The Beach

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So after five days lying down in a hammocks and lying down some more in Belem watching Englands desperate win against Paraguay and watching a street carnival we decide to head off on the route to the coast, to lie down on the beach.

After a few buses of high quality, and cost, we then get a 4x4 across an hour of sand dunes before arriving at our destination of Jericoacoara, which had been described by an over excitable Isreali as ´a dream´. After a short stroll around we can see why it has this reputation, the places is tiny and is made up of about 3 roads of sand all leading to the beach, these roads only have hostels, which are hammock fronted, and bars/restaurants which all look amazing and very chilled out.

The next day (basically all days) involved getting a breakfast of fruit, bread, homemade fruit juice and coffee, and strollling down to the beach and swimming the amazingly warm waters. There really is nothing to do but relax. In the evening everyone, most people here are brazillian surfers and travellers, either walk up the dune which towers next to the village or just head to the beach to play football (our crack team of non-locals held the best local team to 0-0 and very predictably lost on sudden death penalties, gutting.), watch the locals practice their martial art dancing (think BBC ident) and, again, just relax.

After days of this very comfortable non-routine of doing nothing we decide to head down the coast to a slightly bigger but similarly laid back town where we heard dolphins play in the water, the bus left at 2pm so we had plenty of time to pack the day etc, so we thought. In hindsight it probably wasnt the best idea to go out on a friday and expect to be able to leave the next day and as my eyes focused on the time for the first time the next moring it tells me its 2pm and we´ve missed our bus. Usually this would be annoying, but with the Brazil game the next day and the place being so good i was very happy to stay longer. The night that caused this was one of my favourites of the trip so far, leaving our apartment at 11 after watching the sunset earlier we head down to the beach where tiny stalls sell the local drinks, all very string and containing alot of sugar and lime, at very cheap prices. After a few drinks and meeting up with various people we´d met here we headed to a local party that id been given a slip for the previous day. The party was outdoors and had a large stage with various bands on throughout the night, we mainly stayed just outside and drank the drinks from the cheap vendors and ate popcorn which was sold by anouther vendor. After so many days of it being just the three of us, going out and meeting so many people was a welcome change, and a combination of this and the all the sugar in our drinks meant we strolled back up the sandy road to our beds when the sun had risen again.

Our bus tomorrow is at 10.30pm, its going to take a very good night to miss that one.

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