The dune experience

--


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...

--

The boogie experience

--

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!

Brazil 2007

--

As I won't be travelling for a little while I decided to take this opportunity to update the blog with some of the trips I did in the past. Among those there were two trips to Brazil that I did with María and Susana and apart from the hundreds and hundreds of photos I have from those trips, I also have some of the best memories...

I won't be able to update the blog every day but I'll try to add one or two entries a week. There are hundreds of photos, so choosing which to show will already be quite a task, trying to remember all the little places where we stayed will be another. :-)

As some of you already know, Brazil is my favourite country for many reasons. Geography, people, weather, ... you name it, for me it's got all the ticks on the boxes.

The area we visited on our first trip to Brazil is the one marked below:

Something that is hard to grasp for us Europeans is the vast distances in between the different places in Brazil and although initially we were planning on travelling North and South, East and West after looking with some detail to the amount of hours we would be spending flying over the country we realised that our best bet was to stick to just one area and for our first trip we picked Natal. We also spent a few days visiting Río de Janeiro because you can't go to Brazil and not visiting Río...

This first trip took place in December 2007 and one of the first things you'll notice on the pictures is that I really look like the male counterpart of Snow-white, that's what 10 years in England does to your skin. :-)