Travel with Indigo

I felt bad for the crew last night since we didn’t get home from dinner until rather late and they had to come over to pick us up from the dock in the tender. It was just a short trip but still, someone had to stay up until we got back. We were warned not to leave the tender tied up anywhere and when we get back to the boat at night, we always use the crane to lift it up to its place on the upper deck. Too bad but it’s not worth taking the risk of losing it. I forgot to tell you that last night, Grant drove our friends’ car from their house to the restaurant—you can imagine how thrilled he was and believe me, the traffic is terrible everywhere. But he did great.

More about Brazil: the country is almost as big as the U.S. and it takes up nearly half of the South American continent. There are 175 million people living in the country. Apparently the northeastern part of the country, where we are, is different from the more prosperous southern part and the longer I was on this trip, the more I wished I could be on the boat for the southern part of the trip too. We were told that not only is the income and employment situation different, but the accent is different and the food is more spicy and fiery. Sounds interesting too!

So today, we are going on a dune buggy ride. We took the tender to shore where we were to meet the dune buggies arranged by our host the afternoon before. As we were waiting, we saw little monkeys in the trees by the entrance to the “yacht club” and were very entertained by them. I have never seen so many monkeys in trees—though come to think of it, I’m not sure I have ever seen monkeys except in the zoos.

We drove in the dune buggies (they call them “boogies”) to the ferry—Grant and Will in one and Phil and I in the other—and crossed the river to the dunes on a ferry that was pushed by a pivot tug boat, which I had never seen before. The tug boat is attached to one side of the ferry and it changes the direction of the ferry by pivoting itself around to face the other direction. Worked pretty well. We had two great buggy drivers, Ronnye and Ricardo, and I was pleased to hear one was a policeman. Apparently this is his second job—not unusual here—policemen don’t get paid much, but he had a cool-looking badge.

All up and down the coast, there are little villages and behind the villages are huge dunes, much higher than what we are used to—like snow-covered hills. You have to ride with a driver who is licensed to drive the buggies; in other words, you couldn’t just ride your own dune buggy on the dunes by yourself. And you can ride with or without emotion—and of course, you want to go with emotion, which just means a little faster and a little crazier but even I wasn’t scared. We made several stops during our ride at very primitive places with thatched-roof huts. There were lots of vendors with all kinds of stuff to sell you and remember, they like to negotiate.

At one point, the boys went sand-boarding down a really high dune and it was really lots of fun—except that you have to walk back up. This time, their feet were in bindings so it really was like snow-boarding. At one point, the dune buggy had to cross water and since the water is too deep to drive through, we drove onto a very primitive raft and a guy poled us across the river. That was really neat and different.

The next stop was sand-boarding into a lake. Even Phil tried this one since you sat on the board. And the best part was you didn’t have to walk back up. They had a little open car that sat four people and it was pulled up a track by an engine that looked like a dune buggy engine to me. When people were in the car, they guy would sit in his chair and turn on the engine and take it through its gears and the car would be pulled up to the top. Really neat! Another stop, the boys and Phil rode a zip-line down to another lake—you could either sit in a harness or just hold on. They had a car to pull you back up too.

Then we stopped on the beach so the boys could go para-sailing. They went separately with the guy who ran the operation. A dune buggy pulled them up along the beach and then released them. They were gone a long time and went really high (about 1300 feet) and just loved it. There was a camera attached to the sailing thing and the guy was able to take photos of them while they were up there. He gave us the roll of film when it was over.

We then had lunch at a very modest restaurant on the beach and it amazed me once again—and I would have this experience many times over—how delicious the food was when it was cooked in such a primitive manner. We then went back to the ferry loading area—more vendors—they were everywhere! Ronnye and Ricardo came on board Indigo and they loved it—really nice guys. The whole time we were in Brazil, ferries and other boats would pass by Indigo and take photos and yell hello at us and it was clear that they don’t see many boats like ours. What really nice people we met.