Last months travel diary ended with us reaching the end of the BR101 coastal road in Brazil, it also meant we were about to enter the state of Ceara which was to be the 21st state we have visited in Brazil. Ceara is world famous for kite-surfing which means it is windy, our first indication of this was when we got a little lost on our first day in the state and spent hours driving past massive wind farms for electricity.
Based on our timing, we were under the impression that while it would be windy we would be travelling in the tail end of the windy season, and therefore shouldn’t experience hectic winds. Our intended destination on that first day was a wild camp on the beach just a little south of the small village of Sao Bento do Norte but when we arrived there and parked just above the beach in order to figure out how to access the beach and drive south we got sandblasted. It was clear that a wildcamp on the beach would be positively unpleasant and so we moved on, at which point we got lost in the maze of dirt roads traversing the wind farms.
After a long day we arrived at what was described as a surfcamp in another small village called, Sao Cristavoa. However, on arrival, there was nobody home and the site looked more abandoned than appealing so off we went in search of a wild camp, which we found just next to the beach as the sun was setting. What had meant to be an 80km day had ended up being over 400km.
In the morning, when we could observe the ocean better it was clear that there was no surfing to be had and so after a leisurely breakfast during which a number of locals slowly cruised past clearly fascinated by Mr Jones (we got the distinct impression that word had gone out about the strangers just outside town), we packed up and moved on to a campsite under development called Vida Nova. It was quite a popular spot with long term Brazilian motorhomes, who seem to spend over a month in each spot they stop at, and the owners were also super nice, even organising an asado for us the one evening. The downside, was that the camp is very exposed to the wind meaning you get buffeted all day long by wind and sand and it had an unattractive beach. The beach was very flat and reasonably hard packed which meant that everyone took their cars onto the beach and drove up and down it, often at high speed which made going for a stroll on the beach, feel more like walking down a 4 lane highway.
In the meantime, Mr Jones had picked up a loud “knocking” sound which Stuart couldn’t trace and so we had decided to seek out a mechanic in Fortaleza. We have had pretty good experiences with garages operating under the “Bosch Service centre” brand and google told us there were a couple in Fortaleza, the last major town we would encounter for over a 1000km. The garage convinced us that the issue was the fuel injection pump, which was very frustrating as that had been overhauled in a small Brazilian town just over a year prior, at quite some expense. As the weekend was approaching and we didn’t want to be without Mr Jones for days when he would not be worked on, we agreed with them we would come back on Monday morning.
While we waited for the weekend to pass we put the time to good use to research ferry boats, and ultimately book one, for the trip up the Amazon river from Belem to Manaus. Despite the Amazon river being the main transport route for everyone who lives along it, the booking system is surprisingly informal, we did everything via WhatsApp once we had managed to find the cellphone number of a booking agent. Brazilians love WhatsApp and in particular voice notes, which made it quite challenging with our limited Portuguese as the agent would send long voice notes in reply to our enquiries and requests for additional information.
Knowing that we would be without Mr Jones while the fuel injector pump was being overhauled we booked into a backpacker hostel in Fortaleza, hoping that there would be other international backpackers who we could interact with. We hadn’t met or engaged with another international traveller since the middle of September, which meant that apart from talking to each other, every other social engagement had to some extent relied on Google translate. Google translate is a wonderful tool which we couldn’t do without but it doesn’t allow for free flowing conversation, thus making all such engagements rather limited and frustrating. Much to our disappointment, the only people staying in the hostel were Brazilian!
What was meant to be a 2 night stay in the hostel turned into a 4 night one and what was meant to be a relatively expensive job turned into an exorbitantly expensive job! It had escalated from the fuel injector pump to include the injectors as well, plus a whole lot of ancillary items which in Stuart’s option did not make sense and he spent a whole lot of time arguing with the garage about the extent of work and getting items removed. Once again google translate was invaluable and at at the same time incredibly frustrating.
When the injector pump had been repaired a year ago, we had experienced a rapid overheating of the engine when driving away, from what we believed was an airlock in the cooling system – this ultimately led to a head gasket replacement a month later. At the time that mechanic was adamant that they hadn’t touched the expansion tank of the cooling system and as we hadn’t been in attendance at the time we could not prove them wrong. There was no ways Stuart was going to allow that to potentially happen again and insisted on being in attendance for every step of the reassembly process and as he witnessed – it is next to impossible to do the job without the removal and replacement of the coolant – chalk one up for one lying mechanic last year! It was a good thing Stuart was in attendance this time as they proceeded to overfill the cooling system and with the wrong mixture of antifreeze, leading to more google translate arguments as they insisted they were right. In the end Stuart prevailed but then with it past closing time and getting dark, when he took it for a test drive the coolant leaked – thank goodness for our coolant level alarm. The stress levels at this point were through the roof!
