Brazil

Thursday 02.08.07

The moment i stepped off the airport bus into the Cidade Alta of Salvador, I began to be harassed by a teenage beggar. I was on my way to the Pelourinho, the oldest standing part of the city - a small bairro (neighbourhood) of colonial buildings, and one of the few places safe for tourists. I shrugged him off, checking over my shoulder to ensure he wasn't following. It didn't matter. Soon i was being chased by another, determined to escort me to my new hostel (for a charge of course). As luck would have it, I bumped into a woman who worked at the very same place, and like a vehicle's windshield, she deflected any more attempts to latch on as if they were gnats on a country highway. This behaviour, seen at about 7.30am in the morning, was but a precursor for things to come.

Later that day, i made my way to the Plano Inclinado, another way of moving between the Cidades Alta e Baixa (Upper and Lower Cities). Two antique carriages make a short journey on rails on a slope of about 40º between the two halves of the historical centre. At night we wandered the Pelourinho amidst crowds of people, tourists and locals alike. At this time the district throbs with African energy, exciting all senses: The beating drums, the spectacle of performance, the smell of sweat, the push of the crowd, the taste of the local cooking, and there is a sixth feeling, a tangible charisma that sweeps you away.

Salvador, once the capital of colonial Brasil, is without doubt the most affronting place i have ever seen. It is Brasil's 4th largest city, and having fallen into major disrepair through neglect, is now in a process of restoration. The Pelourinho has been restored, and is mostly safe for tourists, but foreigners are constantly being accosted by dozens of hawkers, paupers, beggars and artists. The remainder of the Cidades Alta e Baixa are not the safest places to be walking around in daylight, and are downright dangerous after dark. Me and a couple of guys found ourselves in one such area in search of a cheap dinner. Recommended by the restaurant owner not to walk back the way we came, we took some bad advice and found ourselves in a deserted, dark lane. Every building still standing was completely boarded up, some with their old interiors heaped in piles over the street. We shouldn't have been there.

It happens so fast. There are shouts from behind, and momentarily maybe six people are upon you, wielding weapons. Is that a flash of a knife? You scramble for your cash to hand over, as unfamiliar hands are grabbing you, reaching into your pockets. Details stick out like bandannas obscuring faces, rags tied over handles of weapons. You are spun around, and moments later, like a chilling breeze, they disappear just as quickly as they arrived. You realise what has just happened seconds after the event, as if it were a dream. Taking stock of your former possessions, you suddenly realise it could have been a lot worse. 60 Reals (AUS$40) from me and more from the others has gone, but in a dark place with the wrong movements, more than money could have been lost.

----------------------------------

Out on some exposed rocks off the beach in Barra, a few kilometres away from the intensity of the streets of central Salvador, life is simple. Spongy mosses, sea urchins and other aquatic species call this tidal climate home. The ever-burning Sun provides energy and light, the drenching waves bring nutrients, and breathing goes in and out, over and over.

Monday 30.07.07

We left off last time, with the cash problem still not corrected, and as i found out on this day, even more stress was ahead of me. The flow chart below better describes the week's predicament than any descriptive writing. Emotionally drained by the end of the day, i caught up with friends for a few drinks.

Canned drinks in Brasil are nothing if not entertaining. There is always some element of mystery involved in cracking one open. Canned beer always seems to taste terrible here, and sometimes the cans are kept so cold that one finds chunks of ice floating in the beverage. Stranger still are some liquids that are chosen to be can-worthy (clearly a dubious title). The strongest Cachaça, Pitu can be purchased in this way. Another oddity is Chopp & Vinho, a bizarre mix of beer and wine in a purple can, which i was a little too afraid to try.

My friends pulled up in a dune buggy in the morning, and i jumped on the back for a ride up to the dunes to the north of Natal. The shortest route for now is to take a ferry across the Rio Potengi, but a huge bridge is currently under construction to connect the city to the so far mostly unspoiled northern region. But before the place becomes a popular area to raise a family, before big business moves in with apartment blocks and restaurants, and hopefully long before the prostitutes flock to the tourist boom, let's go to a simpler time, a time where raw petrol-driven buggies raced across the sand, and the air and water were clean: Tuesday July 31, 2007....

