The nature experience

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As the days were passing by I started to realise that every day we were seeing something different and experiencing something new and unusual for us. In great part, we were having a fantastic time thanks to Sandro, our guide, who at first was strictly professional but as time went by he became one of us and I can bet you anything you want that he had a great time too. He was joking all the time and he really went out of his way to make sure we had a great experience.

One day, it was early in the morning, we were driving through a beach like any of the others we passed by the previous days and suddenly Sandro stopped the car by some rocks and told us how the natives used to use that rock to paint their faces... and as a demonstration he painted ours!

We got in the car and kept driving and by the time we went to have lunch we had completely forgotten that we had our faces painted and we didn't get to wash our faces well up until the food was on the table!

This is us after washing up

One of the good things about going with a guide who knows the route is that every now and again he would get our of the beach through a dune, which to us looked like a totally random place but after a couple of Km through the dunes we would get into some road and right there there would be a great restaurant or resort where we were meant to  have lunch, dinner or whatever.

I also remember that Sandro had a car oil fetish... yes, that's right... car oil fetish!, it was a new one for me too. :-)

I'm sure it's not a very common fetish but I've never met anyone who would stop in every petrol station from Natal to Fortaleza and ask for this special oil...no other oil would do, it had to be only that brand "Top Turbo" and let me tell you that it is not an exaggeration when I say we stopped in more than 20 petrol stations looking for the bloody oil...

Not a top seller, I can tell you that!

And one day, when we had almost lost all hope...

For this special occasion we also hired a female model for the photo with the special car oil

Some of the places we visited were amazing, from palms by the beach

to sandy dunes

Places with interesting rocks

oil extraction pumps

Salt mines

Palm tree forest

Lighthouse

Cactus

the sky was fantastic as well, despite of the  few random clouds there was always a lot of light

Amazing sunsets

Colonial buildings

Nice small fishing villages

A nice river mouth

And the sea... of course !

Perfect temperature, over 25C :-)

We had a little bit of everything really.

One of the interesting things of sharing your pictures with other people in the excursion is that everyone has a different eye and we all tend to take pictures of what catches our eye... and thanks to that sharing now I have some pictures I've never would have taken myself...but I'm glad someone did. :-)

We also had time for some artistic photos. :-)

The dune experience

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I must admit that when María and Susana told me they wanted to do this excursion I wasn't very keen on it. Driving a car through 1000 Km of sand didn't sound very appealing to me but now with the hindsight that time provides I have to recognise that this was the best part of our trip, without any doubts!!

It was the first time that María, Susana and I were travelling together and spending a lot of time in a car may in principle be a recipe for disaster and based on our previous experience with the 'I don't give a shite' guide that took us in the boogie excursion I was preparing myself for the worst...

But amazingly enough, it turned out that the three of us have a very similar taste in what we like and don't like to do and we had the best guide we could possibly hope to have. Sandro so the experience turned out to be priceless.

The idea was to go from Natal all the way to Fortaleza on a 4x4 through the beaches, yes, you read that right... no roads... just one beach after the next, miles and miles of deserted beaches.

If you go to Brazil and would like to spend time on a nice and quiet beach... you have thousands of kilometres to choose from in this area...

One of the things that struck us the most was the variation of colours in the landscape, sometimes it was yellow, sometimes, red, other times green, brown, blue... it was always changing and luckily for you my dear reader, you'll be able to see them all thanks to the many pictures we all took.

When we first started this excursion, Sandro didn't really know what kind of crowd we were so he tentatevely asked us what was it that we liked and as he wasn't getting the answer he was seeking ended up asking us directly whether we would be interested on something that required a small dosis of adrenaline... we looked at each other, smiled, smiled back at him and said, of course! Bring it on!

I think this was the first time I realised this may actually be a fun trip after all! :-)

Let me start by saying that we were on a remote part of Brazil so "the rides" we did weren't exactly compliant with all the safety regulations. On the positive side if you have ever been in any amusement park you would probably appreciate the total lack of queues here. :-) We probably were the only customers in the whole day!
 
I think this first picture encapsulates the whole idea behind this ride

Yes, that's it! you sit on that thingy and let gravity do the rest... but you'll fall into the water I hear you thinking... yeah but don't worry, that's why you have this!

Your own personal 21st century pick up boat, crew included.

I am not sure whether the adrenaline surge should come from the ride or for what happens after the ride but it actually was quite fun!

The crew moves the 21st century fully staffed pick-up boat into position

and off you go

You can see the fear on María and Susana's faces!

But that wasn't the only ride around... no sir... Sandro knew of another one not too far from where we were...

So let me introduce you to the second Amusement park of the region with their sand-surfing & splash ride...
I think this one is pretty self-explanatory as well. You get into the trolley that takes you up the hill (that's us at the bottom right of the photo).

and that's us again on the picture below almost half an hour later... it took forever to climb that hill on that little train... it would have been much quicker just to walk... but this is a luxury amusement park after all so no need to walk.

And then you sit on a sand-board and off you go

That guy with his hands in the sand it's me correcting my original trajectory and aiming for the water... you can't appreciate it on the picture but I was heading directly to the bush on my right hand side...

After all the manoeuvring I've managed to make it to the green and dodgy looking water with my mouth fully closed, just in case.

María and Susana just went down the hill straight like an arrow and reached the water at full speed!

It actually was really fun to go to this made-at-home attractions we had a blast on them!

After this we went to see some dunes

If you speak Spanish you'll probably appreciate the humour on the following picture... I must say in my defense that I was tricked into posing for this picture!!

For those of you who don't speak Spanish, the car model can be translated into english as "wanker", no wonder they changed the name in Spain to Montero.

Then we went to visit the site of a famous tree, you can see why it became famous, trees with weird shapes always capture people's imaginations...

Not far from the tree there was a small bar where according to Sandro we could try the best 'caipirinha' of Brazi. Apparently we were the first customers in three days...

I'm not sure whether I would award the title to the best caipirinha but he certainly put the work on it... I think it was here where we learnt that caipirinhas wasn't our thing... caipiroskas on the other hand...

After the stressful experience of serving as judges to the best caipirinha in Brazil we needed to chill out so we went to another dune with fantastic views.

One of my favorite photos...

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