Into South America by Motorcycle Fortaleza Canoa Quebrada

Our Journal

Fortaleza / Canoa Quebrada

Fortaleza is a giant and we rode through an hour of bumper to bumper before getting to the Iracema section where hotels line the beach. We checked into a hotel and spent the next couple of days waking for hours around the city. At night we walked town to a restaurant and bar section in Iracema. Fortaleza is a popular destination for a lot of Italian and other European tourists. There are blocks of bars and restaurants full of gringo hungry ladies of the night. We asked around for normal places with life music and were directed to an enormous complex with multiple discos inside. We kept getting lost in all the different rooms of dance music, electronic, disco, and live forro in an open area. They give you a credit card when you walk in and we never actually saw a price list. Beware, a few drinks can set you back a bit. Exiting we barely had enough to cover the tab and had to walk the three miles back to the hotel. The beaches are beautiful in the city but we assume they are polluted since there are no swimmers. The beach in front of our hotel hosted a music festival one night so we walked down to hear axe, forro and rock and roll (pronounced “hockey hole”). Brazilians dance frantically to everything. In the middle of the concert a group of mounted policemen started chasing a couple of guys right through the middle of the crowd. They ran two guys out of the crowd and chased them down the beach and trampled them with horse hooves. They two guys ran over to some street police, who did nothing. Later, the crowd would periodically scatter in all directions as the horsemen would run through again. It was insane and no one was ever actually caught, nor could we figure out exactly what they were doing wrong in the first place.

Canoa Quebrada

Driving out of Fortaleza there is a field of giant windmills, then about an hour of little beach communities that look like suburbs. About three hours away we stopped to Canoa Quebrada which, like Jericoacoa, is a popular tourist destination for gringos more or less created by the Lonely Planet. We looked around for cheap hotels and could only find absurd prices until we found Hotel California. Steve, the owner, traveled around Africa on a motorcycle, and David, the manager, had just wrecked Steve’s bike and still had pins in his shoulder. They took great care of us and are a wealth of information for traveling the surrounding area. David took us out one night to the main strip in town of bars and restaurants. One thing about these Lonely Planet destinations, the food is always great, and the nightlife is like a feeding frenzy and you, gringo, are the bait. There are bars with all reggae music for hippies, discos for the hip, and a forro hall for the locals. We met Fred and Mateus, two Brazilians who live in Florida and were traveling Northeast Brazil on business. They spoke near flawless English that they learned in rural Louisiana as well as Italian, Russian, and Spanish. Business men in the import/export trade, whatever that is. Canoa Quebrada has great beaches and dunes that stretch to the horizon. The dunes end in cliffs right over the water. Sailboats in the state of Ceara are interesting structs with the mast being a skinny tree trunk. The dune buggy is the mode of transport around here. Our last night we walked down to the beach at midnight to catch the end of a reggae bonfire that takes place every Sunday night. We only found a few hippies dancing around a fire to some of the best reggae I’ve heard. About an hour later more people showed up and by 2 am there were hundreds of people. Not much for these people to do on Monday morning. The next day we drove down the coast and hit sand road. It took an hour to get through 10 miles of sand pushing the digging the bikes out of the bad parts. We drove past salt mounds where salt water is dried out and then came to a ferry crossing. Some motorcross bikes raced past and one guy did a 100 yard wheelie for our benefit. The ferry fit about six cars and took us out of Ceara into Rio Grande do Sur. At sunset we reached Ponta do Mel, a small village where a pousada had been recommended to us. It was no pousada, it was a eco-resort built up on dunes overlooking endless stretches of beach. As we waited at the gate, four donkeys walked up and seemed to waiting to get in as well. The all woman staff weren’t sure what to make of us and had lot of questions about the bikes. There were only two other guests there. Walking the beach we had to get past another pack of donkeys at the other gate. A perfect place to rest and recharge or as their flyers say, “The perfect place to do nothing.”