most relaxing, perfect place with white sand beaches, warm sun, coconut trees, etc... it's actually Fortaleza, and I went there for Easter break. My friend Stacey and I got to stay in a resort outside the city. 
Our first day there we got sunburned under a beach umbrella in less than an hour, and then my friend got sick for like 4 days. So it was not a great start, but we definitely ended strong. We took two dune buggy trips where we drove up and down the beach with our local guide and stopped to check out all sorts of cool stuff: sand dunes, fresh water springs, cool sand formations...
It was off season there was almost no one there. My favorite part was when we did skibunda (literally "buttski"). We slid down a sand dune on a waxed board into a fresh water lake. Totally awesome. We had lunch at a restaurant literally on the beach where we got to pick out the fish we wanted to eat. We're talking fresh.
So yeah, after a rough start it was awesome. Here's pictures from our dune buggy excursions. You can see the dunes, the cool sand formations at Morro Branco, and the traditional fishing boats of the Northeast called jangadas.
