Tentatively Linked Story – A trip to Natal
I have been lucky enough to work in Brazil on a number of occasions,
including a couple of times in Natal. On
my second trip in October 2011, I was travelling with a colleague Marius. We had been in Rio de Janeiro for a few days
and had then headed up to Natal to see some clients. We arrived on the Sunday
and went out for a walk. Natal, in my
mind at least, is a smaller but safer version of Rio. We found a nice place to have a cocktail on
the beach where I have a photo of Marius looking like “a big girl’s blouse”,
which I of course, have not let him forget.
We then found out that Monday, when we thought we would have meetings
was a public holiday. Determined not to
waste a day, I set Marius a mission of booking us a trip doing anything,
anywhere. He could speak fairly fluent
Spanish and therefore could get himself understood to the Portuguese speaking
Brazilians.
He arranged a boat trip but said he was a little sketchy on the detail
as there had been some communication issues in translation. Anyway, not really knowing what we were in
for, we packed our bags for a ‘beach’ day and were picked up by a coach at the allotted
time.
We arrived at a hotel where we had a Brazilian BBQ – I will speak more
about Brazilian food in a later post, we watched the marmosets, one was very
intrigued by my toes. I watched them for
a long while, we listened to a guy playing reggae, watched some guys fishing
traditionally and messed around in hammocks, which was all well and good but
not really the boat trip we were expecting.
Marius, who by this point was getting a little impatient went off to
make some enquiries. It turned out we
were waiting for the tide and would be heading off on our boat trip soon. Sure enough, within 30 minutes or so, we were
back on the coach and off to the beach where we got on a speedboat. We were on it for about 20 minutes when we
got to a platform in the middle of the sea and told to get off. This trip was a snorkelling trip. We were given instructions on how to snorkel
in Portuguese which wasn’t much use to me as I don’t speak a word of it but I had
been snorkelling before so was fine.
Marius assumed he knew what he was doing, grabbed snorkels, jumped in
and was very surprised that he couldn’t breath underwater, mistaking snorkelling
for diving. After that little error, (and
copious amounts of laughter) we were off.
There was an abundance of beautiful fish and it was an incredible day.
We were there for around 90 minutes or so before we got the boat back to
shore and the coach back to the hotel. It
certainly beat working!
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