Jericoacoara (15-24/Sep/06)

Canoa Quebrada, Brazil

Slight misinformation... Bus ride to Fortaleza was in fact over 30h! Well, no matter. We rested the night at near the bus station, and next morning got the 7h bus to Jericoacoara, the village with a coa to many. There we were to spend a week on account of our Portuguese lessons. We were rapidly convinced by the owner of our hostel that we shouldn't spend money on such a silly activity and we would be fine just borrowing a book he had. This meant I didn't study a thing. Esther put in a bit more effort, but our Portuguese is still pretty pathetic. Oh well, sign language and Spanish, with a few ouao's thrown in seems to work fine. We did better on the exercises front; since we aren't doing any trekking for some time we decided to do morning situps.

Jericoacoara is a bit like Tarifa in Southern Spain, lots of wind, sand dunes, windsurfers and a few kitesurfers. The streets are all sand, everybody goes round by sand buggy or 4x4. There is a kind of hippy vibe, but not too much to get on your nerves, and basically you just hang out, drink caipirinhas (cachasa - a type of sugar cane liquor - lime, sugar & ice), watch capoeira (the Brazilian martial arts made famous by a Motorola advert), climb up the dunes, photograph the sunset, go for walks, and not much else. The wind kicks up the sand a fair bit, so most our sunbathing was from hammocks in our private sandpit. 7 lazy days just flew by, starting shakily with some tummy trouble but ending OK with makeshift barbeques in our "garden". Our room had a bit of a mosquito and cockroaches (I absolutely hate cockroaches) problem, but a bit of spray sorted that out. One of the days we walked North up the beach, which is really beautiful, away from the town (which actually has a bit of a manky beach, relatively speaking).

Then we got on the bus again down to the next idyllic beach spot, Canoa Quebrada...