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Published: January 14th 2006
Hello Everyone! We have been having a great time during these first few weeks of the New Year and have been fortunate to have fun people to enjoy them with. Since we last wrote, we have changed residences. The Guimaraes family that we were staying with made the move to Sao Paulo where Antonio has been transferred for work purposes. We will be joining them there after Carnival, but for now we are staying with his sister Ana Guimaraes (or Tia Ana), her husband Samuel, her daughter Amanda, and Grandma (Vovó - the best cook in Brazil). It is at the house where we celebrated Christmas and New Years, so it was an easy transition since we already know everyone so well.
Currently it is summertime in Brazil, even though it is hot where we are year round, this is the time when people go on vacations and the kids are out of school. Ana and Samuel are on vacation for the next few weeks and Tia Ana loves to travel so it has been non-stop since we have been here. So far we have take 3 trips: 2 day trips and 1 three-day trip, all of which have been
fun and we have seen many great things. We do have one complaint though - the roads here aren’t the greatest and driving here is a bit wild. It seems like most of the time you are just trying to pass the slow truck in front of you. So you get pretty used to staring at the back of a semi truck after sometime and bracing yourself for the next “bump in the road”.
Pontas de Pedras, Pernambuco The first trip that we took was about one hour north of here to a small beach village called Pontas de Pedras. Samuel’s brother and his family had rented a beach side cottage and invited us out for a day of relaxing. The beach was unlike any that we had seen before because the water was very shallow where we were. We grabbed our camera and decided to see how far we could walk. We went out about half a kilometer and the water wasn’t even above our waists, so we walked a bit further out to a sand bar we could see. It was amazing that we were so far out, yet here we were standing on our own
little island, after a few pictures, our buddy Rafael (Samuel’s cousin) met us out there and we all played in the warm water a bit.
After making the trek back through the shallow water, we ate a little grub then just relaxed in some chairs and hammocks. We noticed the tide was rising and soon you could no longer see our little sand bar. A popular game you will see on the beaches here is a game that uses two wooden paddles that are about twice as big as a ping pong paddle and a small “racquetball-looking” ball. We really don’t understand the rules of the game, but basically you just hit the ball to each other and try not to drop it, but your opponent tries to make it difficult for you to hit…so it doesn’t make much sense, but seemed fun. They had a couple paddles at the beach house so we gave it a go and had a blast hitting the ball around. After about another hour of chilling, we hit the road and headed back to town. Two days later we were back on the road for our next little adventure.
Pipa, Rio Grande do Norte
Ten people, two cars, and four hours on the road…ahhhh!! The thought of being in a car that is a little bigger than a Geo Metro with five people for four hours didn’t completely thrill us, but we are always up for seeing new sights. This time we were headed north into a different state, Rio Grande do Norte, to visit the coastal town of Pipa (pronounced Peep-ah). The four hours was actually broken up because we made many stops for gas and a long lunch stop. Samuel’s VW is outfitted with two fuel sources, regular petrol and natural gas. Petrol costs about US$5 per gallon here, so driving can be pricy, but a tank full of natural gas will get you about 200km (125 miles) and only cost about US$8 to fill. So the savings in comparison is well worth the many stops you have to make.
We arrived in Pipa mid-afternoon and checked into our hotel, Pousada Praia do Amor, which translated means “Beach of Love” Inn. Our room had a lovely seahorse theme, while the others had dolphins. We even had a hammock out on the front patio for relaxing. The hotel was
located about 50 meters up a steep hill from the beach, but it had a swimming pool, so if we were too hot we didn’t have to trek the steep hill.
The first evening we all headed to the center of town for some grub. We stumbled upon a small little soup shop and decided soup sounded great. Most of us had camarão (gotta love the shrimp) and others enjoyed bean and carne soups. After eating we looked around at all the little shops then headed to the hotel for a swim and called it a night.
We woke up and were ready to go by 8am (as previously arranged the day before), but when we looked for everyone, no one was around. We haven’t experienced too many people being “on-time” here in Brazil, so we were sure they were still getting ready. While waiting, we grabbed some crackers for breakfast and chilled in the hammock. The crackers must have had a good smell because before we knew it there was this little creature wanting some of our food. The little creature is called a Sagüi de Tufo Blanco, but to us it looked like a mini-monkey and
a Gremlin had consummated their love. Soon another showed up and with it were 4 little babies. We were told that they bite, but I worked up the nerve and soon had the two adults eating out of my hand - and I still have all my fingers.
