| Jericoacoara |
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| Jericoacoara, 14 June 2005 Hey everyone, It has been a while that we wrote something in our diary and soon it will be over, snif snif! It will be great to see you guys all back but we will leave with pain in our heart because there is so much more we want to see and do... At the moment we are in a little beach town in the north of Brazil (6 hours by bus from Fortaleza), called Jericoacoara and it is really heaven on earth! We have a hotel on the beach and in front of our room a hammock. The beach town has some nice bars and restaurants with good caiphiriñas!!!!! We have been walking along the beach with palm trees and beautiful white sand dunes and the sunset is wonderful! There are some small sandy streets with little art shops and the only thing you need here is a bikini and a pair of sandals. Even at night it is too hot to wear a t-shirt! The temperature is about 29°c and the sea isn't really refreshing either! You can stay in there for hours without getting cold! Joris has really taken advantage of that and is following a kit-surfing course right now! After 5 hours he was already standing up on his board! Yesterday he had to swallow a lot of water in order to learn how to hold and move the kite. It doesn't look that simple at all to me but as usual after a few hours he knew how to do it! Brazil has been great until now! The death train from Bolivia wasn't that 'deathly' at all.The seats were very comfortable and there was air conditioning, although the trip was quite bumpy! We suspect that the rails were not very straight or had the driver been drinking? We arrived in Corumba (Brazil) at 9 am and booked our trip to the Pantanal for the next day. There we spent 4 wonderful days in the middle of nature. They promised us that we would see a lot of animals and we did! Even on the trip to and from the Pantanal (in the back of a truck, about 6 hours each way) we saw a lot of wildlife along the road. The Pantanal, a vast wetlands in the center of South America, is about half the size of France (some 230 000 km square; less than 100 000 km square in Bolivia and Paraguay, the rest in Brazil) and a real paradise for birdwatchers! This period of the year it is in between wet and dry season so part of it is Savannah with lagoons and wet spots in the meadows. The seasonal flooding has made systematic farming impossible and has severely limited human activity but it does provide an enormously rich feeding ground for wildlife. For 4 days we stayed in the Pantanal; sleeping, eating and relaxing in a base camp and getting up early to go hiking and spotting the animals. At noon we had some time for ourselves and late in the afternoon we left the base-camp for a second walk. We also went horsebackriding, piranha-fishing and swam together with jacarés (alligators). We had a great time! As long as you could see their heads above the water there wasn't any problem but the moment they disappeared in the water, it was quite exciting to stay inside! In the base-camp there were sheds with walls made of mosquito-nets and about 20 hammocks, one next to the other but as we had our tent with us we preferred to sleep in there. First of all because sleeping together with 19 other people, there is a great possibility that at least one of them will be snoring and second of all, but maybe more important than the first, we did not want to start our day picking flees from each others but!!!! Those flees really attached themselves everywhere, even on places on your body you couldn't imagine they would be able to find!? But we saw lots of beautiful birds (Blue Macaws, Toucans, Jabiru storks, Ibis, Jakana, ... and lots of others I can't remember the name of), lots of jacarés (alligators), some Howler monkeys, coatis, piranhas, capibaras, a giant anteater, armadillos (gordeldieren), deer, an iguana,... and that made the flees and the huge amount of insect bites really worth! We enjoyed every bit of it and it was a real pity we did not have a better camera to get close-ups from the animals. From the Pantanal we moved on to the famous Iguazu Falls, on the border of Brazil, Argentina and Paraguay. They are huge and very impressive. The 275 falls are over 3 km wide and 80m high, which makes them wider than Victoria and higher than Niagara. The 'Garganta do Diable' (throat of the devil) is the most spectacular part of the falls, per second 13 000 m3 of water plunge 80m down into 14 falls. We really loved the Argentinian side of the falls because you could get so much closer and get much more wet!!! Another attraction we visited in Foz de Iguaçu was the bird park. Lots of species but sadly enough in cages. I preferred to see them flying in the Pantanal, even if we couldn't take a good picture of them! From Foz de Iguaçu we made a little side-trip to Paraguay. The grandmother of Joris has a friend with a hotel in Paraguay (near Encarnacion) and we promised to drop by when we where in Foz, so we did. They were both still quite healthy. It was a pity we couldn't stay longer than one night in Hotel Tirol del Paraguay (we already booked our flight from Foz to Fortaleza) because the environment was beautiful. The hotel was only 280 km from Foz but it took us more than 6 hours (one-way) to get there (although they told us it would only take 4). The bus really stopped a lot and people got on and off all the time. From Foz we flew to Fortaleza where it was very different! Finally the beach!!!! It is not that we have the need to lay on the beach but it is a nice change after traveling for 4 months! It's hot and there is a relaxed atmosphere. Even at 22h we could still go for a swim without being cold afterward. During the day it was so hot that the water was hardly refreshing. One day later we took the bus to paradise, Jericoacoara, and 5 days later we are still here!!!! Once you get here it's hard to leave again, people told us, and it is true!!!! But the 17Th of June we fly from Fortaleza to Belém so we will have to leave by then. In Belém another adventure is waiting for us, the Amazon!!! Looking forward to it but first we are going to enjoy Jericoacoara for 2 more days!!!!!!!!! Sunny greetings, Domi and Joris |