We got up somewhat late again and after breakfast we drove along the beach to another inlet that required a ferry to cross. This time I was a bit less apprehensive and thoroughly enjoyed the experience. This time they were using poles instead of outboard motors, so I suspect the inlet was a bit shallower. After we got to the other side, Ana and I got in a boat to do a short tour and see some seahorses. The guy who was showing us around told Ana that he used to be a fisherman and, in the winter, would spend as many as 8 days at a time in the same small boat we were using to do our tour. All I know is that he was amazing at catching seahorses. He would reach over the edge of the boat in a flash and when he came back, he'd have one or two seahorses in his hands. We also saw some of the red crabs (not like the ones we ate) that we saw on our sunset cruise yesterday, and managed to snap a few pictures of them today.
When we got back, we jumped back in the Land Rover and headed to a small fresh water lake formed by rains to do some swimming and grab some lunch. They had hammocks hanging in the water, and lounge chairs over the water. The water was a bit colder than the ocean, but still probably about 75 degrees. We swam around for a bit, and then Ana insisted that I try laying in the hammock. She has this thing about me and hammocks, at least, she always gets this smirk on her face when she suggests that I lay in a hammock. Hammocks are a big thing here and every house, nearly every room, has hooks built into the walls for hanging hammocks on. This baffles me somewhat, but I guess that it makes for easy extra bedding if you have people that would sleep in hammocks. Personally, I'm afraid of falling on the floor when I move around in my sleep. So I got in the hammock and she made sure to take some pictures of me.
A while later, a guy came by with a tray with uncooked shrimp, lobster, and fish on it, and we picked the fish. I didn't actualy know they had lobsters here, but they looked a lot different from the ones that I'm used to. After about a half hour, we were called to lunch and the fish was presented. The fish had been cut in half and boned, and most likely laid out on a grill, skin side down. It was cooked with garlic, lime, and salt. It was a very simple meal, but the fish was delicious. I later learned that the name of this particular type of fish is pargo.
We swam for a little while longer and laid out in the sun for a while before leaving. I realized at some point, after it was far too late, that while I had put the sunscreen that Ana's mom picked up for me (with an SPF usually reserved for albinos and the irish) on my arms and legs, I had neglected to put any on my body. This resulted in a surprisingly minor sunburn on my shoulders and ears.
At around 3 or 3:30, we got back in the car and drove back towards the inlet. The ocean tide had come in a little bit and Sergio pointed out that the water was much closer to the path than it had been on the way out to the lake. We eventually came to a spot where the path had been completely covered by water, forming a shallow inlet about 25 or 30 yards across in our path. Sergio calmly assessed the situation and drove slowly straight into the water. About 30 seconds later, water was pouring in through the door and pooling at the floor at my feet. The floor of the Land Rover is about 2 feet high, so we were fording maybe 2 1/2 feet of water. Ana had the quick thinking to snap a shot of the water at her feet. We made it to the other side and opened our doors to let the water out. Sergio said that this was definitely a Hard Tour (the name of his company) and I responded that it was an adventure, to be sure.
We finally made it back and seeing Jericoacoara by daylight it shocked me how every place was proudly sporting the mastercard logo. Even the bottle sheathes that they use to keep bottles of beer cold were emblazoned with mastercard logos. It's funny, because I expect to see this sort of thing at home, I don't know why I would expect they wouldn't have the same phenomenon here, but I think that as I pointed out in yesterday's post, I'm fairly shocked to see any of what I think of as "trappings of the modern world" here in "the middle of nowhere."
Even taking a shower can be an exciting experience in Brazil. As I pointed out in day 1's post, the shower heads here are electric. As I was trying to clean the sand out of my sandals in the shower, I tried to use the spray head attached to the shower head with a long flexible rubber tube. The tube became disconnected at the shower head end and when I went to reconnect it, I got a nice mild electric shock from the solid stream of water leaking out through where the tube was. Normally the water in the shower is broken up into droplets with air between them, which won't carry an electric current, even if one should be present (which would require faulty wiring or a faulty shower head), as MythBusters demonstrated in their peeing on the third rail experiment, but this was a nice thick stream. At this point, Ana insists that I let you know that I've only been shocked by the "crappy shower at the hotel" and not the one at her house. We decided to simply turn off the breaker that fed current to the shower head since we had been taking cold showers anyway.
After taking a brief nap, we headed out to watch the sunset from atop the highest dune near the city, which I was told is the only place for a long distance that you can see the sun setting over the ocean. So we climbed the dune to find that the wind was whipping sand at us hard enough to be annoying if not downright painful. We toughed it out though, and soon werer joined by more and more people, some of them carrying what looked like snowboards. I assumed these were the sand boards that Ana had told me about, but of which I remained skeptical. Watching these people try to ride down the steep hill didn't make me much less skeptical, but they seemed to manage a few decent rides.
The sunset was beautiful over the ocean, but as luck would have it, my camera ran out of batteries just as the sun was starting to hit the horizon and there wasn't even time to play the flipping batteries around trick to try to get a few more pictures. I did flip the batteries around in time to snap a few pictures of people doing capoiera, a kind of Brazilian dance-fighting as we were walking back to get some dinner, but I mostly ended up capturing the crowd.
Dinner was a large crepe with qualho cheese, dried tomatoes, oregano, and bacon, and dessert wass another crepe with chocolate and chopped cashews. Yummy yummy. We stopped to grab a few souvenirs of our trip and after that we were pretty much worn out, so we went back to the hotel to watch some tv and take a nap.
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