teeth) Joaquim José da Silva Xavier, who was a leading member of the colonial Brazilian revolutionary movement known as Inconfidência Mineira, whose aim was full independence from Portuguese colonial rule and creation of a republic. Yes I stole that sentence from Wikipedia. The town is adorable with horse-drawn carriages with heart-shaped benches passing over cobblestone streets (the smell wasn’t so great at the town square), artisan shops selling the local cheeses and jams the state of Mineiras is famous for, and stunning whitewashed architecture with creative license taken on trim colours. 

As we exited town and made our way to the waterfall, we commented on how unpleasant the trail would be in the rain with its clay-like terrain. We arrived at the waterfall and cooled off in the small pool below it. That’s when it started to rain. We weren’t overly bothered since we were already wet and it let up in time for us to get out and re-dress. Then the rain really started. There were a few minutes of attempting to keep our shoes out of the mud but resistance was futile. It rained and it rained and it rained and it rained. We made it back to town and got a few laughs from people in cars and huddled in storefronts watching us march through the flooded streets of town as though it was a normal time to be out for a walk. I took advantage of a gutter spitting out water like a pressure hose to clean the mud covering my backside after falling on the trail. Every time we thought it couldn’t possibly rain harder the skies turned it up a notch. Steph and I made it back to the apartment while Jon and Cheryl took one for the team and grocery-shopped. We started the process of laying things out to dry. We had two days before leaving and we needed every minute we could get. Just one or two hours of powerful sun would dry everything out, but we never did see the sun again for the rest of our stay. We settled in for the evening listening to a rain-inspired playlist, drinking our caipirinhas and playing crib.

The next day we were disheartened to wake up to more rain. Our shoes and clothing were still nowhere near dry, but once it let up we rushed out the door to visit the Fountain of St. Joseph and the Igreja Matriz de Santo Antonio, one of the most ornate churches in Latin America. As we exited the church the rain started again and we managed to soak another round of outfits before making it back home. We avoided the rain for a few minutes by ducking into a local artisan shop and picked up some crackers, local cheese and guava jam to make a traditional regional snack called Romeo and Juliet. 

By this point the apartment was covered in clothing we were trying to dry. We were almost out of dry options, but we didn’t want to sit around all day. We had no interest in seeing the local motorcycle museum or the car museum. We were left with two options, visit the cachaca distillery on the outskirts of town or go to the train station to see the last train of the day arrive. Since we had been enjoying cachaca at the apartment, we decided to go see the train. It actually ended up being one of the coolest trains we had ever seen and was worth one last rain shower in Tirandentes. When the third day rolled around we put on our almost dry shoes and loaded into a taxi our host kindly arranged to take us to São João to catch our bus to Belo Horizonte. Our host’s dad waited in the doorway and waived us off as we say goodbye to Tirandentes.