It was our last day of real vacation travel, with half of it taken up by the trip back to São Luis. It ended up being a relaxed river tubing excursion down the Riocha Cardosa river. It took about an hour of driving through the largely unpopulated cerrado forest to reach a place were we could begin floating down the river on inner tubes. We were joined by a crowd of mostly female senior citizens who were chatty and friendly.
No pictures unfortunately because our camera isn´s water proof. We stopped at the house of a local family that made us tapioca and coffee. I also for the first time ate cashew nuts that had been roasted by a human being, sold to me by a cute five year old girl.They were toasted unevenly, meaning each one tasted slightly
different.
The trip also took as past a bizarre bridge to nowhere put up about 15 miles from the nearest paved road. I took a fleeting picture of it from the truck. It looked like it was made from poured concrete (did they drive concrete mixers for an hour across the sand road?) supported by 10 pillars. It does not connect to the sand road on either side, but does have a rickety hand-made wooden ladder leaned up against one side in case anyone wants to climb up and look around. The truck we were in did fine driving across what appeared to be a small wooden pedestrian bridge that went across the small gully that this Sara Palin-inspired work of civil engineering was attempting to span. Fortunately someone had taken advantage of the structure to set up a
small bar with a pool table underneath it. At least it was providing shade.
Showing posts with label Vacation. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Vacation. Show all posts
Sunday, October 16, 2011
Friday, October 14, 2011
Lencois Maranhenses
The Lencois Maranhenses were probably the biggest draw for this trip. They did not disappoint. They were just the postcard idyll I imagined from looking at pictures online of the blue-green lagoons in the middle of sand dunes. They form during the rainy season as the rain fills up the spaces between dunes, and then most of them totally dry up between October and December as the rains stop. And they migrate. Each year the wind blows the dunes to one side or another, meaning that the rainfall fills up the craters in a different place each time.
Our guide picked us up at the resort and drove around 20 minutes on a sand road and parked the pickup alongside several others that had already brought tourists to the area. We walked less than five minutes
when we were already at the first lagoon. The turqoise freshwater is really breathtaking. They lagoons got bigger as we walked further in,each one beautiful than the next. I made a routine at each lagoon of
swimming across it, then climbing up the dune and charging back down into the water.
The pictures really are worth a thousand words (see them on my Facebook page). Our guide took us to a nearby house where the woman who lived there cooked us an amazing fish lunch. The charming little farm house had a refreshing breeze and great views of the open cerrado wildnerness and the dunes in the distance. We chowed on cashew fruit picked from the trees outside. I´ve eaten cashew nuts all my life but really never
came across the fruit until I got to Brazil – I never once saw it in Venezuela. You can get it at juice bars in Rio, though its often from concentrate.
We drove back to the hotel along the sand track. The sun beat down on the leaves and the shrubs, the scent reminded me of the smell that hot northern California sun creates when it beats down on eucalyptus and
pine in the summer.
Our guide picked us up at the resort and drove around 20 minutes on a sand road and parked the pickup alongside several others that had already brought tourists to the area. We walked less than five minutes
when we were already at the first lagoon. The turqoise freshwater is really breathtaking. They lagoons got bigger as we walked further in,each one beautiful than the next. I made a routine at each lagoon of
swimming across it, then climbing up the dune and charging back down into the water.
The pictures really are worth a thousand words (see them on my Facebook page). Our guide took us to a nearby house where the woman who lived there cooked us an amazing fish lunch. The charming little farm house had a refreshing breeze and great views of the open cerrado wildnerness and the dunes in the distance. We chowed on cashew fruit picked from the trees outside. I´ve eaten cashew nuts all my life but really never
came across the fruit until I got to Brazil – I never once saw it in Venezuela. You can get it at juice bars in Rio, though its often from concentrate.
We drove back to the hotel along the sand track. The sun beat down on the leaves and the shrubs, the scent reminded me of the smell that hot northern California sun creates when it beats down on eucalyptus and
pine in the summer.
Thursday, October 13, 2011
Barreirinhas
The next stretch of the trip takes us by boat along the Rio Preguicas to Barreirinhas, the main jump-off point for seeing the Lencois Maranhenses. We were picked by our third guide of a trip, and older man by the name of Xico, who piled all suitcases into the back of a launch and took us more or less across the river to a nearby town called Mandacaru that hosts an old lighthouse and a sleepy naval base. Cabure made me feel like I was in a hostile desert environment largely cut off from the convienences of modern life. Mandacaru made me realize I was basically across the river from them.
