Day 3 - Getting there is half the fun
Today we started our journey to the beaches of Jericoacoara, a fishing village in north-eastern Brazil. The guy who drove us showed up at the door with a floppy fishing hat, sunglasses, and a huge grin. He speaks a little English, with a thick accent, and not long after we got in the car, he told me that he was going to teach me to swear in Portuguese. The car is a huge, white Land Rover with a custom snorkel attachment that I can only assume is for crossing shallow water. I've been told that where we're going, a lot of places don't have roads. It's interesting to be in a Land Rover since even SUVs, which are apparently growing in popularity in Brazil, are vastly outnumbered by tiny subcompacts by Chevy, Fiat, and VW.
Once we got out of Fortaleza, and onto the beach, I started snapping pictures immediately. The new camera (a Canon Powershot S5 IS) seems to handling taking pictures out of the moving car extremely well. Most of them, you can't even tell that we were moving while it was taken, much less racing over sand dunes at nearly 60 km/h. I'm instantly having a great time, with the wind in my face, the camera strap around my neck, and the palm trees racing by us. The site of miles and miles of beach that doesn't have a hotel, tourist trap shop, boardwalk arcade, or restaurant on it is a very strange site to me, again being from the east coast, where you can't walk along the beach for more than 20 feet without running into one, or all of these.
As we approach some of the small fishing villages, suddenly we begin to see copious amounts of litter all over the beach. Mostly plastic bags and bottles, but also other assorted pieces of trash. It's clear that the locals don't see this as much of a problem since, as I said, there's miles and miles of beach with no one and nothing on them. It serves to underscore, for me, the fact that tourism here is still in its infancy and that most of the people don't look at the beauty around them as a tappable natural resource.
We continue to drive through the villages, past large orchards of palm trees from which coconut are harvested. Its odd, for me, seeing palm trees growing in neat rows, spaced at even intervals the way you might see pine trees on a christmas tree farm, but in hindsight it makes total sense if you're growning them for agricultural purposes. I guess I just hardly ever think of palm trees as a "crop" plant like apples, instead more as tropical "eye candy". There are also a great number of wild donkeys and cows roaming the sand dunes. As I saw that, I thought to myself, "I assumed that cows would pretty much just die if let out of the pen" but here they have few natural predators besides, perhaps, the wild stray dogs that also roam the dunes.
In the early afternoon, we get to the hotel at which we are staying for the night and have a nice fish stew as a late lunch. We also take a brief nap before heading out on a boat ride to watch the sunset. As luck would have it, I don't bring my camera bag and Ana doesn't bring her purse or her camera, and the batteries in my camera die at the least opportune moment, five minutes the boat has left the dock, so we can't even race back to a local store to grab more. Flipping the batteries around so that the negative side up batteries are now negative side down and vice versa gives us a few pictures on the boat, and pulling the same trick again gives us a few more pictures of a beautiful sunset from the top of a nearby dune.
After we head back, we have a nice dinner of light fish in a white sauce with bananas and fell asleep pretty early. It's weird to me that the sun goes down so early here, since it feels like its summer all the time, and in the summer I'm used to the sun going down at about 8pm, but since we're so close to the equator, the days are all almot exactly 12 hours long, from about 5:15-5:30am to 5:15-5:30pm. Tomorrow, we continue our trip to Jericoacoara!
Today we started our journey to the beaches of Jericoacoara, a fishing village in north-eastern Brazil. The guy who drove us showed up at the door with a floppy fishing hat, sunglasses, and a huge grin. He speaks a little English, with a thick accent, and not long after we got in the car, he told me that he was going to teach me to swear in Portuguese. The car is a huge, white Land Rover with a custom snorkel attachment that I can only assume is for crossing shallow water. I've been told that where we're going, a lot of places don't have roads. It's interesting to be in a Land Rover since even SUVs, which are apparently growing in popularity in Brazil, are vastly outnumbered by tiny subcompacts by Chevy, Fiat, and VW.
Once we got out of Fortaleza, and onto the beach, I started snapping pictures immediately. The new camera (a Canon Powershot S5 IS) seems to handling taking pictures out of the moving car extremely well. Most of them, you can't even tell that we were moving while it was taken, much less racing over sand dunes at nearly 60 km/h. I'm instantly having a great time, with the wind in my face, the camera strap around my neck, and the palm trees racing by us. The site of miles and miles of beach that doesn't have a hotel, tourist trap shop, boardwalk arcade, or restaurant on it is a very strange site to me, again being from the east coast, where you can't walk along the beach for more than 20 feet without running into one, or all of these.
As we approach some of the small fishing villages, suddenly we begin to see copious amounts of litter all over the beach. Mostly plastic bags and bottles, but also other assorted pieces of trash. It's clear that the locals don't see this as much of a problem since, as I said, there's miles and miles of beach with no one and nothing on them. It serves to underscore, for me, the fact that tourism here is still in its infancy and that most of the people don't look at the beauty around them as a tappable natural resource.
We continue to drive through the villages, past large orchards of palm trees from which coconut are harvested. Its odd, for me, seeing palm trees growing in neat rows, spaced at even intervals the way you might see pine trees on a christmas tree farm, but in hindsight it makes total sense if you're growning them for agricultural purposes. I guess I just hardly ever think of palm trees as a "crop" plant like apples, instead more as tropical "eye candy". There are also a great number of wild donkeys and cows roaming the sand dunes. As I saw that, I thought to myself, "I assumed that cows would pretty much just die if let out of the pen" but here they have few natural predators besides, perhaps, the wild stray dogs that also roam the dunes.
In the early afternoon, we get to the hotel at which we are staying for the night and have a nice fish stew as a late lunch. We also take a brief nap before heading out on a boat ride to watch the sunset. As luck would have it, I don't bring my camera bag and Ana doesn't bring her purse or her camera, and the batteries in my camera die at the least opportune moment, five minutes the boat has left the dock, so we can't even race back to a local store to grab more. Flipping the batteries around so that the negative side up batteries are now negative side down and vice versa gives us a few pictures on the boat, and pulling the same trick again gives us a few more pictures of a beautiful sunset from the top of a nearby dune.
After we head back, we have a nice dinner of light fish in a white sauce with bananas and fell asleep pretty early. It's weird to me that the sun goes down so early here, since it feels like its summer all the time, and in the summer I'm used to the sun going down at about 8pm, but since we're so close to the equator, the days are all almot exactly 12 hours long, from about 5:15-5:30am to 5:15-5:30pm. Tomorrow, we continue our trip to Jericoacoara!
No comments:
Post a Comment