Meeting Mamacita and Saturday Night in Jericoacoara
Today’s drive was from Parnaiba to Jericoacaora. It was actually the first day since the beginning of the trip on Jan 9 that we were travelling in our lovely overland truck called “Mamacita”. Every Dragoman truck has a name which gives it a kind of personality when speaking about it. “Mamacita” is quite an old lady but our co-driver / mechanic girl Anki brought her into a pretty good shape during the last days.
Before starting to drive at 10am, Ross and Anki gave us a short introduction into the truck, e.g. explained where everything lives, gave us the code for the combination lock at the door and we also received a special demonstration by Ross on how to enter and exit the truck without jumping and breaking your angles. As soon as the truck started to move we also had the possibility to put our valuables into the “pub” which is the nickname of the build in safe of the truck. We actually always call it “pub” so that strangers do not get alerted when they hear us speaking about it. For the same reason we do only go into the “pub” while the truck is moving so that nobody watches what we are doing.
Ross also gave us our truck jobs. Every traveler has to take on certain responsibilities which are related to the operation of the truck such as cleaning, loading / unloading luggage and tents, checking the accounts of the kitty money etc. This time I’m up for cleaning together with my roommate Molly.
After driving for three hours we had to park “Mamacita” and use 4×4 drives for the last 15km which is an off-piste drive across the sand dunes. We were picked-up around 2pm and arrived in Jeri, the nickname for Jericoacaora, half an hour later. In Jeri we stayed in the lovely Pousada Pareiso which is situated only a five minutes’ walk away from the beach.
After everybody had a walk around in town and watched the sun setting behind the big dune, people started partying. First there was a room party in one of the boy’s rooms out of which half of the people came out pretty tipsy. I joined a bit later at the beach bar which had very good and relatively cheap Caipiroska. One could select the fruit of choice and watch the drink freshly made. I tried strawberry, passion fruit and kiwi out of which strawberry was my favorite. What’s also funny is that our seventy year old fellow traveler Bob joined the partying and ended up pretty drunk and vomiting during night time… He’s really the coolest guy I know in his age group. Bob has the shell of a seventy year old but behaves like a thirty year old which makes him really special.