Not wanting for them to rush while trying to fix the leaking coolant, nor risk further issues when driving through dodgy Fortaleza in the dark we called it quits and called an Uber to take us back to the hostel for another night. We were both physically and mentally shattered and most definitely not in love with Brazil anymore.
The saddest part of the whole experience, while we do believe that the pump and injector pump overhaul has made Mr J run a bit better, the knocking sound we had been concerned about was still there, just slightly subdued and so they had ultimately not fixed the problem we were concerned about.
We were very keen to get the hell out of Fortaleza, apart from the mechanic experience it is the first major city in Brazil where we have felt you need to watch your back, however we had one important logistical task to deal with once we got Mr Jones back the next morning – swap out our Brazilian 5kg gas bottle for a new one as ours was empty. Brazil does not fill foreign gas bottles and only swaps its own for full ones. We had purchased a Brazilian bottle in September when our South African one had run out and this bottle was now also empty. In theory it should have been an easy task of stopping at a depot, and making the swap however as we were to find out, in the north east of Brazil, 5kg bottles are not used and so the depots only had large 13kg ones. We spent roughly 4 hours driving from depot to depot in the town until one eventually pointed us to the actual gas plant outside of town but even there we did not come right.
So, with no options left, we headed out of town to a little village that appeared to have a surf camp but upon arrival found that the restaurant associated with it no longer offered camping which was a great pity as the surf out front looked rather nice and so as was a theme for this month, we moved a bit further up the coast to our next option. This was meant to be fantastic, based on the reviews, and only metres from a wonderfully quiet beach with nobody on it. When we got there, we found very high walls around a locked up large compound and at least 500m of dunes separating it from the beach. It was by now late in the afternoon and as this spot was quite remote we decided, if nobody was home then we would just camp outside its walls. Some hours later, as we were finishing cooking supper, the German owner and his Brazilian wife arrived back home and so after eating our food, we packed Mr J up and moved inside the compound. The following morning, we did try and access the beach, but wind and fine sand do not make for a pleasant experience and we abandoned that idea after only a few hundred metres.
For weeks, every Brazilian Motorhome owner we interacted with had told us that we must visit a spot called “Beach Camping” in Praia do Baleia. Based on our most recent experiences we were fully expecting to be disappointed but thankfully that was not the case and it was the perfect spot to restore our karma. As always language was a bit of a barrier but we had some great interactions with fellow campers, enjoyed an asado with them, took long walks on the beach (the wind wasn’t even that strong), Stuart managed a bit of surfing and perhaps most importantly managed to sort out our gas problem. As every South African knows, a braai is a wonderful place for men to stand around and discuss a variety of topics and it was at the asado (South American term for a braai) that the issue of not being able to find a replacement gas bottle come up as well as a solution offered. The suggested solution was to gravity fill the 5kg bottle from a 13kg one using a special adapter that the one Motorhome owner had and after a bit of further discussion (with google) Stuart proposed that they in fact try and fill our South African bottle rather than the Brazilian one. The following morning after searching through the multitude of different sized fittings Stuart had purchased before the trip for this exact prospect, he found one that fitted onto the Brazilian adaptor and our Cadac bottle. 30 Minutes later we had a full Cadac bottle and had gifted our 5kg Brazilian one to the helpful Motorhome owner, who in return gifted his adaptor to us which is guaranteed to come in useful somewhere else in the world.
For the technically minded (and for those not – skip this paragraph): the issue with gravity filling a gas bottle is that you need liquid gas to flow from the donor bottle to the receiver bottle. This is done by hanging the donor bottle upside down and connecting it to the receiving bottle with a high-pressure hose, however the receiving bottle has air in it from when it emptied and in order for the liquid to enter the air needs to be displaced. There are convoluted ways of trying to change the pressure differential to allow for this, such as placing the donor in the sun and the recipient in the shade covered with a wet towel BUT the beauty of our gifted adapter is that it allows you to bleed off the air in the donor cylinder while controlling the liquid flow making it a relatively hassle free process.