The latter is relatively isolated but still has power connected to the national grid and a wide range of commerce including small grocery stores and artisan shops. Cattle roam the area, cashew trees dot the sand. We entered the town via a small dock next to an outdoor bar boasting its cashew-fruit caipirinhas. Eight-thirty a.m. was a bit on the early side for that sort of thing, at least for me. I got to chatting with a guy who called himself Enoc, who said the growth of tourism had for years been creating new employment opportunities in an area traditionally dominated by fishing. Even more recently, oil and gas discoveries by Petrobras and start-up oil company OGX had created new transportation routes and new demand for labor. A geological
prospecting service that used small aircraft for surveying had started carrying passengers from remote areas of Maranhao that previously relied on slow and unreliable bus transport. This sort of thing seemed
to be happening all over Brazil. I remember one of my earliest experiences in Rio was becoming a regular at one of the increasingly common juice bars in Copacabana. A particular chain called BigB was started by a man from Ceara, the state that´s home to Jericoacoara, and he mostly hired workers who had migrated from there to Rio. One of the staff there named Olivio said he used to take a bus for five days to get back to see his family for a month. Now he flies, not only because its faster – it´s cheaper. A changing nation.
Xico drove us along the river to Barreirinhas, stopping at a dune-centric tourist stop called Vassouras that offered sodas, coconut juice, snack, and arts and crafts. It also proudly displayed a set of domesticated monkeys that did tricks like hanging from rafters or walking across tight-ropes in exchange for bits of apple or coconut. I actually found the dunes more interesting, in part because monkeys are pretty common in Rio (once you spend a bit of time around them you start to realize that they´re generally a bunch of bastards). Xico dropped us off at the business end of Barreirinhas, where most of the restaurants and commerce were, a bit of a hike from the swanky resort we would check into.
We were picked up in a taxi by a man who identified himself as Ue, originally from São Paulo. He came four
years ago, following his brother who had set up a business a decade back. That´s when the tourism to the Lencois really took off, he said. Now Ue has two boats and a couple cars to work the tourism circuit.
You can leave your car open, you can walk around at night by yourself, it´s not like São Paulo. Barreirinhas is a good place to live. The real game changer for the Lencois was the road linking Barreirinhas to São Luis. Previously it was only the most determined traveller that would make the eight hour journey across the unpaved road to see the world´s most spectacular lagoons (pardon my editorializing). Today it takes about three hours – and the journey is still a complicated one, as these posts have pointed out. It´s the sort of thing you see all over Brazil. It´s a country bursting at the seams, its growth constrained by airports that are overcrowded to the point of chaos, ports that are in disastrous overuse, railroad lines without capacity to carry goods. It´s well-known – almost to the point of cliche – that trucking grain from the center-west of the country to the coast can cost as much as half the value of the grain. It makes me wonder what Barreirinhas would look like if the remaining difficulties in making this journey – particularly for foreigners – were somehow straightened out. Brazil´s expensive for a lot of reasons, one of them is that fact that it´s just not easy to get
around.
We spent the remainder of the day lounging in the Porto Preguicas Resort, an upscale tourist haven with suburbanesque identical red-roofed cabins and manicured lawns. My instinct to pass it off as the usual tourism industry fare turned out to be entirely wrong. Along with the expected amenities like a pool, sauna, game room and river kayaks, the place had some unusual extras including an orchard that provided a considerable part of the kitchen´s food. It grew everything from mangoes and bananas to parsely and cilantro, and composted used coffee grounds along with spent charcoal. Left-over food scraps from the restaurant didn´t go into the trash, they were fed to a gaggle of chickens and goats. The restaurant´s menu included “galinha caipira,” Brazil´s way of saying chicken that´s not factory farmed (Brazil is now one of the world´s largest producers of factor farmed poultry).
The chickens in the coop in the back scrapped over a piece of lettuce that looked a lot like the one Isa and I had left on our plates the day before. They provided eggs that were also used in the kitchen. The garden hand, Jefferson, has been on the job for three months, formerly working as a painter. He knew how to tend a garden because he had one at home. The resort also houses a pottery production center with two pottery wheels being used by two teenage guests under the eye of a local resident who works there. The entire resort is filled with vases and pots that are made on site and fired in a wood-burning kiln. Next to that is a wood shop where other Barreirinhas residents make furniture used in the resort. I have to admit I was pleasantly
suprised.
Isa and I enjoyed a meal of slow-cooked chicken, possibly one of the ones we had seen earlier. I think this was my first locavore meal ever. Isa joked that eating recently killed chicken with our hands while drinking beer under a chandeliered wood-decorated dining area made it feel like we were in the Middle Ages. She hummed Holy Grail-esque flute sounding medieval tunes as we ate.