Now across the other side of the river, the buggies roared into life toward the dunes, except for ours, which was broken down by the side of the road. After some unnecessary parts were jettisoned, and all of us pushed the thing some distance along the road, it stirred, sputtered and then started, and soon we were accelerating northward as if the very passage of time was too slow to catch us. Between the dunes of Genipabu we raced, into high banked turns, almost vertical plunges and plenty of sideways drift. It was all done in a fashion the locals call Com Emoção (with emotion), to a soundtrack of gangster rap and reggae. It is worth noting at this point that Brasilian pronunciation of such English terms ends up sounding like Hippy Hoppy, Haggy or Hock & Holl.

The dunes themselves sit on top of a reservoir, which can be seen from time to time in the form of freshwater lakes here and there. One of the lakes we visited has chairs and tables set up in the shallows, while another sees people plunge into its depths from atop a dune by way of zip line and water slide, Com Emoção if you please. All over the area, via the coastal buggy route, river crossings by pole barge were necessary, sort of like gondolas of the wild west. After a late seafood lunch, we persuaded the driver to take us further north, to the place where Brasil's coastline turns from north to west. The coast up in this region has a more remote feel to it, of windswept palms swaying together, sleepy white-washed towns and miles and miles of empty beach.

I embarked on the final leg of my cash transfer on Wednesday, sitting frustrated in the bank for some time, watching a female security guard idly playing with the handgun bullets holstered in her belt. Brasil itself is drowning in bureaucracy, from medical insurance hassles, to the difficulty of purchasing airline tickets without consulting an agent; and even such simple things as banking or buying a drink at the bar are tediously time-consuming. The protocol for many bars is to decide what to drink, buy a ticket for the chosen beverage, and then proceed to the bar to redeem the ticket, sometimes at the other end of the venue. I have seen small green grocers with 15 employees, and service stations with 12 people standing around the pumps. It is this 'due process' that can make Brasil an expensive and sometimes frustrating place to be.

This lack of efficiency can be translated in other means, as the recent air crash in São Paulo may attest. An Airbus A320, with a long list of problems, was cleared to land with only one thrust reverser operational, onto a short, badly-surfaced runway in the rain. Upon landing, either the speed brake system completely failed, or the throttle was jammed, and the aircraft ploughed into an inappropriately placed multi-story building at the end of the runway. This tragedy, the worst in Brasilian history, only a year after another airliner vanished without a trace into the Amazon, could have been completely avoided.

This brings me to my final point, that being the fate of the cities of Northeastern Brasil. Development and tourism are not terrible things, especially when the whole community can grow and profit from them, but there is a distinct lack of responsibility for development in this region. It is not the multi-storey apartment blocks popping up all over Ponta Negra, amazingly constructed of just bricks and concrete, nor is it the bridge facilitating expansion into the northern regions, but prostitution that is strangling the cities. It distances the locals from the tourists and drives out the families. I hear prostitution has all but claimed Fortaleza's appeal, and all of Natal will fall shortly if action is not taken. Praia dos Artistas, as the name suggests, was once a bohemian beach hang-out when Ponta Negra was just a fishing village. The three main beaches in Natal, including Artistas, slowly fell to sex tourism, until Ponta Negra was the only place for everyone else. Now it too is suffocating, and the local government is either too lazy or itself asphyxiating in bureaucracy to lift a finger. I left Natal on Wednesday night, to return by air to Salvador, where i was soon to find my battle with the buck had only just begun.

Friday 27.07.07

Out on the gaming table of life where fortunes can be made and lost, a flip of a card could change a life. In my corner, I had been quietly playing my own game, trying not to get too distracted by the bright lights or sleazy people. I was counting the cards, and I was sure by coming to northeastern Brasil I'd backed a winner. Oblivious of the hand the dealer had ready to play, and a little ignorant of the stakes involved, I played on. It was to be my downfall.

The first sign was the loss of my wallet during the trip to Ponta Negra the night before. Instead of worrying, I bluffed, wearing a poker face good enough to fool a pro, and made arrangements to get my bank card cancelled and replaced. In the morning at our hotel, things began to slide in a downward direction. Me and the Canadian girls had been put into a different room than the one we had negotiated for the night before, and now the owner of the flat we stayed in demanded a payment of double our agreed rate. They tried all kinds of dirty tricks to win, from telling lies, feigning ignorance and wearing sunglasses, but Kelly from the Dominican Republic (whom we had adopted the night before) spoke so fluently in Portuguese, they weren't able to cheat outright. We played our final hand, broke even against the odds, and got told to leave the hotel.

