Not a very good boat trip on the delta

The second tour that most people do in Lençóis Maranhenses is a boat ride in the river to the ocean. The river goes through mangrove, stops at the small Lençóis, then at the lighthouse and ends on the beach for lunch before going back.

Let’s say that this was a tour I could have done without. Nothing was really interesting – and we are always smarter in hindsight but I would advise to not waste your time. After our great experience with our simple half day tour in the national park, and all the nice quad ride or beach buggy rides we had done in the previous days. This felt just very boring and poorly executed.

The small Lençóis was dried out, and it was a little sad to look, plus at the back of it are rows and rows of windfarms. It’s a narrow strip and you don’t get the nice landscape. What I like however was how the sand dunes just go straight into the river. You have an interesting contrast of colors with the white of the sand and the green of the vegetation.

There were small monkeys at this stop, but we have seen many, so that’s not really exotic for us anymore. If anything, with all the experience we had with them in Malaysia during our hikes, or visiting temples in Thailand – they are more annoying that anything else when they are too much in contact with humans.

The second stop was the lighthouse – which is small and old looking. The queue to climb up was super long and it looked just too small to accommodate these many tourists. The rest of the tiny village it’s in, was a collection of souvenir shops and places to have a drink. We didn’t go up the lighthouse, it was quite expensive for something that wasn’t looking so great. ( and the queue ! )

One thing that got us really angry on this day was how lunch was managed. We stopped before the lighthouse to the beach restaurant. We were handed menus in the boat to chose from. Of course, it was extremely expensive for what you eat – but to be expected and in line with similar beach shacks and laguna stops we had visited in Jericoacoara before. We came back there after the visit of the lighthouse, one hour later. We expected our orders to be ready but no ! We waited another hour before getting a simple ( and overpriced ) grilled fish. To add insult to injury, you stay 1 hour at the lighthouse village, and as you disembark the same meal was 25 reals, whereas in the beach shack it was 130 reals… If you do this tour, just take a few pictures of the lighthouse, don’t go up and eat your lunch there. This way you have the full 2h30 hours to enjoy the beach of the last stop instead of waiting for your food.

We drove through mangrove at record speed to and back – so I can’t say we saw much of the river. We had a short view at red ibis on the river bank on the way back, the boat didn’t stop.

We arrived middle of the afternoon back at our house, and we just enjoyed the pool and relaxed. We both agreed that was a pretty bad tour – and the landscapes we saw today were not worth our time or money. It has been a while since we felt being taken advantage off this way – well not, since Puno I guess.