Right when I found out that it was possible to sandboard in Florianopolis, I made plans to go sandboarding right away. It took me several days of planning, but finally I got everything together and took a taxi to the beach. For more information on my planning and the logistics of my sandboarding trip, you can read my other blog post here.
The day I planned on going, it happened to be drizzling a bit, so I kind of freaked out, but decided to take a risk and still go. Once I got to the dunes, the weather seemed to clear up. The sand was a bit damp, which meant slower sandboarding, but I was fine with that because it was my first time sandboarding ever.
I rented a sandboard from a guy in a hut across the street from the dunes and hurried to get started. It cost 20 Brazilian Reals per hour, which is about 10 USDs. I was planning on riding as many dunes as I possibly could during my hour.
When I first walked out on the dunes, I wasn’t too sure what to do. I had never snowboarded or surfed, but I figured that it wasn’t going to be that hard. Besides, I had read a WikiHow article on how to sandboard. I was ready for anything.
My mom made me start out with a little dune, because she didn’t want me to die knew that I was the type of person that would start out on the steepest and highest dune there.
After a couple of falls and face plants, I figured out how to balance and slide down without hurting myself. I felt confident and ready to take down any dune.
I was going to treat the dunes like a giant buffet, where I was going to make every cent worth it. You could say I was a bit over excited. Once I had slid down a dune, and ran back up 5 times, I knew this ‘get the most out of the hour that I have’ plan wasn’t going to work.
I was panting extremely hard, and actually felt a bit nauseous from sprinting up sand dunes in the hot 1:30 PM sun.
I gave up and decided to take it easy.
From then on I just took it easy and had fun sliding down dunes and falling. I tried sliding down a super steep dune while sitting on my board, but it didn’t work out too well because sand got all in my pants and all over my whole body.
At the end of my sandboarding experience I crossed the street and went to the hut where the sandboard renting man lent me a brush to wipe my sandy arms, legs and shoes off.
Have you ever tried sandboarding? Leave your comment below.
Wow … looks like a lot of fun sand boarding Jonathan! Will definitely have to try that out, especially should we get to visit Brazil one day. Thanks for sharing!
It was a lot of fun! I would highly recommend trying it out. I’m also hoping to sandboard in Peru, later on in our RTW.