No room at the inn...

That bloody Lonely Planet. I've cursed it on nearly every leg of our journey so far. I don't even mind the fact that we've had to take the price of everything it lists and double it before we get somewhere approaching the actual amount for a bus journey or a hostel room. Or even that it only provides one paragraph on some of Brazil's most important historical sights. Even when we arrived on Ilha Grande with no cash because it had singularly failed to tell us there were no cash machines on the island, I forgave it. But when the authors just decided to omit the presence of a festival that attracts 70,000 from all over the world, I really lost my rag with it. OK, so it's not Mardi Gras, but the Festa Literaria Internacional de Parati or FLIP as it's known, is bigger than Carneval or New Year to this small town on the coast between Rio and Sao Paulo. And we had no idea about it.
By this time, we'd hooked up with six other people - Jake, Gemma, the three girls and a lad from Newcastle called Martin, who we'd picked up at the bus stop - and there wasn't a single hostel room in the whole place. I was just getting out my matches to perform a ceremonial burning of 'South America on a Shoestring' when a local travel rep pulled up beside us in his jeep and said he'd found us a house. He showed us to a rambling old farmhouse surrounded by fields just five minutes from the cobbled streets of the old town of Parati. And not only did it have six double bedrooms, it had a full size swimming pool and was available for us to take over for three nights. I don't think I've ever been so excited. It was just like having our own holiday home in Tuscany.
So, for the next three days, we made the place our own, cooking dinner for each other, drinking and playing cards. During the day, we swam in the pool, wandered to the beach and even braved the local fish market to create a culinary masterpiece wrapped in banana leaves, complete with shrimps and rice. But it was the festival itself which really brought the place to life. It was apparently started six years ago by an English woman who wanted to create a literary festival to rival Hay-on-Wye, Toronto and Adelaide. Since then, Martin Amis, Salman Rushdie and Margaret Attwood have appeared and even Tom Cruise has been spotted there. This year, both Tom Stoppard (Shakespeare in Love, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead) and Zoe Heller (Notes on a Scandal) were guest speakers. Coloured flags were strung up across the beautiful cobbled streets, lined with brightly painted shops and houses. On every corner, stalls were laid out, filled with homemade cakes, ice creams, clothes and jewellery and artists stood at eisels painting scenes of beaches and waterfalls. And the thousands of people who arrived throughout the week created a wonderful atmosphere quite unlike anywhere I'd been before. We left after three days with heavy hearts - another group were moving into 'our' house - but I'm sure we will return. And I've forgiven the Lonely Planet - perhaps it's better that the hoards of British backpackers like us who treat the guide like their Bible don't know about it yet. It can be our little secret.