The latter is relatively isolated but still has power connected to the national grid and a wide range of commerce including small grocery stores and artisan shops. Cattle roam the area, cashew trees dot the sand. We entered the town via a small dock next to an outdoor bar boasting its cashew-fruit caipirinhas. Eight-thirty a.m. was a bit on the early side for that sort of thing, at least for me. I got to chatting with a guy who called himself Enoc, who said the growth of tourism had for years been creating new employment opportunities in an area traditionally dominated by fishing. Even more recently, oil and gas discoveries by Petrobras and start-up oil company OGX had created new transportation routes and new demand for labor. A geological
prospecting service that used small aircraft for surveying had started carrying passengers from remote areas of Maranhao that previously relied on slow and unreliable bus transport. This sort of thing seemed
to be happening all over Brazil. I remember one of my earliest experiences in Rio was becoming a regular at one of the increasingly common juice bars in Copacabana. A particular chain called BigB was started by a man from Ceara, the state that´s home to Jericoacoara, and he mostly hired workers who had migrated from there to Rio. One of the staff there named Olivio said he used to take a bus for five days to get back to see his family for a month. Now he flies, not only because its faster – it´s cheaper. A changing nation.
Xico drove us along the river to Barreirinhas, stopping at a dune-centric tourist stop called Vassouras that offered sodas, coconut juice, snack, and arts and crafts. It also proudly displayed a set of domesticated monkeys that did tricks like hanging from rafters or walking across tight-ropes in exchange for bits of apple or coconut. I actually found the dunes more interesting, in part because monkeys are pretty common in Rio (once you spend a bit of time around them you start to realize that they´re generally a bunch of bastards). Xico dropped us off at the business end of Barreirinhas, where most of the restaurants and commerce were, a bit of a hike from the swanky resort we would check into.
We were picked up in a taxi by a man who identified himself as Ue, originally from São Paulo. He came four
years ago, following his brother who had set up a business a decade back. That´s when the tourism to the Lencois really took off, he said. Now Ue has two boats and a couple cars to work the tourism circuit.
You can leave your car open, you can walk around at night by yourself, it´s not like São Paulo. Barreirinhas is a good place to live. The real game changer for the Lencois was the road linking Barreirinhas to São Luis. Previously it was only the most determined traveller that would make the eight hour journey across the unpaved road to see the world´s most spectacular lagoons (pardon my editorializing). Today it takes about three hours – and the journey is still a complicated one, as these posts have pointed out. It´s the sort of thing you see all over Brazil. It´s a country bursting at the seams, its growth constrained by airports that are overcrowded to the point of chaos, ports that are in disastrous overuse, railroad lines without capacity to carry goods. It´s well-known – almost to the point of cliche – that trucking grain from the center-west of the country to the coast can cost as much as half the value of the grain. It makes me wonder what Barreirinhas would look like if the remaining difficulties in making this journey – particularly for foreigners – were somehow straightened out. Brazil´s expensive for a lot of reasons, one of them is that fact that it´s just not easy to get
around.
We spent the remainder of the day lounging in the Porto Preguicas Resort, an upscale tourist haven with suburbanesque identical red-roofed cabins and manicured lawns. My instinct to pass it off as the usual tourism industry fare turned out to be entirely wrong. Along with the expected amenities like a pool, sauna, game room and river kayaks, the place had some unusual extras including an orchard that provided a considerable part of the kitchen´s food. It grew everything from mangoes and bananas to parsely and cilantro, and composted used coffee grounds along with spent charcoal. Left-over food scraps from the restaurant didn´t go into the trash, they were fed to a gaggle of chickens and goats. The restaurant´s menu included “galinha caipira,” Brazil´s way of saying chicken that´s not factory farmed (Brazil is now one of the world´s largest producers of factor farmed poultry).
The chickens in the coop in the back scrapped over a piece of lettuce that looked a lot like the one Isa and I had left on our plates the day before. They provided eggs that were also used in the kitchen. The garden hand, Jefferson, has been on the job for three months, formerly working as a painter. He knew how to tend a garden because he had one at home. The resort also houses a pottery production center with two pottery wheels being used by two teenage guests under the eye of a local resident who works there. The entire resort is filled with vases and pots that are made on site and fired in a wood-burning kiln. Next to that is a wood shop where other Barreirinhas residents make furniture used in the resort. I have to admit I was pleasantly
suprised.
