South America

Well it has finally happened - I wish I was at home at the moment...but only for the weather. Can you believe that I am actually writing this?! I am in the northeast of Brasil on the coast and London is having better weather than me!! This is simply not supposed to happen. And I am really starting to get concerned that I am not going to get a tan worthy of having been in South America for 6 months in time for going home...I have only 6 weeks left :O what a shocking thought. And not one that i am going to spend any time dwelling on. I still have so much to do and see.

But first let me tell you of the amazing things that I have seen and done recently... I am so far behind in recording my adventures that I am not sure where to start!

I am now in Pipa, a little town with beautiful beaches around. The majority of people come here to see and swim with the dolphins that hang out in the bays here all year round. I am lucky enough to also be here at the right time to see baby sea turtles hatching on Madeiro beach and being helped down to the sea by the conservation project here. They are so tiny it is hard to image that they will grow to be as big as the adult ones that I later spotted from the cliff viewpoint in the ecological park. That was yesterday in the sun on the beach and now I am looking out of the window at torrents of rain.

Although Pipa is nice I have to leave tomorrow as I stayed far too long in Jericoacoara and so gave myself no time to stop in Fortelaza or Natal on the way here. I turned up in Jeri expecting to stay about 3 or 4 days and left 3 weeks later! But I had the most wonderful time and met some awesome people. When all the boxes get ticked for enjoying a place it then becomes increadibly hard to move on. Wonderful place, wonderful travelling friends, kind and friendly locals, interesting things to do, a beach, good food and a great place to stay. I met 2 dutch girls on the beach on my first day there who I had met previously in Sao Luis. They were really nice and it was good to see familiar faces. When they saw me ill the next day (nothing serious - just a fever and a cold) they rescued me and took me to their amazing pousada. The rooms there are little buildings on their own set around a beautiful garden, one side of which was the kitchen and room where we had breakfast (this was completely open on two sides so looked straight out into the garden). Each room had a little porch with a hammock, garden chair and table and chairs. Every morning they gave us a most delicious breakfast of fresh fruit, cake, bread, egg, fried banana, coffee and fruit juice. I woke up each morning with a smile on my face.

So what did I do with the 3 weeks I had in Jeri? To be honest I am not entirely sure, but each day really felt as if I had filled it! I practiced capoeira (a very brasillian marshal art/dance from African roots) on the beach every day, had lunch and supper with friends, went to a bar with pool tables and played an odd brasillian version of pool, learnt (tried!) to dance forrô, walked to the top of the large sand dune on the edge of the town to see the sun set and rise, watched a few films in the sittingroom of the video shop on rainy days, and spent a lot of time in the hammock on my porch. I have to say that life really couldn´t get much better

The journey to Jeri was a lot of effort - I have never made so much effort to get anywhere! It took 2 days, 2 buses and 4 4x4s. A great experience though, and shared with a group of cool people - Matt (San Fran), Joán (Barcelona), and 2 German girls who I am having big problems remembering the names of (sorry girls but I guess this is an occupational hazard of the traveller). Matt was getting really pissed off on the 2nd day because a promised '2' hour rough 4x4 ride was actually 5 hours but it was a laugh or cry moment (well in 5 hours several moments!) and I had to laugh, especially when an increadibly old indiginous woman climbed into the back of the ´jeep´ with a long thin smoking pipe in her mouth and dribbled all over us in the process of sitting. Let me take a minute here to try to describe to you the 4x4 travelling experience. They are normally toyotas. I think that a lot of people would call them jeeps as they have a cabin at the front and then an open back, normally used by farmers and people who transport small amounts of stuff. These have been converted by the brasilians to also hold people. In order to get into one you have to either scramble up using a wheel to stand on or a wooden ladder supplied by the driver and then swing a leg over the side. There are wooden benches either along the edges or about 3 or 4 rows across the width. If you are lucky these benches have a cushion, but more often than not you, the lucky traveller, are transported along rough roads for hours on a hard bench with no padding sitting closer to the people around you than you ever thought would be possible. One of the roads that we travelled, I have just noticed, is described in my guide book as 'a very bad road'. It was fun though!

I travelled to Jeri from Barreirinhas, a small fishing town where people stay to visit the incredibly beautiful Lençóis National Park. This park is a landscape of white sand dunes interspersed with blue-green lakes of rain water in the wet season. It is one of those places that makes one emit an involuntary 'wow' when first glimpsed. The lakes of rain water were delicious to swim in and the dunes created beautiful vistas. Along with the Uyni salt flats this has to be one of the most beautiful places on Earth.

Before the Lençóis national park I was in the UNESCO World Heritage site of Sao Luis. This is where I met Matt and Joán and Johanna and Wille and the german girls.. and another couple i have just remembered about! (Finally I am having the travelling experience of bumping into the same people again and again ) Sao Luis is a beautiful crumbling town of old colonial architecture, incredible thunder storms, delicious pizza and too many caipirinhas.

Without going as far back as my Amazon adventure (I hope to find time to write about this in the next week!) this gets me up to date I think. Next I am going to Olinda and then Salvador, and from there I will fly back to Buenos Aires for 2 weeks to see friends made in my travels through Argentina. I am incredibly excited about going back to BA, which is helping to distract me from the awful thought that after this I will only have 2 weeks before I fly home. But let´s not think or talk of these things yet.

It has now stopped raining I am going to go and eat a papaya for lunch and hope that the sun has come out by then so I can go to the beach and work on that tan!

See you soonish London!