The call to move on to Canoa Quebrada
On Tuesday 24th in the evening, we arrived back home to Paracuru. Having tasted the sceneries and the strong winds further northwest, we could not stand the sticky windless weather conditions and immediately felt the urge to leave the place we'd so much loved during a whole month back in december. Many kitesurfers have left, the strong trade winds have definitely moved on further north, and the local population started to give us the impression as if they've got eager to scratch every single little cash as possible, not considering their own good reputation before sinking back into misery for half a year. We decided to leave within 36 hours in order to keep the place in good memory (since probably most of the negative feelings were produced by ourselves, suffering pure coincidence and having no fun to start a new household as we had in december). We would transfer by public bus lines via Fortaleza to another village called Canoa Quebrada, on the eastern tip of Ceará's coast.
Now, what do we do with all our gear, we asked ourselves. We had packed as much stuff as possible back in Switzerland, and brought it all the way to this first place in Brasil. Some clothes and guidebooks we thought might be useful in a later stage of the trip (e.g. for the cold nights of the high Andes mountains) would be sent by post to Fruchie in Rio. The two surfboards would be strapped on top of the huge Quiverbag containing all our kitesurf equipment (45 kilos). The bikes should be sold on the spot, as it was planned when we bought them...
Haha, no way to sell two bikes in a poor village at the end of a touristic season. Nobody had enough cash in hand even for a bargain price. We did not want to geet stuck in Paracuru just because of the bicycles, neither did we want to just give them for free. So we decided to take them along on our trip, as far as we could, and hoped that they would go on serving us until we would find a buyer elsewhere.
Now imagine the face of the busdriver on that early thursday morning of the 26th of January, when we arrived with all our belongings to Paracuru's Rodoviario. Just say, we love him! And so do we the next bus driver in Fortaleza...
Canoa Quebrada, the hippiest party town in Ceará after Fortaleza, would be our home for one week. We adored the fine food in the different restaurants (e.g. Argentinan All-You-Can-Eat Barbecue with great wine), the crazy Reggae parties in front of Canoa's famous ocre sandcliffs, the firstclass kitesurfing conditions and simply hanging out and enjoying the seaview and the cool seabreeze on the veranda of our neat pousada Quebramar built by an Argentinan architect.
As the places are nice, lots of people come in at weekends, and so does the risk of thefts rise. Early on Monday morning I woke up to discover that somebody must have climbed up from the street to our veranda and get in through the open window to steel some valuables. Luckily there was no violence involved, but we are quite sad to have lost our digital camera, my little pocket trumpet, and some other little handy things that bring in good cash at the black markets... Take it easy, such things are quite common, not only in Brasil... Now the only things that can't be replaced are the pictures from our buggy trip. All the great impressions from the ongoing places will have to be kept in memory by some other means until we find a new camera... Here are some last pictures of Paracuru paradise we´ve managed to retrieve from an old SD-card: bye bye paracuru
On our last day in Canoa, we did a bicycle trip to enjoy the typical lobster session in Ponta Grossa, which is a beautiful secluded village stuck at the spectacular cliffs 28kms west of Canoa Quebrada. The main adventure was the ride back: After a long digestive Siesta in the Palm Garden of Sidrak's Barraca, we crossed a river with our bikes on the shoulder suffering the strong mangrove smell and we quickly advanced through the beach immerged by tons of soft brown algae (barefoot, yearghhh). Then, after sunset, we flew over a hard sand "motorway" during almost an hour and a half and arrived in Canoa for a fullmoon bath in a transparent water lagoon.
On Tuesday 24th in the evening, we arrived back home to Paracuru. Having tasted the sceneries and the strong winds further northwest, we could not stand the sticky windless weather conditions and immediately felt the urge to leave the place we'd so much loved during a whole month back in december. Many kitesurfers have left, the strong trade winds have definitely moved on further north, and the local population started to give us the impression as if they've got eager to scratch every single little cash as possible, not considering their own good reputation before sinking back into misery for half a year. We decided to leave within 36 hours in order to keep the place in good memory (since probably most of the negative feelings were produced by ourselves, suffering pure coincidence and having no fun to start a new household as we had in december). We would transfer by public bus lines via Fortaleza to another village called Canoa Quebrada, on the eastern tip of Ceará's coast.
Now, what do we do with all our gear, we asked ourselves. We had packed as much stuff as possible back in Switzerland, and brought it all the way to this first place in Brasil. Some clothes and guidebooks we thought might be useful in a later stage of the trip (e.g. for the cold nights of the high Andes mountains) would be sent by post to Fruchie in Rio. The two surfboards would be strapped on top of the huge Quiverbag containing all our kitesurf equipment (45 kilos). The bikes should be sold on the spot, as it was planned when we bought them...
Haha, no way to sell two bikes in a poor village at the end of a touristic season. Nobody had enough cash in hand even for a bargain price. We did not want to geet stuck in Paracuru just because of the bicycles, neither did we want to just give them for free. So we decided to take them along on our trip, as far as we could, and hoped that they would go on serving us until we would find a buyer elsewhere.
Now imagine the face of the busdriver on that early thursday morning of the 26th of January, when we arrived with all our belongings to Paracuru's Rodoviario. Just say, we love him! And so do we the next bus driver in Fortaleza...
Canoa Quebrada, the hippiest party town in Ceará after Fortaleza, would be our home for one week. We adored the fine food in the different restaurants (e.g. Argentinan All-You-Can-Eat Barbecue with great wine), the crazy Reggae parties in front of Canoa's famous ocre sandcliffs, the firstclass kitesurfing conditions and simply hanging out and enjoying the seaview and the cool seabreeze on the veranda of our neat pousada Quebramar built by an Argentinan architect.
As the places are nice, lots of people come in at weekends, and so does the risk of thefts rise. Early on Monday morning I woke up to discover that somebody must have climbed up from the street to our veranda and get in through the open window to steel some valuables. Luckily there was no violence involved, but we are quite sad to have lost our digital camera, my little pocket trumpet, and some other little handy things that bring in good cash at the black markets... Take it easy, such things are quite common, not only in Brasil... Now the only things that can't be replaced are the pictures from our buggy trip. All the great impressions from the ongoing places will have to be kept in memory by some other means until we find a new camera... Here are some last pictures of Paracuru paradise we´ve managed to retrieve from an old SD-card: bye bye paracuru
On our last day in Canoa, we did a bicycle trip to enjoy the typical lobster session in Ponta Grossa, which is a beautiful secluded village stuck at the spectacular cliffs 28kms west of Canoa Quebrada. The main adventure was the ride back: After a long digestive Siesta in the Palm Garden of Sidrak's Barraca, we crossed a river with our bikes on the shoulder suffering the strong mangrove smell and we quickly advanced through the beach immerged by tons of soft brown algae (barefoot, yearghhh). Then, after sunset, we flew over a hard sand "motorway" during almost an hour and a half and arrived in Canoa for a fullmoon bath in a transparent water lagoon.
posted by Patrick Jeannerat at 1/31/2007 10:32:00 PM
0 Comments:
Post a Comment
<< Home