Out the front of our new place in Vila, a poorer area of Ponta Negra, a three-night street festival was just warming up in the early evening, and before long the place was crowded with locals. Eager to cater for their needs, all kinds of mobile shops were set up, selling pastries, corn or kebab skewers, or cut-price beer and cane spirit cachaça out of polystyrene coolers. As the festa wore on, it grew stranger and stranger, incorporating a June Festival hoe-down of sorts and several dance routines from local groups. My attempts to dance the Samba and Forro once again were far more amusing than precise, but being one of the only tourists, I still garnered plenty of attention.

Walking through a post-festa Vila at probably 4.30am, Latin America seemed at its most distant, its most inaccessible. Gone were the crowds of people, drinking, dancing and living their lives by the street. Far away from the flashing lights of the festival in the back blocks of Ponta Negra, the cobble-stoned streets were now the realm of cats and dogs, a monochrome world polarised by orange streetlights and dark shadows. Latin America, at this place and time was sleeping, and I, walking through this bairro on the way back to a secure hotel unit, was similarly polarised. A white person in a dark neighbourhood, awake while others sleep, so close geographically and so distant in mindset; unified only in one thing: Silence.

Saturday I held my cards with an iron grip, determined not to let the game slip. The odds though, were as long as a Shetland's in a steeplechase and soon to get even worse. On the beachfront promenade I bumped into Carlo, an Italian guy we had met through Kelly. He had been staying in Ponta Negra for several months already, doing research on the area for a university in Venice. Getting money from my credit card failed utterly, and while I was waiting outside the bank for him I was approached by a bohemian-looking (and very attractive) Brasilian girl. After what seemed like fifteen seconds of small talk, we were kissing on the lips - the second time this random type of encounter was occurring during my stay in Brasil. Tenderly, we parted after a minute or so, and with a look back over her shoulder, she was gone. Carlo had seen the whole thing from inside, and was quick to point out his suspicions that she was a 'Street Beautician' - in his words, a professional...

I had no other option but to place my chips on getting emergency cash wired to Banco do Brasil. After playing every one of my trump cards through numerous frustrations to get back in the black, I finally got the cash secured for Monday. Or so i thought. Later in the evening, Carlo took me out to meet up with some friends living in Ponta Negra, and we hit the local bars. Years ago, I had vowed never to enter a club named Matrix but here we were with free passes to Matrix Disco Pub, featuring big fluorescent polystyrene balls stuck to the walls and music that I would have liked if only I was Hello Kitty on a disco biscuit. Needless to say, I lasted about the length it took me to throw back a couple of beers before heading back to the street party and respectability.

My travelling buddies Tamara and Melissa were leaving for São Paulo, and after our farewell dinner on Sunday night I met up with Carlo again on the way to the Vila festival, now cartwheeling into night three. Out the back of the festa, past the stage and the typically South American church centrepiece, we found a children's fairground. Included were such death-defying rides as a pirate ship only twice the size of a garden swing, squeaking rusted teacups and a carousel of little race cars bumping over a rutted wooden track. Amidst a crowd of eager kids, we fired air rifles at candy, handing out our edible prizes in all directions like a couple of Caucasian piñatas. The music was even more frantic than Friday's offerings, featuring some hyper-speed Forro mixed with electronic music; and naturally the 1940's polka antics were in full swing, this time with the country folk replaced by cross-dressers. But all too soon, the festival finished, and people returned to their lives, leaving nothing but their giant piles of rubbish behind.

Monday 23.07.07

Amazingly, i got up for my second free breakfast in a row! For all you people back home, that means getting up before.....yawn.....the ungodly hour of 10am. With some hours to kill before getting our evening bus to Natal, we took a walk to the historical centre of Salvador. The city's historical centre is divided into Cidades Alta e Baixa (upper and lower towns), joined by a beautiful art deco elevator 72m high. Mercardo Modelo occupies a building in the centre of Cidade Baixa, once the customs house of the port serving the city. The market's bright, busy energy gives no indication of its musty, humid basement, and the terrible atrocities that must have gone on down there many years ago. In this dark, flooded place, African slaves fresh off the boat were stored here awaiting auction. These days, a concrete causeway keeps visitors feet out of the shallow water, and similarly, light brightens the place up, but it is doubtful the slaves would have enjoyed either luxury. It may come as no surprise that there have been reports of unexplainable phenomena during closing hours by the night guards.

