The boogie experience

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I have to start by saying that my arrival to Brazil wasn't how I had envisioned it and I am not talking about the Samba girls greeting me at the airport.

Not only was I quite a few hours late but they also lost my luggage!! So imagine this!. Coming from London in December (freezing cold temperatures) and you arrive to Brazil 30+ temperatures, no clothes except from what you carry in your rucksack... so I had all my electronics with me, money and flight tickets but as far as clothing items... let's just say shopping was a compulsory activity.

Anyway, I met with María and Susana when they came back from the beach (yeah... they had a tough day waiting for me at the beach while trying all the different combinations of caipiroskas) :-)

We went to have dinner and then we went for a walk along the long, long beach. It may be worth mentioning we weren't in Natal exactly, we were in Ponta Negra which is in the outskirts of Natal. I still remember the name of the hotel. Hotel Tubarao... great place, not too expensive and with a small swimming pool.

As you can see, despite of the adversity I was still positive and really looking forward to the rest of my holiday... without my suitcase...

Our end plan was to do a one week long excursion throughout the beaches, 1000+ km of beaches in a boogie but before that we had the good sense of trying a boogie with a short 1 day trip to the nearby areas of interest.

I must admit that we did enjoy the boogie experience but it became really obvious to us that we couldn't do long distances on a boogie, not without any kind of physical side effects, that is...

There is barely any space in it, you go all crumpled and bouncing up and down, left and right all the time... not exactly a comfortable trip... not to mention you have one hand on your head at all times to avoid your hat to fly away and the other to hold yourself to the car so it is not you the one who flies away... at this point I didn't have many clothing items so it wasn't a good idea to lose one of the few I managed to keep with me and with the strong sun you don't want to go around without a hat.

It may sound like a trip through Hell but it actually was quite fun... despite of the driver which was in the mood of "I hate my job"...

We had another person joining us on this trip. Her name was Marcia and she was from Río and she was working on a temporal assignment there in Natal.

As you can see on all the pictures, I was really, really white, mostly due to the fact that I was living in England and the only light I got to see on a daily basis was the fluorescent lighting from the room where I worked. As a consequence of this María and Susana nick named me "copito de nieve" ("snow flake")  and you will notice when you see my pictures how appropriate the name was. :-)

The below pictures are from the ferry while we were crossing with the boggie.

The weather wasn't great as it was changing all the time... it went from cloudy to sunny, back to cloudy and back to sunny again...

The publicity signs in some of the places we passed by could do with some polishing...

Boat trip and fishing... seriously, does that sign inspire any confidence on you to go on a boat trip or fishing with them? When I look at that sign the first thing that springs to mind is... if the ad is like that, what would  the boat look like?  shall I have to bail water out all the time or will they have someone to do that?

We stopped on a few places with the boggie and had a few pictures of some of the places

We even got stuck in the sand once so we all had to get off the boogie and push...

Sometimes a photo helps you put things in perspective... Who's the snow-flake now?

We ended this trip in Parnamirim, the land of the largest Cashew-tree in the world!!
If I recall correctly it's got a radius of about 50 metres which doesn't sound like a lot...but believe me... it is!

That's all one tree!!!

I was really impressed with the tree... María and Susana got quite disappointed with the site though... which goes to prove  you can never please everyone...

After this excursion we learnt a few lessons and one of them was that for the long excursion through all the beaches we would be travelling in a 4x4 which is what our next guide Sandro recommended to us when we were enquiring about this excursion at his place...

I have to make a confession here... when María described it to me I thought it would end up being just a long drive experience through lots and lots of sand...and I wasn't really looking forward to it but nothing further from the truth... it was the best part of the trip without any doubt!