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JERICOACOARA
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Most of the old fishermen's houses have been now transformed into inns ("pousadas") or tiny shops, whose pretty feature is that most of them do not have any form of tiled floor: even the inside floor is made of sand... Yes, sand's everywhere! Most of the tourists spend the daytime sleeping after a night of dancing and drinking; some go to the beach by the village, and few decide to walk beyond the "Sunset dune". So much the better: they do not know what they miss...
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They are fishermen, and they are up to their main activity: fishing. They come from a tiny village called "Mangue Seco". The whole community is here, and they work together. The fish they get will be sold to the restaurants of Jericoacoara, and the money divided among the families...
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Fishermen use a tiny boat (but, actually, may I call it a "boat"?) whose name is jangada. It's a flat set of axes joined together: it seems so vulnerable; yet, due to its flat shape, it never sinks. In the 50's some fishermen used a jangada to sail all the way down to Rio de Janeiro in order to ask the government for better life conditions for the North-eastern regions: it was a 1250-miles trip! they did it!
Anyway, today a jangada may be used for a more comfortable purpose, like... taking a nap!
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One morning we decide to climb a rocky hill that's on the Southern side of Jeri: it's the "Serrote" and it's a fossil dune: the sand has been compacted into a hard rock. Unlike the sandy dunes, where the sand grains are continuously moved around by the wind so the keep a fresh temperature, on the Serrote it's hot like hell! There are about 115°F, there's no wind and the soil burns our feet even if we wear our beach-shoes... Will they melt down?
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But we decide to go on: we're heading to "Pedra Fourada" ("Holed rock")... On the way to this place we find something unexpected: just in the middle of the desert path there is a donkey, one of the hundreads of free-roaming donkeys that do not belong to anyone. Then we realize that it's a... "she-donkey", and that's trying to give birth to her baby-donkey! How interesting! We've never seen something like that. We feel like we are "inside" the National Geographic Channel! But unfortunately the baby donkey is kind of... lazy: it seems it doesn't want to be born... We spend almost one hour over there, waiting for the event, feeling like two fathers who nervously smoke cigarettes in the waiting-room of a nursery... Oh, well, that's just a metaphore: we do not smoke, but... our feet do!!! It's past midday, temperature must now be well above 120°F, there's not the slightest chance of shadow, and... the stupid baby-donkey does not want to get out! So we decide we might just as well go and have lunch and come back in the afternoon when the temperature is not such unbearable...
Guess what? We come back after one hour and a half and... There's no trace of either the mother or the baby! But how can it be possible? Is a baby-donkey able to walk along its mother side just a few minute after its birth? We search around the whole hill, but nothing... we missed it,... What a shame!
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