Highlights from the dunes close to Natal (Brazil)

Hi everyone, here is @lemouth writing!

As a side effect of my work, I am traveling a lot all around the world. In fact, I am spending almost four months a year far from home, at the moment. I know, this is a lot and there are important drawbacks in being so often away, in particular on the family side. This is why I am currently in the process of both reducing traveling and traveling with the family whenever possible. And having a travel agenda spread all over the year.

Nevertheless, traveling is often accompanied with a positive side. For instance, I had the chance of visiting plenty of places all around the world. I may have made mistakes in my counting, but if I am correct, I have been to 31 countries so far.

This means, sightseeing many things and meeting many people of varied origins.

With this respect, I consider myself as lucky. :)

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HAVING FUN IN THE DUNES CLOSE TO NATAL (BRAZIL)

Last November, I have been to Natal as an organizer of a particle physics workshop. I will not discuss any physics here, as this is left for my other blog, but I will describe some fun I had during the days off (we always have a couple of days off when a workshop lasts for more than 10 days).

With a bunch of physicists, we rented some buggies (including their drivers) and went to visiting huge dunes of sand that were located quite close to the workshop place. While the start of the drive was a bit boring (driving on normal roads, inside the city), the fun started quickly as soon as were far enough from downtown.

We went to the beach (with the buggies) and drove along the Ocean side. Very close to the water. Actually sometimes even inside a few centimeters of water.

My first impression was that we were on a beautiful beach, with super-blueish water and a clean area of sand, with no one except us around…

But the charm broke after about 10 seconds… Those buggy tours consist of a real industry there. So many of them all the time. However, I must admit that from inside the tour, we only fell the crowdedness at the stops, as plenty of buggies were all stopping at the same place.

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Those buggies quickly brought us to the dunes. The interesting stuff that we wanted to visit!

Driving in the sand, feeling all the bumps, was really cool and funny. Our driver asked us (we were three in our buggy) the level of craziness in the driving we wanted to have. Guess what we answered... ;)

Instead of plenty of words detailing what I saw, I think that a bunch of pictures is better. Here is a small montage.

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An interesting part of the trip was also when our buggies wanted to cross the Ocean on small wooden boats, just to take a shortcut from point A to point B.

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As shown on the above picture, the moving dunes that were waiting for us (not so calmly) on the other side were really worthy again.

Here we are! I hope you enjoyed this non-sciency post in which I shared some of my memories of last year :)