The ultimate Brazilian family vacation – Part I
Quite satisfied with our awesome candomblé experience, we shoved off the next day, on a 24-hour, freezing cold bus, way to the north, to a town called Teresina, famed for being Brazil’s hottest city; we’re talking purely temperature here. The bus ride started out fairly empty, but a few hours later we stopped and piled the bus with hippies. (There are a lot of hippies in Brazil. Noticeably. And not just your normal, sort of laid back people, but either your trust-fund, well-dressed hippie or your dirtier, smellier type who think they’re saving the world by selling jewelry. You can find them in all your main tourist locations and any main plaza, square, or park in most major cities.)
So, Teresina offered nothing. Thankfully, it was cloudy, so we didn’t even get to experience the hottest of the hottest city, but it was still pretty hot and very humid. We stayed the night and left for Piripiri, a jumping off spot for a national park called Sete Cidades (Seven Cities).
Piripiri was a cute little rural town with not much going on (though you couldn’t tell from the super professional tourism brochures were received at our hotel). We witnessed a robbery, which was exciting (three girls I think at a clothes store), but you would have thought there was a celebrity in town with the way the locals took to the streets to watch the action. We spent the day mostly buying supplies…one stop took us to a very large supermarket, which got us both very excited. I was on a quest for peanut butter (there’s none in all of Brazil).
We both wandered around in the store, something I really love to do, looking at all the things I used to be able to buy but now have no practical use for them. After a while I ran into Vanessa, who was talking to two store clerks. “Ah, mi amiga!” she said, and waved me over…translator again to the rescue. She was looking for hairbands (to no avail) and these two girls instantly made friends with her, so I nailed down the details for us to meet up later for a few drinks.
The girls came later and we headed out to The Best – a local bar. I got a ride on the one girl’s motor scooter, which was totally great, very exciting, for the three blocks we traveled. We drank a few beers and ordered some food. I learned that there was a shortage of bacon in the city (i.e. no bacon in Piripiri), but definitely no shortage of tripinha, which upon looking up in my dictionary, learned to be intestines. Yes, the girls ordered fried pig intestines and ate them with gusto. We tried a little bit and weren’t too impressed. Tasted like pork rinds to me, and I’ve never been a fan. This night was short, but fun, with me translating in Portuguese, Vanessa communicating through song (a little Ah ha!, a little U2). But, we did have to get up early to catch the free bus out to Sete Cidades, so we called it an early one.
The “Seven Cities” are a set of rock formations that are impressively old (something like 10,000 years), though not much to talk about (i.e. I won’t bore you with the details…check out the pictures). Some of the views were impressive, some of the rocks coincidentally resembeled more familiar, mundane objects, and the landscape was quite interesting…semi-arid, which I guess means both really green shubbery and cactuses co-exist in mostly sandy ground. It was very, very hot with unrelenting sun, but we did get a nice chance to dip in a natural pool and meet a Brazilian family with little girls who were eager to practice their English. They were on vacation and were doing exactly our planned trip in reverse.
Well, that was all we took from Piripiri, and the next day headed off with the planned destination of this little hippie beach resort town called Jericoacoara. (This is actually fun to say…Zherry-kwa-kwa-ra) Well, at the first bus connection (Sobral – name of the town) we were jumped on by several different people to tell us that we had missed the only possible daily connection to Jericoacoara. OK. Fine. We don’t care. We have to go to the bathroom. Then another traveler dude – are you going to Jericoacoara – we can’t get there today. Yes. OK. Fine. We have to go to the bathroom.
After we sorted ourselves out, we returned back to the traveler dude and figured out what we should do next. We arranged to take the next bus to Camocim – a town that was on the ocean, rather than this small, hot inland locale – and then did proper introductions. It’s funny how these simple things like names take the backburner in the midst of making rush-rush travel arrangements. You’re going our way? OK, great! Come with us. Oh yeah, what’s your name? Well, this is Pete, from Ghent, Belgium, and he would now join us for the next few days.
We got to know Pete on the bus to Camocim. It was dark when we got into town, and we just found our way to the riverfront (it was on a river and an ocean), found a hotel and got some food and drinks. (Incidentally, I don’t know if I’ve mentioned that I am now the proud owner of a hammock. I’ve always wanted a hammock, and now I am a hammock owner. I bought a nifty little travel hammock in São Paulo to take with me on my travels, particularly for the boats through the Amazon, and this was the first night I got to use my hammock…our room only had 2 beds, so I slung up my hammock and we got a pretty killer deal on the room. And the hammock was great!)
Our main point of business between dinner and the next morning was to figure out how we could get to Jericoacoara the next day. Supposedly there’s a van, a sand buggie, or a boat (in order of increasing interest) – we just had to figure out the logistics of each of those options. Pete and I had the strategy of staying up late, drinking caipirinhas, talking to locals, and trying to coerce some guys on vacation with their family to ditch their family and drive us there – Jericoarcoara is much more fun! Despite our sweet-talking and a little push start to get their jeep going (along with my advice to put the damn thing in neutral instead of 2nd gear), we got nothing; family held precedence. Vanessa’s strategy was to go to bed early, wake up early and ask around town. Does it need to be said who was more productive?
The boat option was not to be found, so it was between the van and the sand buggie. Well, the choice was obvious. We packed our bags, threw them on top of the buggy and were off. Oh what good fun, but it wasn’t like we were flying over sand dunes like I thought we would be; just a pleasant ride along the sandy coast for about an hour and a half, with brief stops to ferry over two rivers. We passed other buggies and 4x4s on the same path and waved to people walking as we went by (who the hell is walking out here in this sandy middle of nowhere?). Whoever these people were, they waved back at us. How could they not? Waving is infectious in that way…you just can’t help not waving back.
Tags: Brazil, Tag Index
Tania