Exploring Jericoacoara East with a beach buggy

Our buggy is right on time this morning and we get our first taste on the dunes outside of Jericoacoara. Today we explore the East of the coast line.

It’s quite fun to zoom in the sand with the party music, hair in the wind and taking in the views. While some part of the way on the East are beautiful, a good half is still fairly developed. 
Our first stop is a fallen tree – and there are a lot of people there already… with a queue for pictures. So we queue… Needless to say at this point, we were like – ok .. if this is what today is going to be like, we worry we won’t enjoy this.

We drive in front of Praia beach and again we see a sad looking “big PRAIA name for pictures” with a queue in front, so we told the driver to just skip this one.
The next stop is a laguna Buraco Azul – the parking lot is full. Our worry increases. We pay the entrance fee and wow ! The color of the water is insane. It’s an impressive turquoise blue, it’s incredibly beautiful. 

And it’s rain water – so the water is soft. This is a natural swimming pool.

There is a lot of people, but it’s big enough that everyone is spread out. We spend an hour here, swimming, taking pictures and enjoying a cold coconut at the small bar in the complex. 
Next, the driver brings us to another laguna, almost in front, but this one is artificial and since we just swam a lot. We feel like there is no need – we decide to skip this one for the next stop.

We drive further into the dunes and in smaller pathways, and this is a pretty cool landscape. There are small lagunas on our left and rights. Our longest stop of today is a Beach Club called Alchemyst along a huge laguna of only soft rain water. This lake is 9km long.

The entrance fee is a little high, but we get very good facilities there and we order our lunch sitting on a table on the beach ( feet in the sand ! ). It’s clearly a very touristy spot with some overpriced menus, but our lunch of grilled octopus was excellent and tasty. In the end, we just chilled, swam and enjoyed the place. The music was not too loud and it was safe to leave your belongings when you went to swim. 

We got the famous water hammock there, which are a key feature of many Instagram posts about Jericoacoara. The beach club also had one of those water parkour for free – and we had good fun getting through it. It’s a lot harder than it looks!

On the way back to Jericoacoara, we stopped by a beautiful laguna with a very nicely defined white sand dune. I think it made for great pictures. We could swim, and it’s again soft water only and because the bottom is white sand, the color of the water is just nice.

This was a great day – although it’s just not our vibe going from beach clubs to beach clubs and Instagram stops. Yet we are in a very touristic village and I guess, in low season it’s fine. In high season, I would have hated it – the crowd was just borderline comfortable today.

We arrive back in our accommodation a little before 4 pm. I have some massive sunburns on my face. The wind was knocking my hat backwards and my forehead was not protected. Reapplying sunscreen regularly was not enough. I just pity all the people I saw at the back of their buggies with just bikinis or bare-chested for the men. We were the only ones with long sleeves and hats ! 

After a short break, we go explore the town. We need laundry done, groceries and to find a way to Camocim – and if possible, combining it with the West coastline tour. This way, we transform a transport day into a visit day.  When we contacted people online, we had refusals to do this, and we were not very hopeful to find a solution.  Alexis had found one advertisement in Portuguese online for a cooperative of buggeiros doing this. We are going to visit their office. 

No-one is at their office… great… We find a next-door tour agency and ask the person in front. What happened is that, the man was actually a buggy driver waiting for his customer to pay him. The agency was actually one of the only currency exchanges in town. The customers were French-Brazilian and we chit chatted; we told them about our plans. They asked for us the driver. He said yes, he can bring us to Camocim, us and the luggage and drive us to our accommodation in Camocim, as well as go for the day tour. We only had to pay him a little more and in cash. We got his contact, agreed on the price and itinerary and we were all set. We were very lucky to have met these travelers, with their help we could clearly explain what we wanted – and the driver said that it’s something they do regularly, and was happy with getting us there. We negotiated 700 reals for this, including the two ferries to cross the rivers on the way and the normal “west” circuit spot to visit.  Let’s hope this works out as intended.

Then we walk around, pick up our laundry – see the beach – get groceries and go back home to cook diner. Our accommodation has a small terrace, we enjoy the cool evening with some snacks and a beer.