Barra Grande

It takes us five hours to drive from Ilha do Guajirú to Barra Gande – a whopping 350 kilometres and partly on gravel roads through the deepest pampas. Both Google and Open Street Map indicated this route, and locals showed us the same way. We only learnt a day later that we could easily have saved ourselves a third of the journey by taking the new road between Jijioca and Granja.

Barra Grande is almost completely booked out due to a bank holiday. Even modest private rooms without doors quickly cost an astronomical €40 a night by Brazilian standards. So we book ourselves into a really fine luxury resort for €10 more. The house is pure hippie art, each table a painting made from carefully crafted solid wood. After the journey, we are exhausted.

So we’re out early the next day. In the middle of low tide, we start our two and a half kilometre downwinder towards the kite spot from a sandbank in front of the village. The kitespot in Barra Grande is a large mangrove-fringed lagoon behind a long sandbank. Numerous small sandbanks branch off vertically into the sea from the large sandbank. At low tide, we walk over some of them, continue on and finally cross the large sandbank with the kites in the sky 200 metres to the other side towards the lagoon.

The tides in Barra Grande differ by a whopping two metres. The lagoon is completely empty apart from a puddle in the centre. We wade a few metres through the mud towards the puddle when a loudly shouting fisherman suddenly runs towards us, waving a large knife aggressively. Kiting is not forbidden here, but apparently some people still don’t like it. We flee into the sea and only return to the estuary at the end of the sandbank.

Ian’s 10 kite is showing its age. During a water start, the sail tears off the front tube over a large area. We share my kite in the ebb tide and cruise through the labyrinth of sandbanks in the estuary. The water is anything but as expected: small, steep choppy waves dance vertically on the sea like water on a subwoofer. Only directly behind the sandbanks is there some beautiful shallow water. Depending on the tide, the water flows between them at speeds of up to 15 kilometres per hour. Ian hits a few big airs, then organises a boat back across the estuary.

I cruise alone in what is now 30 knots of chop for two and a half kilometres across the lagoon with choppy waves and later the open sea back to Barra Grande City. The sea is boiling one and a half metres high. At high tide, the secondary sandbanks now repeatedly conjure up very surprising and violently breaking two-metre-high waves. I lose my board twice. It immediately disappears between the waves, while my fully depowered 9er barely allows me to bodydrag upwind. When I land on the beach after almost 1.5 hours, I’m just happy. The trip was anything but fun: simply very exhausting and dangerous. I hop from shade to shade in the glowing sand back to the pousada.

The next day is not much better. At low tide, we start in the shallow water in front of the BGK Pousada, which is riddled with sharp rocks. After 30 minutes, the 13 is far too much. I switch to 9 m² – and am soon pretty well powered up. The incoming tide is bringing in some poisonous choppy waves again and the wind is blowing at around 26 knots. After a lunch break, I take a few more jumps among hundreds of Brazilian holidaymakers in the now calmer waves thanks to the high tide and then sneak off to bed.

Barra Grande has some really nice and mostly quite expensive resorts. In the nameless bar opposite the BGK Pousada, I drink some of the best passion fruit caipirinhas in Brazil. But that’s the only good thing I can say about Barra Grande. Shallow water? Forget it! The lagoon is bucking, and between the sandbanks in the river delta there is usually a lot of choppy water. In any case, it’s a long and arduous journey by kite or €5 by donkey cart.

I am a kiter. And I realise: I don’t like ours anymore. Especially here in Barra Grande, many kiters have the arrogance of German nobility, the behaviour of crusaders, the ignorance of cokeheads and the helpfulness of hyenas. They don’t spend money, they throw it around, they devalue everything and above all everyone and burn a beautiful place anew every week until all that remains are ashes of greed and envy. I’m tired, pissed off and just want to get out of here.