Weekend Argus (Saturday Edition)
kitesurfing along brazil’s coast
A terrifying, but exhilarating adventure that will have you howling in ecstasy and your heart racing
FROM a distance, it probably looks like I’m having fun. I am off the north-east coast of Brazil, kitesurfing across one of the largest river deltas in the Americas, and I’m terrified.
Swells three metres-high pitch from all directions. The current, where the mighty Parnaiba River pours into the Atlantic Ocean, is swirling, further complicating the fluid physics equation that is kitesurfing. The group I set out with has dispersed. I am alone and the sun is setting fast.
I should add that I’m here voluntarily, on a week-long, lateOctober guided trip attempting to kitesurf more than 190km, from the city of Parnaiba to the town of Atins.
This isolation, along with consistent wind, tropical days and 26ºC seas, is a big part of the appeal. While kitesurfing has exploded in Brazil, the action is centred in the once-sleepy fishing villages between Fortaleza and Jericoacoara and few visitors make it to the remote delta, where the 1 700km Parnaiba dissolves in a jigsaw of jungle islets, shifting sandbars and wind-scalloped dunes.
Our outfitter, Surfin Sem Fin (Portuguese for surfing without end), runs trips throughout the region during its July-to-December windy season.
I saw this as an achievable challenge and a chance to improve my skills under the tutelage of our guides, former world wave-kiting champion Guilly Brandao and
Andreas Lagopoulos, a Canadian expat who runs kitesurfing camps from his home in Cabarete, Dominican Republic.
It’s day one and “achievable” is in doubt. The morning started innocuously, with a poolside breakfast at the charming Hotel San Antonio in Parnaiba.
We had amassed there the prior night, an eclectic pod of whitecollar adrenaline seekers: my buddy Andrew, Okalahoma; Lula, who owns a sailing school in Rio de Janeiro; his childhood friend Andre, at 59, the oldest among us; Ricardo, who runs Coca-Cola’s bottling operations in northeast Brazil and bears an uncanny resemblance to the Dos
Equis “most interesting man in the world”; his friend Chris, the youngest member of the group at 45, retired after selling his steel company to the country’s government and Emily, a San Francisco, California, lawyer and the only one of us who has done this trip before.
We drive half-an hour to Pedra do Sal, a beach at the eastern edge of the Delta do Parnaiba Environmental Protection Area. As we unload, a 25-knot wind whips up a concussive shore break, along with my anxiety.
I have trouble from the outset, fighting the wind and waves, crashing and ripping a loaner kite.
I emerge from the white-knuckle crossing happier than a hobbit escaping Mordor. The waves, although still big, are marching uniformly toward the beach. In the dimming light, I see tiny figures around a fisherman’s hut.
Someone spots Andreas and Ricardo, and we load gear on to two waiting all-terrain vehicles that spirit us over Sahara-like dunes and up a hill to our base for the next three nights.
We are on Ilha dos Poldros, a 1 200-hectare island owned by a Spanish tanning magnate who adorned his Eden with a guest house of stone, local carnauba palm wood, glass and thatch, along with a swimming pool and two cabanas.
Directing the support crew is Surfin Sem Fin founder Jalila Paulino, herself an impressive kiter.
Sunday morning reveals fragrant tropical vegetation that tumbles to rain-fed lagoons dotted with shorebirds and egrets. After lunch, we load into a trailer, pulled by an orange tractor, for a short ride down a sand path to a dock, where we transfer our colourful circus to a pair of small powerboats and follow a snaking tributary to the Parnaiba. We emerge from shelter of the mangroves into the forceful current, smacking over swells toward the ocean.
In the purpled dusk our boat driver, Bao, a stocky delta lifer who looks hewed from the mud, steers us across the Parnaiba and into the labyrinthine channels of the mangrove, where he uses a hand-held spotlight to scan for wildlife.
Monday is stolen from a dream. After 11km of surfing we gather on the beach and, keeping our kites high in the sky, walk 450m through a gap in the dunes to the Rio Feijao Bravo. I’m riding a wake-style board, which has much shorter fins than a surfboard, affording me access to the glassy, inches-deep water near shore. For the first time this week I ride with unbridled confidence, laying down buttery s-turns like a skier on an endless powder run.
Maybe it’s my age – 52 – but I find this guided journey liberating. Sure, we’re schedule-bound and catch only fleeting glimpses of local culture, but every detail is seen to, from meals, hotels and boat rides to the sandwiches.
This frees us to focus on the task at hand, which on Tuesday is monstrous, nearly 65km of kiting bisected by the hardest stretch of the week, an 8km crossing that requires us to angle out to sea to make the opposite point. We pause before the inlet, eyeing an ocean that looks like a washing machine set on “destroy”.
“Stay in a line, everyone behind me and don’t drop your kite or lose your board,” Guilly commands before he leads us into the maelstrom.
The rest of the week washes by: a night in the town of Tutoia and, after another 55km downwind run, two nights in the luxurious woodand-thatch bungalows of Villa Guara, where the sand streets of Atins yield to the ocean. We kite through coves dotted with wooden boats and, more than once, beach on parcels straight out of the Star Wars’ movies.
Our final day ends at the dunes in the Lencois Maranhenses National Park, the largest dune field in South America. Many of the rain-fed lagoons have dried up but a few remain and the landscape resembles a Dali rendering of a giant waffle.
We roll down slopes into a lagoon, howling and laughing. I run down one dune then up another, just a speck on a ripple of golden sand, grasping a moment before it blows away in the wind.