Runaway Beach?

Península de Maraú. View through the coconuts-

Article in the Guardian, February 24, 2007 re: last 2 decades at remote Jericoacoara, Ceara fishing village cum destination.

Or as its close friends call it- 'Jeri. Tourism at this remote (8 hours by bus from Fortaleza's international airport). "Discovered" by Washington Post journalist 2 decades ago, quickly segued into an international windsurfing/kitesurfing and 'cool' Brazilian beach destination.

'Jeri's' development boom- could it be in store for the rather less remote Península de Maraú, too? 1 hour air taxi from Salvador's International Airport. Or 3 hours by car from Ilhéus Airport with an International Airport in the pipeline there, too.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/travel/2007/feb/24/saturday.beach.brazil


Runaway Beach

Everyone wants to find his own little piece of paradise. The cracks only begin to appear when the word gets out. Doug Lansky charts the rise and rise of a remote Brazilian fishing village.

The Guardian Saturday February 24 2007


Jose Diego Martins greets me with a lingering handshake. "I don't understand tourism," he says. Over the past 20 years, this 80-year-old fisherman has watched as his sleepy Brazilian village has morphed first into backpacker paradise, then bustling tourist destination that is attracting charter packages from Europe.

This is the story of how Jericoacoara, virtually isolated from the outside world, became an international destination - in 2004 it was voted best beach in the world by Lonely Planet - and where it goes from here. As Alberto Magalhaes, a Brazilian tourist who's been visiting "Jeri" for nearly 20 years, puts it: "If there's a corner on this earth where heaven and hell meet, it must be here."

If one man can be said to be responsible for the rise of Jericoacoara, it is surely Cal Fussman, an American freelance writer who back in 1987 was travelling around South America when an editor from the Washington Post asked him if he knew of a great beach in Brazil for a feature they were doing. He replied that a Swiss backpacker had tipped him off about an incredible place in the northeast, but that it was difficult to get to and few outsiders had ever visited. Fussman was immediately dispatched to investigate.

On January 10 he boarded a bus in Fortaleza, about 300km down the coast, with 60 other passengers (all Brazilian). The date was easy to remember because, he says: "I met my wife on that bus ride."

His subsequent story included this passage: "Tourists started coming to Jericoacoara only six years ago. One of the first to arrive told me that the village existed in a former time, that in Jericoacoara paper money had little value and, if you wanted to stay, you bartered with clothes or a bag of rice. With tourists now more than willing to ride eight hours in a bus over paved roads and another 45 minutes in the back of pickup trucks over sand dunes just to get there, money has taken on a new importance. For a dollar or two a day, a fisherman will hang a hammock for you in his living room or on his front porch."

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Did Fussman expect his story to have such a dramatic impact? "Not really. I figured the place was an ecological preserve without much room to grow; it had no hotels or restaurants, and it was an awfully long plane ride from the US to Rio or Sao Paulo, then up to Fortaleza, then eight hours on a bus. And to go through all that just to sleep in a fisherman's hammock."

He was right. Americans weren't inspired to visit, but an editor at Brazil's Vision magazine read the article and wondered how such a paradise had eluded Brazilians. Soon Jeri was splashed across the Brazilian media; the Washington Post had - predating Lonely Planet by some 17 years - declared it the world's most beautiful beach.

Except it hadn't. The Post had run a photograph of Jeri on the cover of its magazine with the headline "The world's best beaches beckon". Inside was Fussman's tale, plus two others: one from Sanibel Island in Florida and one on Mombasa in Kenya. There was no ranking of beaches, just this rather random grouping. "Beaches aren't like wine, with a list of criteria that can be judged by experts," says Fussman. "It was just an editorial decision, and with a little imagination you can almost hear their rationale: 'Hey, Fussman is down in South America, let's ask him. OK, now we've got this remote Jerico-something place and we need another domestic one to balance it. How about picking seashells in Florida? That should do. And we probably need something from Africa as well so it'll look like we've got the world covered.'"

As the Brazilian media revved its engine, Jeri became the place for hip, adventurous Brazilians. And Fabio Nobre, who was running a 4x4 tour company out of Fortaleza, was in the perfect position to take them there. "For that first year or two I could charge almost any price for a direct ride there," he says. "I started at $80 and my rate peaked at about $250."

Fast forward 20 years and it's still $250 for a private Land Rover ride to Jeri. There's electricity now, plus two ice cream shops and seven jewellery stores, but unchaperoned cows, donkeys and horses still wander the sandy roads, locals still play football on the beach at sunset, and anyone with a couple of bottles of rum, a cooler full of ice and a card table can set up a bar to sell caipirinhas.

The image that drew me to Jeri, though, was one I found on the web of a dune buggy being transported across a river on a rickety wooden raft barely bigger than the buggy itself. Buggy and raft were each hugely appealing, but the combination was like a double scoop of adventure with chocolate sauce. So it was that my wife and I decided to do something different with the paternity/maternity leave we were owed following the birth of our third child. We locked up our home in Sweden and headed for Jeri.