A 20-hour bus ride was in store for us come evening, past cities built not so much on 'Rock and Roll', but of unfinished bricks and mortar. The landscape varied little, just a blur of tropical trees and tended fields, of multitudes of greens and browns. As night fell, along the unknown miles and miles of highway, outside the one-street towns and their few flickering lights, was nothing but silhouette against sky, a vast expanse of black on black, a nothing yet everything at once.

I awoke in daylight, as we pulled into yet another diner. Every two hours for the entire trip we stopped at either a diner or a bus station, in places too numerous and nondescript to mention. We disembarked a little before Natal to visit one of the area's most popular beaches, Pipa.

On both Wednesday and Thursday, we walked north to Baia dos Golfinhos along the beach, picking our way around and over iron-rich volcanic rocks. They lie haphazardly in piles at the foot of huge sandstone cliffs, which are hued in creams, pinks, reds and purples, topped by overhanging greenery. As the name suggests in Portuguese, the bay is frequented by groups of dolphins, and over these two days we swum around, while circled and observed by the curious creatures. At one stage I saw one aggressively pursue a fish, snapping around in tight circles while the fish desperately attempted escape. The dolphin soon was winning the bout, flipping the fish skyward in the final moments into its mouth, and moments later it paraded it triumphantly through the water, much like a dog that had just fetched a stick. We left late afternoon for the city of Natal, about 90km north, to stay in the bairro Ponta Negra for the next few days.

Thursday 19.07.07

Salvador from the air was a lot bigger than i expected, and it was still dark when we touched down. With a little perseverance, and absolutely no help from the taxi drivers crowding the exit doors, i managed to get a cheap bus which took me all the way along a beautiful urban coastline into the centre of town while the sun rose outside. Upon reaching the end of the line, i was directed down an elevator into the Cidade Baixa (lower city) to get to the boat docks. I met up with the two Canadian girls i had previously met in Rio, and we boarded a catamaran bound for Morro de São Paulo, part of an island to the south of Salvador.

The boat took a couple of hours to reach its destination, giving us plenty of time to get a little burnt. The first indication that the place was more than a little touristy was the 'Rich Gringo' tax to enter the island, a scam I've been subjected to on previous excursions in Latin America. The only traffic the sandy streets of Morro see are people and wheelbarrows, the latter employed to haul the former's belongings between the dock and the multitude of pousadas situated along the three main beaches. Ours was just off the biggest beach, lagoon-fronted Praia 2. The sun was powerful here like I hadn't encountered on this venture, and we soon got acquainted with island life. Every tourist whim was pandered for, from sun lounges, food ordered and delivered on the beach, to massages and souvenirs. The seedy side of tourism was present too, with illegal substances offered here and there amongst constant harassment from vendors and restaurant staff.

One of the most delicious things for sale was ice-cold Açai, served for breakfast, topped with banana pieces, muesli and honey. Every evening, stalls were set up all over the place with huge fruit displays, ready to be blended with ice and vodka into drinks. Friday night was a big party night on the island, with Forro music the speciality, and it was a good chance to dance the night away in a fruit + vodka charged haze with locals, spilling out onto the beach before sunrise. Unable to sleep but unable to move, i lay on a deckchair as the sun rose and stayed until mid morning. Despite rain and cloud for most of that time and surely protected by the umbrella I was under, I got burned once again.

We were met Sunday morning by a local of African descent, Robson at about 9am to take us to the other side of the island. Passing into steamy jungle vegetation once the dwellings had thinned out, the island showed us a more native side. We soon were clambering up clay embankments and down gullies criss-crossed with roots. Another result of tourism, a hastily constructed neighbourhood for the influx of workers sprawled in a nearby valley, apparently rampant with crime.

Soon the track dropped into a verdant grotto, where a little waterfall sacred to the locals filled a pool in the shade of moss-covered rocks. From there, we walked to Gamboa, on the other coast of the island, a sleepy place with a long beach. Local kids were everywhere, playing beach football and scrambling onto and off an anchored fishing boat. After lunch, we walked back to Morro by way of the coast, passing a pastel-hued cliff, famous for its medicinal clay. Not content to just rub it on their skin, the girls instigated a vicious and one-sided mud fight that lasted for about 15 minutes before we washed it off and left for the town.

We were disappointed to find out our catamaran ride back to Salvador became a 3.5 hour boat-bus-boat combination, and by the time we were back in the city, we had missed our connecting bus to Natal by just minutes. Disappointed, we caught a taxi to a seaside suburb, Barra to stay the night.