Parnaiba River Delta

We left Jericoacoara with a tour guide in a pick-up truck headed west toward the Delta of the Parnaiba River. This trip is a complicated one to do in part because much of the most fabulous parts of it involve driving across sand dunes or taking river boats for stretches of a couple hours at a time. You can´t do the same sort of trip by renting a car yourself, because parts of it are over sand roads that would require a four-by-four and a fair amount of experience in driving offroad. You also have to know the cycle of the tides to get out along
the beaches.

This trip is also tough to do for someone who´s not already in Brazil. The start and end points are Fortaleza and Sao Luis, neither of which have any serious volume of international air traffic. The best a person could do would be to fly through Manaus, which would require a layover in Belem to get to Sao Luis. Add in the absurd cost of doing anything in Brazil, I´m guessing it will be some time before there this route becomes a tourist destination like Cancun or Aruba. During the trip we were passed from one guide to another. In a perverse analogy, it struck me as a bit like kidnapping victims that are passed from one band of gang-bangers to another, though in our case were high-end tourists. It´s just what popped into our head.

Our tour guide Marzinho drove us out along the sand dunes on one side and the crystal waters of the Atlantic on the other. The route carries us across several rivers, the first one by raft. Ten years ago there was no way to get by car Jericoacoara to the nearby towns fishing towns of Guiru, Tatajuba and Mangue Seco. Now you pull your car onto a wooden raft and three guys row you across with long wooden branches. Some folks still fish along the banks across from Guriu, but a good number of them like Gustavo just work as rafters.

It´s better than fishing, Gustavo says. Fisherman don´t sleep. They wake up at midnight, or one in the morning. I get here at eight. I´m 27 and I´ve been doing this since I was 13. The first rafts could only
carry small cars, and you spent the whole time worrying that the raft would sink before it made it across. Then other people saw it was good business, and competition started, and the rafts got better, now you can carry pick-ups like this one. A lot of people leave little towns like this. The guys I first started working with, they left ten years ago, went to Riberao Preto in Sao Paulo, they made some money and came back. The city´s not always that great. You can make a living here, it´s not a bad life.

We get to the other side without sinking or worrying about it. Then Marzinho drove us up to the top of a huge dune with a spectacular view of the surroundings, where I finally got a chance to try my hand at duneboarding. OK, it was sitting down, like sledding, but it was amazing. I probably would have done it three or four more times if it hadn't involved hiking back up the dune. Another half hour´s drive and we were at a lake made by a dammed up river, where hammocks and deck chairs sit out on the water that has been driven up by a rising tide. Then we got onto a paved road that took us out to the Delta of the Parnaiba River. Like a hand with five fingers, the Parnaiba breaks into five main branches that take you out to the Atlantic. Parnaiba was once the capital of palm wax, which boomed in the 19th century but later collapsed with the rise of synthetic petroleum based waxes. The city of Parnaiba still has a series of elegant buildings and warehouses built in 19th century style and surprisingly well maintained, testaments to the wax boom much like the Manaus opera
house is a living icon of the rubber boom.

There´s still a market for it, and these days wax palms are the main form of agriculture along the delta. But the state of Piaui is generally a pretty overlooked place. It for years sought to promote itself with the motto “Piaui exists.” The delta reminds me a bit of Venezuela´s Orinoco Delta, though the latter is much more jungle-like, poorer and still heavily influenced by indigenous groups. What´s most fascinating about the Parnaiba River delta is that its lush and verdant mangrove forests lead into barren white-sand dunes. We took a boat tour through the Delta for almost two hours. At high tide the ocean links straight to the river, at low tide the two are separated by sand bars. We got there at low tide, so we cold only get within about 300 yards of the dunes. We walked for 10 minutes along a wet muddy river bed. Then we crossed a line where we literally went from gooey brown mud to white desert dunes.

Our guide told me and Isa he was going to stay behind to watch the boat. We walked up to the dunes, which rise up and suddenly fall like cliffs into craters below that are the size of car or a small house. During the rainy season, those craters fill up with water and form spectacular lakes between the dunes. The scene is just as cool when they are empty, this bizarre moonscape of dunes pocked with huge holes, the bottoms of which are carved out like dried river beds.

Another ten minute walk and we were at the beach. An incredible, isolated white sand beach called Bahia do Feijao Bravo, with nobody on it for kilometers, no stands selling coconut juice, no vendors hocking Cokes or hot dogs, not a soul in sight. Isa stripped down to her bikini for a dip, but I wasn´t having any of it. I´m sorry honey, we did not come 1,000 miles to an isolated beach so we could take a swim with our trunks on. I tied up my trunks to a branch to keep them from blowing away. Isa held her bikini top and bottom in her hands and we ran into the water in our birthday suits. I honestly did want to take a picture of it but didn´t. Not that I was fearing a Scarlett Johansson type phone-hacking scandal, but rather because our camera that day had filled up with sand and refused to take any pictures (this is frequent in Jericoacoara) We stayed pretty close to the shoreline because the waves seemed to move in strange patterns. The sand vibrated under our feet as we stood in the water, a strange feeling as if sci-fi creatures were waiting below to much on our toes. The entire environment is in constant flux. As we walked back, it occurred to me that the guide was probably less interested in guarding the boat than in giving us a chance for a skinny dip.