The reality didn't disappoint. At least, not for the first few weeks. I spent at least two hours a day pursuing my dream of becoming a windsurf/kitesurf bum in the 28C waters and legendary wind. (It blows six months of the year, from July through December, at between 18 and 35 knots. Every. Single. Day.) I taught my five-year-old daughter to surf on the gentle wave break in the late afternoons. When the waves got too big, we put on lifejackets and surfed them together in a wave kayak, laughing as we balanced precariously for 50-metre rides. In the mornings, after gorging on more fresh fruit than you'd find on Carmen Miranda's head, we sandsurfed (on snowboards with Velcro bindings) down dunes before the sun and wind turned the desertscape into a massive convection oven. And while my five-year-old attended the local primary school, I spent at least an hour swimming with my two youngest (aged one and two) in the hotel's pool.

When we could muster the energy, we pushed the buggy through the heavy sand and took the whole family to the beach for sunset. We sipped caipirinhas, listened to bossa nova, and bought banana cakes from the banana cake lady, cheese kebabs from the cheese kebab lady and chicken kebabs from ... As the sunlight faded, the local capoeira club (no-contact dance-fighting) would begin their daily training, a show with more entertaining acrobatic moves than anything you'll see at the Olympics.

With the help of a babysitter, my wife and I dined out twice a week - about two times a week more than we could manage back home. The lack of tourist families made us feel we had stumbled upon something special.

With 135 pousadas (rooms, guest houses, hostels and small hotels) to choose from no one is camping out in fishermen's homes anymore, but one endearing link with Jeri's past is the line of credit that gets extended to anyone who sets foot in town - mostly because no one seems to have change. Try to buy an ice cream or a fruit juice with the equivalent of a pounds 10 note and they'll hand you your food and just tell you to come back and pay later when you have small change. Keeping a mental ledger becomes a challenge; at one point, I must have owed eight people less than pounds 1 in total, and not for lack of money in my wallet.

A funny thing happens when you live in paradise for three months: after a while it just starts to feel like life. And the downside to picking a remote, not very child-friendly destination for our sabbatical was that it wasn't - surprise, surprise - that great for the kids. Just three degrees south of the equator, our children, even with sunscreen, could only last an hour or two in the sun. And there aren't many interesting things to do in the shade. Our five-year-old began to miss her friends so much she would cry regularly, and all three of them were jetlagged for what seemed like a month. We started to feel like prisoners in our tiny room. My wife confided that she was missing personal space so much that she wanted to return to the vastness of our Lilliputian house in Sweden.

Other cracks began to appear, cracks you don't often see on a standard holiday: the hotel staff, for example, became so friendly they started to share their gripes on a daily basis, and at breakfast we listened as the hotel owner told the same three stories to each new guest.

We were also in Jeri long enough to become mildly disillusioned. Towards the end of our stay, I watched 40 Finns waddle up the beach behind a tour leader holding a Finnish flag. Patricia Tholen, a 40-year-old from the Netherlands who had been working in Jeri for a year, said: "I was in shock. If this is the future of Jeri, it's not for me."

Jeri managed to maintain its charm for more than a decade because few people had heard of it, it was difficult to get to, Brazil was notorious for violence and there were few comfortable places to stay. Now the word is out, and there is an 82-room boutique hotel and an even pricier rustic-chic resort with stilted bungalows. Nevertheless, access - an indirect flight to Fortaleza followed by a six-hour drive - is still an issue. A proposed airport just 32km from Jeri may change that.

Brazil's parliament is also debating a bill that would allow expansion of the town. If Jeri grows and direct charter flights start landing at a new airport, the town could be caught in the crosshairs of a hyper-accelerated commercial development programme that would reduce the capoeira artists to plastic figures that do flips out of a Happy Meal box. Local entrepreneurs are fighting for control of their future; they are trying to raise funds to have Jeri declared a city so they can get their own mayor. The question is: will Jeri go the way of mass-market Cancun or of protected Fernando de Noronha (a nearby island with expensive visiting permits and maximum of 420 tourists at any one time)?

"It's almost axiomatic," Paul Theroux once wrote, "that as soon as a place gets a reputation for being paradise it goes to hell." Jeri hardly felt like hell, but I had never witnessed a place making such a fast transition. Only five years earlier, well-pierced backpackers had sat where wealthy Italians were now resting their cocktails. And the money that once went to local fishermen is now going into the pockets of Italian, British and American hotel owners. At least Jeri won't have to worry about losing one of its residents. "I will never sell," says Jose Diego Martins. "Other places are not like here. This is a special paradise."



Getting there



Flights to Fortaleza via Lisbon from Heathrow or Gatwick cost pounds 699 on TAP Air Portugal, bookable through STA Travel (0871 230851, statravel.co.uk). Most hotels can arrange for a car to pick you up at the airport for the six-hour drive to Jericoacoara.

Where to stay

Vila Kalango, rustic-chic on the beach, doubles from US$120 (vilakalango.com.br). Or Pousada Nova Era, clean, friendly staff, free yoga, central, lovely garden, doubles from US$45 (jericoacoara.tur.br/novaera/en/index.html).

Further information

Country code: 00 55.

Flight time London-Lisbon: 2hrs 30mins; Lisbon-Fortaleza 7hrs.

Time difference: -5hrs.

£1 = 3.78 reals.