Brazilian beach holiday

We arrived in Fortaleza after a "short" 28-hours-busride (luckily the longest that we had to do during this trip and luckily because it's already over) and at first I had to work a bit, my first real translation job, please applaud everybody! After that was done we met my friends mum Thereza who lives close to Fortaleza and we spent some very relaxing days in her beautiful house close to the beach. We went to the beach and had some very chilled beers (my brazilian friends in Germany used to complain about the beer not being cold enough, now I know why) while sitting in plastic chairs on the beach.

After Fortaleza we took the most terrible night bus ever to Natal, which is a famous holiday destination also among brazilians and the school holidays take place in July so it was full of brazilian families which was interesting because the average brazilian tourist seems to like it crowded. At some places the beach was almost deserted and then at others the people would sit so close to each other you had problems walking through the lines of chairs and tables.

In Natal we also did a snorkeling trip to a nearby reef which I liked and Flo didn't because again there were heaps of people, but for me it was interesting to watch because again people would stay really close together in the water and most of them also had their head out of the water and were chatting instead of looking at the fish.

We stayed 4 days in Natal, then went to the next beach town called Praia da Pipa which apparently was a hippie-town in the 70s, but like all of the little towns along the coast was discovered by mass tourism, so that, nowadays the only hippie-like-thing about it are the colorful dresses that you can buy there. Still we liked it much more than Natal, because it was much smaller and quieter, had surprisingly good restaurants, and had more wildlife.

There is a beach that you can walk to at low tide where dolphins get very close to the shore and if you go swimming you almost have the feeling of being really close to them. Then there was also a sanctuary with a lookout where you could observe sea turtles during high tide and they had a little enclosure where you could watch tortoises having sex and making funny noises at any time.

Again we went to the beach a lot, had some sunburn, had quite a few beers (it's Caipifruta on the picture, but we also had beer, and caipirinhas, and more caipifrutas)and just generally relaxed a lot. Surprisingly despite this lifestyle which felt very decadent because we didn't watch our money too much, we spent less than in the cities where you have to pay public transport and entrance fees to museums etc.

Next on our List is Recife where we're NOT gonna go to the beach as a few days ago a girl has just been killed there in a shark attack. It's one of the ten most dangerous beaches in the world (according to 5-seconds-google-research), because of the harbour they built very close to the city. The construction changed some of the currents along the cost, plus tiger shark are very attracted to large trailer ships and follow them for several hundred kilometers living of the rubbish that is thrown overboard. These tigersharks and bullsharks are responsible for most of the attacks along the bay of Recife, so no swimming for us there, thank you.