Sun, sea, sand and chopp in the northwest of Brazil. A little quiet when compared to Rio (what isn't?) but a great place to relax for a week or two and enjoy all things Brazillian.

Brazil is big. Very big. In fact it’s so mind-bogglingly big... Well, perhaps not quite that big, but at over 3 million square miles it’s bigger than the US, the largest country in South America and the fifth largest country in the world. It’s also mostly flat, unlike the rest of South America, and most people associate Brazil with the Amazon, Carnival, football and F1 racing.

Since Brazil is so big, to get anywhere fast air travel is the only real option. In fact, to get to some places flying is the only option. International flight connections are concentrated in Rio de Janeiro and Sao Paulo and there are air-pass programs for foreign visitors that allow you to travel around with the minimum of hassle and without causing too much damage to the credit cards. If you’re travelling cheap then there are buses to some destinations, but few people really relish the thought of spending forty hours in the same seat.

Flying in from New York to Sao Paulo means I actually flew over Natal and had to get another 6 hour flight back. Immigration is no problem with 90 days being the usual (extendable) limit for tourists, but it is worth checking the baggage reclaim to make sure your bags have been transferred to your next flight, as this rarely seems to happen with international flights arriving in South America.

Also a direct flight may not be as direct as you would expect, as they seem to stop at every city and airport along the way. Sometimes they even stop twice at the same airport (much to our relief the pilot landed on the second attempt)

If you look at a map of Brazil, on the eastern most point you’ll find Natal. Not a big place it has recently appeared on the tourist maps and especially during February and March is popular with Swiss and Germans. The upshot of all this is the city has a good selection of bars, restaurants and other touristy stuff, the extra money has seen an improvement in the roads and infrastructure but perhaps best of all the crime rate which Brazil is [in]famous for has been contained, at least for now.

I stayed with relatives in Natal, so I saw a different side to most travellers. Admittedly this did involve spending most evenings at the Chicken In (a chain of bars that sell fried chicken in addition to beer, or chopp as they call it) near the stadium.

It was in Natal that I had the first technology hiccups. Firstly I discovered I had left the headphone adaptor plug for the Libretto in Washington (little did I know how this was going to be a recurring theme) and then the Libretto itself died. This was actually quite a serious problem because I was relying on the machine as note pad, MP3 player and most importantly as a photo album. Normally this would not be too much of a problem to fix, except that I don’t have the CD’s to reinstall everything with me and there’s no floppy disk drive with makes re-installing Win 98 a bit tricky.

For some reason the disk manager program decided that I didn’t have an Operating System installed any more and stopped the machine booting. My Aunt teaches at Cultura Inglesa, an English school in Natal, and arranged for me to use their computer facilities to attempt a resurrection. Thankfully I had brought the hard disk adaptor with me so I could plug it into a real PC and after four emails to OnTrack support (many thanks to Tech God Paul Huggins!) it was fixed using an undocumented "feature", although I had to recreate the msdos.sys file again. Needless to say, a goodly quantity of beer was consumed that night!

The beach in Natal is OK, but nothing special. Everyone goes to Ponta Negra instead. It’s only half an hour by bus, has a good selection of bars and restaurants and is basically an excellent place to hang out and watch the world go by.

Another good beach is Pirangi, about 40 minutes to the south by buggy. With only a couple of bar restaurants it’s pretty much undeveloped (although new hotel are being built, and one day might actually open) it’s off the tourist trail. On the way you pass the hub of the Brazilian space effort. NASA used it during the 60’s for testing purposes and work on a number of programmes continues today, mainly on meteorological programmes.

Food wise, Natal is pretty good. Lots of fish, chicken and tropical fruit dishes feature on the menus and there are a couple of all-you-can-eat buffet places that feature local and Chinese dishes, a great ice-cream bar and of course normal bars on every corner.

For drinks there is chopp. Pronounced "shop", it is ice-cold draught lager style beer served in small glasses, often with too much head, and is very cheap. And it’s not considered excessive to drink several of these. Or you can get a litre bottle of beer in a cool jacket and serve yourself. If you fancy something stronger Caipirinha is the local choice. Take a handful of small limes, cut in quarters, and crush them in the bottom of a glass. Add a desert spoon of sugar, a handful of ice cubes and then fill up the spaces with Cachasse. To describe cachasse as sugar cane rum is like describing Chateau Gut-rot as fine champagne. Brazilians run their cars on alcohol distilled from sugar cane. I don’t think there’s all that much difference between what comes out of the pumps and what comes out of the bottle. On a warm evening though, it’s the ideal drink to start the night. Alternatively you can use vodka as the active ingredient, in which case it’s called Caipiroska.

One of my favourites was Maxachera. Looking a bit like a long parsnip, its best served cut into thin strips and deep-fried. It tastes a bit like chewy chips and goes really well with fish. Other favourites are Linguica (sausage) and pan fried chicken bits in various sauces.

If you visit Natal, you have to do a Dune Buggy tour. There are several companies operating the tours (all now licensed too) along the Litoral Norte. All come with a driver as too many tourists have injured themselves and others in the past. The buggies are capable of doing 100 on the flat and sunbathers don’t expect buggies to come leaping out of the dunes at them. And people on the beach may not show up too well either.

Like many Brazilians, our driver thought he was Ayrton Senna so it was like being on a roller coaster without the rails. That is, when we weren't going flat out along the beaches just above the reach of the waves.

We stopped at some of the local attractions to swim, dune-board, and admire the view from the tops of dunes before plunging over the edge. At one stop there was a wire slide. You sit in a sling that looked like it had been made from old fire hoses and slid down the cable into a lagoon 100ft below, jumping out just before you reach the bottom. To save the walk back to the top, they had built a chairlift powered by half a VW Beetle. I'm not sure which was the most exciting, sliding down the wire or riding back to the top afterwards.

During the high season the buggy drivers would do two trips a day, but at this time of year you can take all day. As it was, we were the first people our driver had taken in over a month.

As for amenities, Natal has everything you could need. Lots and lots of small shops catering to all requirements, although a lot of them only seem to last a few months before going out of business (they don’t seem to have heard of concepts like business plans or market research). Local supermarket chain Hiper has two stores, Carrefour are here and a modern shopping centre at Rio Shopping. A good selection of banks too, HSBC or Banco Brasil for Cirrus/Maestro/Mastercard and Bradesco or Banco Brazil for Visa. Other banks seems to be fussy about foreign cards. And the stadium of course, and enough bars to keep even the most determined alcoholic happy for several months. Not that it takes many Caipirinhas to get you nicely sozzled.

Natal definitely gets the "I Could Live Here" award. My Aunt & Uncle moved out here for a couple of years - 20 years ago - and have no plans to leave. I wish I had stayed for just a few more days. Or a week, or two.