Around 9am, heads started popping out of the rooms with people ready for the beach. We made the short trek down the hill and were ready for some relaxing. We were about to sit down when a local mentioned that up the beach a little ways were some natural wading pools. Everyone seemed interesting in this, so we started to walk. Thirty minutes later, we found no pools so we turned back to play in the waves. Felipe (Samuel’s other cousin) and myself headed into the water to try some body surfing. One time I caught a huge wave were I was body surfing for sometime, but then the wave broke it threw me into a back flip mid-air! No injuries luckily. After the ocean, we head to town for some lunch, then back to the hotel for a little siesta. Once everyone was up and ready we headed one hour
north to the town of Natal (translated: Christmas) to check out the views and grab some dinner.
We enjoyed the colors of the sky during a beautiful sunset on the beach and enjoyed the cool night air coming off the ocean. After Heather took some photos, we headed to dinner where it was R$18 (about US$8) for an all you can eat shrimp-fest. It is unlike the all-you-can-eat restaurants in the States, you actually sit down and servers bring around all sort of different type of foods from the kitchen and they are fresh! Since this place was famous for their shrimp, they only brought around shrimp dishes - garlic shrimp, picante shrimp, queijo shrimp, grilled shrimp, shrimp in butter, battered shrimp, and many others I can’t remember. It was very similar to a Churrasqueira restaurant or barbeque restaurant (very common in Brazil) where the servers come around with long swords of all types of meat and cut off how ever much you would like to enjoy, except it was all shrimp and no swords. We can’t even start to tell you how many shrimp we consumed, but it was quite yummy! We headed back down south to Pipa,
sat around the pool talking for sometime and then crashed for the night.
We awoke around 8am the next day to find our Gremlin monkey friends back for some food. We had a quick bite to eat and then hit the road for a short 15 minute trip to Golfinho Bay (Dolphin Bay) where we were told we would see golfinhos. We were a bit skeptical since we were told the day before we would find natural pools and didn’t, but sure enough there were dolphins swimming around! I wanted to try and swim with the dolphins, so I jumped in the water and swam out a ways. They didn’t get close enough for me to grab on to one, but I was swimming in the bay and they were swimming in the bay, so one could say that I swam with the dolphins! After this we went back to the hotel for one last dip in the pool, loaded up the cars and headed back to Recife. After three days of rest, Tia Ana had our next day trip planned for us.
Bonito, Pernambuco Wake-up at 5:30am, nine of us out of the house by 6:30am,
grab a couple taxis to downtown where we were greeted by four guides from Amigos da Trilha to take a tour van to the a village called Bonita…and we were on time! We weren’t exactly sure what we were going to do on this day trip, but we were told there would be hiking, wear tennis shoes, bring a lunch, swimming suit, change of clothes, and we would be rappelling next to a waterfall- sweet!
On the way to the town of Bonito (translated: Beautiful), we stopped off at a ranch and enjoyed a lovely breakfast; it was a nice stop to break up the trip. After 1.5 hours in a tour van, thirty minutes of which were on bumpy dirt roads, we reached the trail head. We walked about 5 miles and came to a big waterfall. A couple of our guides stopped there and started setting up ropes in the area, but we continued on. About 15 minutes later we came to a small pond with another waterfall and a lot of shade. We disrobed down to our swimming suits where we played in the water for about one hour and had fun taking pictures. It was
really rocky in the area and the water made it very slick, so needless to say, many of us took a spill or two! We headed back up the trail to the rappelling area to find out that we were going to rappel down
in the waterfall! We had rappelled before in the States a number of times, but never with water pounding on our heads. We watched a few people descend and it looked like a lot of fun. You go down in pairs and there is a guide in between helping you out. The rushing water and slippery rocks made it bit more difficult then expected, but also because of the language barrier with the guide. When you are descending and you want to stop, you pull the rope to your back, but the guide had a hold of my rope and it only allowed me to pull it to my side and I didn’t know how to say, hey buddy, I need some more rope! Heather was fantastic and did a great job translating for me. So, it was a bit frustrating at first and though my hand is a bit sore from having to super
grip the rope, in the end - “Waterfall rappelling in Brazil” was a memorable experience that we won’t forget. After everyone had rappelled, we hiked out, loaded up the van, and hit the road. Even though the roads were very bumpy, many of us didn’t have a hard time sleeping since we were up early and played hard all day.
We are still figuring out the details of our next adventure, but it sounds like Ana and Samuel want to head north on Sunday, far north, about 20 hours in a car broken up between two days…ahhhhhhhhhhhhhhh!!!!!
Eddie - we are always here for you no matter how far away.
Love Ben and Heather
A quick shout out to our homeboy Adam…send us an e-mail to wherearewenow@gmail.com so I can have your e-mail address.
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Phil
non-member comment
Love the Monkey shoot
Hey I want to do a shoot with a Grimlin Monkey, Love it! Great pics. Looks like you guys are having the time of your lives.