Ponta Negra

After Jericoacoara LeeAnn and I headed back east to Fortaleza and were kindly chaperoned around the city for a day and a half by friends of some friends. If you really want to know the connection, LeeAnn met a Brazilian guy at a trade show over the summer and he put her in touch with his ex-girlfriend living in São Paulo who gave us contact information for her friend who lives in Fortaleza. So from a professional networking event and very tenuous connection at best emerged a fully guided tour through Fortaleza with initial strangers turned the world’s nicest people for their kind accommodations and services. It’s a testament to the Brazilian open and friendly nature. We walked around the municipal market eyeing all the handmade crafts and textiles, strolled around the old Portuguese fort that helped give rise to the city’s name of FORTaleza, ate a mouth-watering typical northeastern fish stew cuisine called peixada, and took a sunset boat ride along the city’s coast.

Peixada = yummy

Putting the Fort in Fortaleza

Same height, but he's a lot more bad-ass

Fortaleza

Coastal view of Fortaleza

From there it was a midnight 8 hour bus southeast to the city of Natal (means Christmas in Portuguese), capital of the state of Rio Grande do Norte. I had a mild heart attack en route when the bus broke down around 2am just south of the middle of nowhere. The bus broke down about 2 hours after departure from Fortaleza with no major city close by. So I was figuring that by the time they called HQ, knocked on some poor unfortunate bus driver’s door in the middle of the night to tell him that he was the lucky one chosen to drive the rescue bus, and arrival thereafter at the breakdown point, we were looking at a 4 hour layover. But the powers that be came thru and we were back on the road by a little after 4am. Gotta love Brasil and their roll with the punches attitude. Had that been the US, every passenger would be throwing a fit demanding a full refund and a year’s worth of free travel at the least. Rightfully so, you pay for a smooth and efficient ride. But seriously, what can you do in a situation like that when the bus breaks down and how will complaining alleviate the situation? That’s the Brazilian attitude. So instead of any complaints, everyone rolled with the punches, shrugged their shoulders with a patient attitude, and strolled over the dive-bar across the street for some midnight beers and music blasting from the back of a pick-up truck. Jeitinho Brasileiro.

Our travel books didn’t have the raves reviews about Natal so we actually skipped over the city completely and shot right over to a hopping beach town 10km south of the city called Ponta Negra. There is a counter-cloud machine in the skies of the northeast Brasil. Meaning, every single day in Fortaleza, Jericoacoara, and Ponta Negra was clear blue skies and 90+ degrees with only a trace of clouds at most, to the point where I was convinced that any clouds that potentially arose were sucked out of the sky by an immense vacuum-like machine. We stayed in a cute little pousada (bed and breakfast) called Pousada do Alemão (The German Pousada) because the owner was a Brazilian guy who happened to speak German. Random, but I thought it was funny. So yeah, with the beautiful weather and gorgeous beach Ponta Negra was an awesome and relaxing getaway. Lying on your back soaking in the sun all you have to do is raise your hand and then a guy comes over wheeling a portable bar to mix you a caipirinha for R$3 which at the current exchange rate is a little over $1. Ha!! It’s almost criminal!! After the beach the town was chalk full of vendors and boutique shops to do some window shopping. And our dinners were spent in gluttonous fashion taking advantage of the relatively cheap churrascarias (all you can eat bbq buffets) and pizza buffets.

Ponta Negra

Party on wheels

The night life was interesting there. On the beach I met a cool vendor dude who sells alligator and snake skinned belts and bracelets. He told me about the local bars that are hopping every night with forró (more or less Brazilian salsa) and samba and that he would go there with us later at night. So we met up for some beers and he showed us the bars. They were stacked with foreign men and Brazilian women. Admittedly, initial naïveté had me thinking “wow, look at how easy it is for all these guys to talk to Brazilian women.” But then sort of like the awakening I had in the infamous touristy red light district of Bangkok when after realizing that one skimpily dressed Thai woman was a dude 90% of the other “women” were the same, I came to my senses that the bar in Ponta Negra was nothing more than a conglomeration of foreign men and Brazilian prostitutes. LeeAnn and I got a kick out of it and laughed it off as a cultural experience.

We were in Ponta Negra three nights but really only went out one night. And that one night was a few drinks at most. Nothing really heavy on the party scene. Seriously, traveling takes a toll out of you being under the sun all day long and then eating a heavy dinner at night. It sucks the energy out of you to go out partying at night and instead makes you just want to pass out in a hammock for the rest of the night, which is what I ended up doing the other two nights. I LOVE hammocks. I could sleep in one for the rest of my life.