Beach Camping was great and we could easily have spent Christmas there, in fact our fellow campers and the owners were quite disappointed when we said we wouldn’t and needed to move on. We needed to “move on” for two reasons, firstly with a ferry date secured we need to keep moving north towards that and secondly, we were hoping (against all odds) to find a spot which had perhaps another international Overlander (or two) with whom we could socialize over the festive period. With that in mind we had decided to move to Jijoca de Jericoacoara which is more touristy. Unfortunately our gamble did not pay off, there were no international tourists and the camp was surprisingly empty but nonetheless we did find ourselves in a very nice campsite and ultimately had a fantastic Christmas day full of WhatsApp calls to family as we juggled timezones from Sydney, to South Africa, Switzerland and London and then finally ending with a fantasistic roast pork leg on our mini Weber.
We have spent a number of Christmas away from home now (Malawi, Uganda, Argentina’s Patagonia & now Brazil) and it has been interesting to see the different approaches to this holiday period in each country. In South Africa our Christmas holiday rush (when everyone dashes from inland cities to the coast) always starts around the 16th, in Brazil we learnt it starts the day after Christmas. On the 26th we started to see the campsite full up throughout the day and late into the night, and each subsequent day more and more families arrived until it was bursting at the seams and we felt like we could be camping at one of the very popular KwaZulu Natal south coast spots where guy ropes interlink between sites and there almost isn’t an inch to move. There were no designated sites but Stuart had anticipated a fuller place when we arrived and positioned Mr Jones next to a couple of trees which prevented anybody parking right on top of us, on the one side and on the other we had our hammocks strung out between Mr J and a tree, so overall we had quite a large footprint and some space to move.
Although we had more space than many around Mr Jones and the location itself (on a stunning aquamarine lake) was very nice, we were very “alone in a crowd” and so decided to rather seek out a more isolated spot for the New Year. For this we had in mind a stretch of beach a little further north on which it appeared you could easily wild camp and so on New Year’s Eve we set out to explore. It took a few attempts in the little town of Tutoia to figure out how to get onto the beach with Mr Jones but once we were on it, we could have been on a multi-lane highway with many tracks heading up and down it. Unlike in South Africa, driving on the beach is a very common activity in this part of Brazil. After 15km we come to an area with many tracks heading off into some large sand dunes which is nicknamed “the mini Lencois”. One of the main tourist attractions, called Lencois Marenheses, just north of here is a huge dunefield which has many natural pools that form between the dunes. The natural pools form during the rainy season and make fantastic swimming pools surrounded by dunes. It was one of the attractions Tania had been very keen on seeing but we were concerned that we were too late in the year and that the pools would have dried up, this was confirmed for us at mini Lencois which also has such pools but they were all dry, which a local tour guide who passed by confirmed for us, was because of the season.
We backed Mr Jones up against one of the dunes, grabbed some drinks and climbed the dune for sundowner drinks. Incredibly we still had cellphone signal and so were able to make a few WhatsApp video calls and send messages to wish everyone a Happy New Year. While it was a quiet New Year’s Eve for us, it was an improvement on the year prior which had been spent in a truck stop in the middle of nowhere on Argentina’s Patagonia steppes.
While the location of our New Year’s Eve wildcamp was quite spectacular, the sea itself was not very inviting and so instead of spending a second night there we moved on to the town of Barreirinhas which had two campsites marked on Overlander that promised swimming pools. Barreirinhas is the launch point for all trips into Lencois Marenheses and so we were also expecting an attractive tourist town with perhaps a nice looking restaurant or two. Sadly, we were disappointed on all counts and would have been better off staying at our peaceful wild camp another night.
At this point we were wary of moving too fast as we still had 9 days to go until our ferry sailing date from Belem and only really had one more campspot in mind before we did a couple of days trucking to Belem. Fortunately for us the little oasis and campsite of Camping Encanto das Aguas, lived up to its name. Not only was the location spectacular but the family that own and run it just exuded peace and tranquility, it was exactly what our souls needed.
After wiling away 4 days, it was time to put our heads down for a couple of days trucking to complete the last section to Belem and our awaiting Amazon Ferryboat.
Follow the below links to view other pages that complement this travel diary entry:
Gallery: Brazil – December 2023 (including additional photos which don’t feature above)
Captain(s) Log: December 2023 (a glimpse into the daily highs and lows of life on the road)
Overnight Locations (an overview of the various spots we stopped at for a night or two and therefore of our general route this month)
Maintenance Log (everything it takes to keep Mr Jones purring)
