The beach road experience

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I think that not many people know this but Brazil is a very curious country where you have a mix of first world country and third world country all in one. If you go to the big cities like Rio or Sao Paulo, you'll notice they have nothing to envy to any other big city in the world when it comes to infrastructures and services but in areas like the one we were visiting things were quite different.

There were either few roads or no roads at all in some places and the most fascinating thing is that in those situations people tend to use what they have, which in this particular case was the beach.

That's right! check it out! This was the road (you can see the marks left by the tyres from all the cars passing through).

And now you may think that yeah, maybe some crazy guy goes with his 4x4 every now and then... well, you couldn't be more wrong... even the school bus was using it!

I kid you not! That is the school bus doing its daily rounds...

Another interesting thing we found in this area is that people don't have much to live with but they don't really need much either... One day we stopped at a "restaurant" (and I use the term 'restaurant' in a very generous way here). The place was as isolated as it gets, in fact we were the first customers they had in 3 weeks!!!

Life was simple for them... they would get up in the morning and go to the sea to get some fish and lobster... should some customer pass by that day, they would give them the lobster and the fish, otherwise they would eat it themselves...

They only had two dishes...fish and lobster no other choice but despite of not being very fond on seafood I must admit that the lobster was fantastic... judge by yourself!

We visited a few fishing villages

Not everyone uses a 4x4

Another thing that is really weird, at least for me... is being close to Christmas and having a nice warm sunny day (35C). :-) The below Christmas tree won't get you into the Christmas mood but for me you could be singing jingle bells all day long...with 35C outside there is no way you can get me into the Christmas mood.

yeah... I know... not the nicest looking Christmas tree in the region that's for sure.

 This region we were visiting had lots of cashew trees and people tend to use cashews for everything. In one of the places we stopped to spend the night, the owner (a nice old lady) offered us a cashew cake and a cashew refreshment. They were both delicious and they are both very common in this region.

You may remember the cashew tree from a previous post (the largest in the world) :-)
Below you can see the fruit of that tree as sold in a local market.

If you are not careful handling this fruit you can hurt yourself. The green thing on top of this fruit releases a liquid that will burn your skin or so they say, luckely this is one of the few things I haven't experienced in my own flesh. :-)

Replenishing liquids with one of the local refreshments...

We were getting to the end of this 4 day excursion and we ended up in a peninsula (you can see the water on both sides of the road).

From here we had to take a local ferry in order to make it to the other side

And then it was a fairly quick drive to Fortaleza were we were ending our 4 day excursion and where we would be waiting for a new team member that was about to join us for the rest of the trip. Javier Valdés.

We took some amazing photographs but I think the most remarkable thing in the whole trip, at least for me, it was the different landscapes and colours and despite of my initial hesitation about the trip, María and Susana managed to make this trip an unforgettable experience.

We even had a couple of nasty storms...

but they never lasted long...

  

Next on our agenda was Jericoacoara. A weird place you can only reach by 4x4 and only after a long, long trip through the dunes, but that's a story for another blog entry. :-)

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