The houses are all built the same with mostly white walls and red tiled rooves, stretching to the edge of the surrounding mountains.
Most of the churches in Ouro Preto look the same, much like the one with yellow trim off in the distance.
After taking the overnight bus from Rio de Janiero, we arrive at sunrise and take a walk into town, coming across this free-ranging horse having some delicious grass.
Ouro Preto, Minas Girais, Brazil: A small town built into the hills formed around the discovery of an enormous quantity of gold in the 17th and 18th centuries.
Jef stops for a photo. This road lead from our hostel into the edge of town. There's no paved roads in Ouro Preto - only stones.
I'm not sure what these were for, but they were all over town, and usually didn't have anything behind them. Maybe it's just a really fancy public toilet used to promote whatever church had built it there.
At this point it was still only 7 or 8 in the morning, so we were pretty much the only ones on the street. By lunchtime this area was full of people.
Being a town built of stone, it isn't a surprise you can find markets like this. Even the taxis have stone wheels.
Here's an example I got off a Brazilian tourism site.
There sure are some great landscapes around Ouro Preto, especially surrounding this particular church.
Everything in Brazil is pretty cheap. We got these two massive \"Satelite\" burgers for about $2 each, which had Ham, chips, corn, lettuce, and tomato.
Me taking a break in front of some quality baroque architecture. They wouldn't let you take photos inside the churches, but they were pretty amazing inside. Most had these extremely ornate gold covered interiors decorated by the best artists of their time.
This is the view from where I was sitting two photos prior. Being on vacation in Brazil, I had plenty of time to sit and draw this landscape in my notebook.
Jef's main goal of this excursion was drawing, and he spent hours sketching the architecture while I'd walk around with my camera. The stand behind us sold food and snacks, and these little kids came up asking if we could buy them some drinks - not uncommon in Brazil. So we got them a few beers and sent them on their way.
The church that Jef was drawing from the previous photo. I have to say his drawing came out pretty good.
About twenty minutes away by bus is an obandoned mine that you can get a tour of. You take this old mining train down below, and get a guided tour of the area. The size of it was pretty amazing.
Off in the distance you can see some French dudes that decided to ignore the sign and go for a dip. Later on, they were playing ping pong and one of their arms turned purple and fell off during match point.
At the bottom was this crystal-clear pond that our old guidebooks said you could swim in. We were going to, until we saw a new sign saying it was dangerous. I wonder how many people realized they'd ingested some strange chemicals before that happened.
Instead of barbed wire, they use shards of glass embedded into the cement.
Our hostel was nestled into one of the hills that had some small footpaths leading up to it. A good find indeed. Here is the front yard view of the town at night.
Old mining stuff. What you can't see is all of the \"Made in USA\" marks on all of the equipment.
Jef touching up some of his drawings.
They keep their Beetles in top condition.
Some more horses just hanging out.
The buildings in the middle of town were pretty colorful, including the cars.
All the stone you could ever want.
This was an old government / military building where in the basement they'd hold prisoners. Today it's mostly an art & history gallery.
This one store had some really funky plants for sale.
The view up the hill from one of the front patios.
