After a day and a half in Recife we took a van to Porto de Galinhas, which was meant to be the highlight of our trip. I heard about Porto de Galinhas earlier in March, in conjunction with a conference that was going to happen there. The place was described as the most beautiful in Brazil, and the pictures that I saw did seem to give some support to this claim. I ended up not going to the conference, but we kept talking about going to Porto de Galinhas, and this eventually grew into this treap to the Northeast. Porto de Galinhas (“Chicken Port”) has shady past as a secret center of illegal slave trade in the 19th century, which has given the town it’s name: “chickens” was a code word for slaves (“There is a new shipment of chickens arriving next week” being a code for the arrival of a slave ship), but it’s trying to forget it as much as it can. (The town is filled with chicken statues, which I found a bit crass.) The town’s claim to fame to day is its coral reef. During low tide the reef exposes and you can take a a small boat to it. Or, rather, hundreds of people take dozens of boats, and that’s during low season. But the site is absolutely gorgeous.

Unfortunately, you really need to be during low tide to fully appreciate it. The time of low tide changes every day (shifting by about an hour), so we had to get a table of tides and keep track of them during the whole journey. (The difference is not as drastic in other places, but it does make a difference on most beaches.) On the second full day of our trip, when we headed to Porto de Galinhas, the lowest tide was around 8:30 am and we knew we couldn’t get there from Recife in time for it. So, we made a plan to stay overnight, see the reef in the morning, then go north. During our first day (the afternoon), we did a buggy tour of some beaches nearby, which were nice but hardly comparable to the reef at Porto de Galinhas itself. This included a “mangezal” (a mangrove swamp), which was interesting.

Next morning the low tide moved to 9:30, so we didn’t even have to get up so early. In fact, I ended up doing two trips: first the two of us went without a camera, then I went back with a camera and spent my fourty minutes just taking photos. (The boats, which all work as a single cooperative, all offer the same 40 minute tour for R$8 per person.)

The tide was already rising during my second trip, which, however, only made it more picturesque. People recommend going to the reef when the tide is lowest, which I would agree with it from the point of view of ease of walking. Also, on many days the lowest tide is not so low. That day, however, it went down to “0.3” – whatever they are measuring it from – and I found that the reef was even more attractive when the tide went slightly up.