I was in a Club Med commercial

I was in a Club Med commerical. Seriously. OK not seriously but in my mind I was. Instead, I was on an insanely beautiful beach called Jericoacoara (it’s a mouthful, I know) in the northern state of Ceará about 5 hours west of the city of Fortaleza. I’ve been on the road for a little over a week and my first stop was Fortaleza. At first it was literally just a stop...landed, spent the night to rest and recharge and then booked out the next morning to Jericoacoara (from here on to be referred to as “Jeri”). It was fully inland, along the northeastern coast of Brasil, but the beachtown is so isolated by sand dunes and ecological preservations requiring an hour sandbuggy ride to get there that it might as well have been an island. The town is squeezed in between massive sand dunes and sparkling ocean. You turn your back to the water facing the dunes and you can easily feel like you’re in the Sahara desert. Not that I’ve been to the Sahara, but you know what I’m saying.

Because of the protection of the dunes and the local environment, Jeri is prohibited from having paved roads. All the streets are pure sand and the mode of transporation around town is either by foot, horse, or buggy. During low tide on the beach the water gets caught inland between the dunes and forms little lagoons for a few hours before eventually getting washed up again with the regular tide. So it was sometime while I was lazy swimming in the lagoon looking at the dunes, with a capoeira class going on in the distance, and a family frolicking in the waters behind me that I felt that I was a in a Club Med or Royal Carribean commercial. Might as well have been. The most stunning part of the town was sunset on the dune. Everyone hikes up there and camps out to watch the sun dip into the ocean horizon. Jeri is one of the windsurfing capitals of the world so there is a constant strong breeze blowing thru the town, including on top of the dunes. So the sand stung a bit as it blew in the wind but the view and atmosphere were worth it. And of course, with every picturesque view comes a market to make money. There were local Brazilians renting out snow/sand boards to go sliding down the dunes. At night everyone congregates by the beach jiving to the music pumping from the bars but drinking from the portable drink carts that make caipirinhas and the like for R$3 (equal to about $1.30).

I am continually impressed by the efficiency of transportation around this country. When traveling to new cities, different as they may be, the schematic is always the same: each city has a central bus station for arriving and departing inter city routes. That station connects to a smaller bus terminal that is the hub for local city routes. You go from one to the other, ask the locals which bus to take that puts you closest to the hotel or B&B that your travel books recommends, do a little street wandering, find the accomodation, book it, and you’re on the beach by mid-day. It’s a beautiful system.

As predicted, the northeast is blazing hot with little to no clouds in the sky. It’s a string of endless beaches with each city and town having a unique twist to it. The Portuguese spoken here is different than the southern part of the country where I have lived both last year and this. I’ll spare you the linguistic details but in a historical perspective, I read that the pronunciation and word usage in the northeast more closely resembles that of Portugal because of the greater colonial influence in this part of the country.

After Jeri we trekked back to Fortaleza and spent the day there touring the city with friends of some friends. Then hopped 8 hours southeast to Natal and a lively little beach town called Ponta Negra where we stayed for two days. I’m currently in the city of João Pessoa, in the northeast state of Paraíba. Yesterday I took a hike to the end of one of the beaches here and reached the eastern most point of the Americas and the closest point in South America to Africa. Tomorrow I take off for the historic beach city of Recife. More to come on the other trips after Jeri but I needed to start with first things first.