Isa and I enjoyed a meal of slow-cooked chicken, possibly one of the ones we had seen earlier. I think this was my first locavore meal ever. Isa joked that eating recently killed chicken with our hands while drinking beer under a chandeliered wood-decorated dining area made it feel like we were in the Middle Ages. She hummed Holy Grail-esque flute sounding medieval tunes as we ate.
Tuesday, October 11, 2011
Cabure
We stayed the night in Parnaiba, and then the next morning drove two hours through thick vegetation known as cerrado until we reached the town of Tutoia. Winding through some of the back trails in town we were
back on the sand dunes, and we headed west along the beach another half hour. The scrub grass struggled to grow through the sand, making the whole thing look like a lawn with a covering or snow on it. A group of
fisherman's huts made from palm fronds dotted the beachline next to a tall antennae-like pole being used to test the area for wind generation.The beach was dotted with blackened stumps that poked out of the sand
as if they´d been buried. This is in fact what happened. Ten years ago this was a mangrove swamp, but the wind slowly covered it with sand and left the mangroves strangled. Constant flux.
We arrived at the town of Cabure, which is in fact simply a group of three different pousadas set back from the beach. There´s only power available half the day, provided by a diesel generator. The Rio Preguicas sits on the other side of the pousadas, and is the usual mode of transport for most people and goods and that come in and out.
Our pousada is a set of cabins set behind a large dune to shelter them from the wind, but the breeze is still so strong that it feels as if the rooms have fans blowing air through them all the time. Isa and spent the afternoon on the beach, not swimming much because of the bizarre wave patterns and weird currents that make you feel as if something is sucking your legs out to sea. So we lay in the tidepools that form just back from where the waves break, skipping shells and chatting about nothing. I could barely feel the sunshine because of the wind blowing off the ocean.
The pools vary in depth from about an inch to about a foot, which gives them a variation in color. I really
only noticed this because I tripped and nearly twisted my ankle on one of them. A buzzard sits watching us from the remains of some abandoned structure. Beauty and hostility all rolled into one. Life´s not easy here, says the manager of the pousada, Irai. The spectactular beauty of the place keeps people coming back, to watch the sunsets of the Rio Preguicas, to see the stars at night, to fall asleep to the sound of the wind and the waves. I love the sand and I love the water. But there´s so much to do that I often don´t get out there. And people come here complaining about all sorts of things.They say there´s so much sand, it´s too windy, they want air conditioning.
We took an afternoon tour to watch the sun set over the river and watched the bright pink guara birds play overhead. We went back to our room and read until the lights went out. It´s been a while since I put down a book on account of lights out rules.
back on the sand dunes, and we headed west along the beach another half hour. The scrub grass struggled to grow through the sand, making the whole thing look like a lawn with a covering or snow on it. A group of
fisherman's huts made from palm fronds dotted the beachline next to a tall antennae-like pole being used to test the area for wind generation.The beach was dotted with blackened stumps that poked out of the sand
as if they´d been buried. This is in fact what happened. Ten years ago this was a mangrove swamp, but the wind slowly covered it with sand and left the mangroves strangled. Constant flux.
We arrived at the town of Cabure, which is in fact simply a group of three different pousadas set back from the beach. There´s only power available half the day, provided by a diesel generator. The Rio Preguicas sits on the other side of the pousadas, and is the usual mode of transport for most people and goods and that come in and out.
Our pousada is a set of cabins set behind a large dune to shelter them from the wind, but the breeze is still so strong that it feels as if the rooms have fans blowing air through them all the time. Isa and spent the afternoon on the beach, not swimming much because of the bizarre wave patterns and weird currents that make you feel as if something is sucking your legs out to sea. So we lay in the tidepools that form just back from where the waves break, skipping shells and chatting about nothing. I could barely feel the sunshine because of the wind blowing off the ocean.
The pools vary in depth from about an inch to about a foot, which gives them a variation in color. I really
only noticed this because I tripped and nearly twisted my ankle on one of them. A buzzard sits watching us from the remains of some abandoned structure. Beauty and hostility all rolled into one. Life´s not easy here, says the manager of the pousada, Irai. The spectactular beauty of the place keeps people coming back, to watch the sunsets of the Rio Preguicas, to see the stars at night, to fall asleep to the sound of the wind and the waves. I love the sand and I love the water. But there´s so much to do that I often don´t get out there. And people come here complaining about all sorts of things.They say there´s so much sand, it´s too windy, they want air conditioning.
We took an afternoon tour to watch the sun set over the river and watched the bright pink guara birds play overhead. We went back to our room and read until the lights went out. It´s been a while since I put down a book on account of lights out rules.
Monday, October 10, 2011
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.
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.
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