Port Control working hard to get us checked in.
This was a time consuming process but easy and relatively painless. We first went to the Maritime Office. We were really dependent on someone speaking some English as we spoke no Portuguese. Eventually someone understood us and sent us to another office. This person decided we were in the wrong place and had someone show us to another office down by the water front. This guy told us we were in the wrong place and he took us back to where we started from. Nothing like a good walk to stretch the legs. Now we walked back down to the ferry dock, not far from where we anchored our boats. They thought we were alongside the ferry dock and wanted to check out the boats. We assured them we were not able to bring the boats along side as it was too shallow and we really didn't want to compete with the ferries for space. It seemed that we were a novel concept, arriving on sailboats and wanting to check in. We were walked back to the second office and finally led inside to the interior of the building (probably circa late 1800's), and sat down. Finally someone knew what to do with us. We watched as the one finger typist on an old typewriter proceeded to fill out the forms. We were charged about $50 for the pleasure but at least we didn't have to pay any bribes. We next proceeded in the general direction of Immigration. Eventually we asked a person from the University where it was and he was kind enough to give us a ride in the back of his Ute. When we arrived at Immigration, we were once again faced with someone who didn't know what to do with us. After an hour of phone calls, he got it sorted and he drove us back to the waterfront immigration office. Here we waited again for our passport to be stamped. And no money changed hands. We found the process easy and the officials very helpful, not what we had been led to believe. Now it was time to have a look around town. We found a relatively new shopping mall that included a supermarket, so some shopping was done. We got a sim card for Internet and found a bank for money. Even though it had the high rises of a city, the back alleys were certainly Africa.