We didn’t go too far to start with, about an hour up the coast to Taiba where we had been before. Taiba lagoon in the mornings was really deserted so we spent a good week or so there doing an early morning sessions. Sarah really progressed fast here, and we both discovered we both thrive on a bit of space. In the afternoons we all trooped back upwind and Toby and I would head out into the waves just downwind of Taiba town. Consistently there is a nice cross/cross on shore beach break there with enough space to pull some freestyle shapes in the flat water as well.
Before we came to Brazil, everyone we spoke to said something about gun crime and up until this point we had seen no crime at all really. It had to happen at sometime! On one of our morning sessions at the lagoon whilst I was training Sarah a buggy pulled up about 30 metres away. I took no notice of this at all until four big Norwegian guys came running towards me as the buggy roared off into the distance towards Paracuru. Apparently what had happened was two guys had approached them from beyond the dunes with painted faces armed with a gun and a knife and had basically asked them for all their money, anything else valuable and their buggy. They sensibly had agreed to everything and had come away unhurt but with no cash or transport. It was a good wake up call for us all security wise. It’s very easy to get complacent. I drove them all into town to try and find them a way of getting home, and we miraculously found a Brazilian guy that spoke perfect Norwegian. A crowd of about twenty Brazilians gathered in the fish market. Someone called the police, someone else got them all a beer and within 5 minutes everything was sorted out and they were on their way back home with a free lift. When things do go wrong in Brazil you can almost always rely on the kind-heartedness of the locals. You would rarely get that much help from complete strangers in Europe.
Good food in Taiba included a newly opened English place http://revolutionkiteboarding.com/. We had some nice Pizza and beer in a pretty terrace there, it’s very well hidden though. There was also a great but very bog standard Brazilian fish meal on the square on the right.
The wind decided to die off a bit, so we came to the decision to head up to Icarai which was somewhere we passed on the mammoth 4x4 down-winder that looked worth exploring.
