Jericoacoara: Um Abraço

It is ritual to climb the face of the dune to watch the sun set. For the fourth day in a row the two of us, arm in arm, have joined hundreds of others. Sun-bitten gringos, backpackers, fugitive brasileiros and other good timers trudge wearily through the thirty metres of soft sand to the summit. Teak hard windsurfers and ancestors of the indigenous Tremembé fishermen streak ahead in great leaps and bounds. A capoerista performs somersaults while he waits. An errant dog yodels at the sun which is vast and blood red and is dropping over the Atlantic, where earlier we’d accepted four-foot breakers like a yolk, emerging on the other side newborn, salt water streaming from our nostrils, laughing, and not spluttering. The dune is chameleon, quickly turning orange then pink then blue then dusk.
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Um abraço. A hug. You do not have to travel far in Brazil to hear these words. Or see them embodied in the warm embrace of the Christ Redeemer statue. When Felix bids farewell he says them to me as though he has known me for years rather than a matter of hours. Felix is a lunatic Combi driver who has already established himself a purveyor of all manner of dubious substances and services. His next best offer has intrigued me more. Jericoacoara? he asks. A word which rolls off his tongue like some psychomime for happiness or wonder or Brazilian hospitality. I shrug ignorance. And as his battered VW camper hurtles onwards, plastic crucifix swinging wildly from his rearview, Felix turns his mirrored wayfarers from the road towards me again, gives thumbs up and says it again. Jericoacoara! A statement this time.

In those days the name of the place felt like a discovery in itself. When I rendez-vous with Felix the next morning he has seven other passengers in his van, a handful of Brazilian backpackers from the South and some fellow gringos who have learned of the existence of ‘Jeri” by word of mouth, her name whispered fondly in bus terminals or the breakfast rooms of cheap pousadas.

Jericoacoara is easier said (remarkably) than done. To get to her takes nine hours, Felix eventually dumping us in a spot where tarmac begins to subside into dust and tufts of marram grass and finally thick sand dunes and uneven ditches that can only be negotiated by a four-wheel drive. Arriving in the pitch black night, our new driver tells us, is like accepting a blindfold before a beautiful surprise.