Hi everyone, here is @lemouth writing!

As a side effect of my work, **I am traveling a lot all around the world**. In fact, I am spending almost four months a year far from home, at the moment. I know, this is a lot and there are **important drawbacks** in being so often away, in particular on the **family** side. This is why I am currently in the process of both reducing traveling and traveling with the family whenever possible. And having a travel agenda spread all over the year.


Nevertheless, traveling is often accompanied with a **positive side**. For instance, I had the chance of **visiting plenty of places** all around the world. I may have made mistakes in my counting, but if I am correct, **I have been to 31 countries** so far. 

This means, **sightseeing many things and meeting many people of varied origins**.

With this respect, I consider myself as lucky. :)

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## HAVING FUN IN THE DUNES CLOSE TO NATAL (BRAZIL) ##

Last November, I have been to [**Natal**](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natal,_Rio_Grande_do_Norte) as an organizer of a particle physics workshop. I will not discuss any physics here, as this is left for [my other blog](http://www.steemit.com/@lemouth), but I will describe some fun I had during the days off (we always have a couple of days off when a workshop lasts for more than 10 days).

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<center> ![](https://s18.postimg.org/owrgzpbtl/buggy1.png)
<sub> [image credits: myself (Samsung Galaxy A5)]</sub> </center>
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With a bunch of physicists, we rented some buggies (including their drivers) and went to visiting [**huge dunes of sand**](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natal_Dunes_State_Park) that were located quite close to the workshop place. While the start of the drive was a bit boring (driving on normal roads, inside the city), **the fun started quickly** as soon as were far enough from downtown.

We went to the beach (with the buggies) and drove along the Ocean side. Very close to the water. Actually sometimes even inside a few centimeters of water. 

My first impression was that we were on a beautiful beach, with super-blueish water and a clean area of sand, with no one except us around…

But the charm broke after about 10 seconds… **Those buggy tours consist of a real industry there**. So many of them all the time. However, I must admit that from inside the tour, we only fell the crowdedness at the stops, as plenty of buggies were all stopping at the same place.

<center> ![](https://s18.postimg.org/gei0vbfkp/buggy2.png)
<sub> [image credits: myself (Samsung Galaxy A5)]</sub> </center>

Those buggies quickly brought us to the dunes. The interesting stuff that we wanted to visit!

**Driving in the sand, feeling all the bumps, was really cool and funny**. Our driver asked us (we were three in our buggy) the level of craziness in the driving we wanted to have. Guess what we answered... ;)

Instead of plenty of words detailing what I saw, I think that a bunch of pictures is better. Here is a small montage.

<center> ![](https://s18.postimg.org/4pe173ojd/buggy3.png)
<sub> [image credits: myself (Samsung Galaxy A5)]</sub> </center>

An interesting part of the trip was also when our buggies wanted to cross the Ocean on small wooden boats, just to take a shortcut from point A to point B.

<center> ![](https://s18.postimg.org/adkbxyil5/buggy4.png)
<sub> [image credits: myself (Samsung Galaxy A5)]</sub> </center>

As shown on the above picture, the **moving dunes** that were waiting for us (not so calmly) on the other side were really worthy again.

Here we are! I hope you enjoyed this non-sciency post in which I shared some of my memories of last year :)