I was reading Charles Darwin´s account of his travels on the HMS Beagle from 1831-36 and came across a section early on where he wondered how large a population the abundent land of Brasil would one day support. Sir Charlie was right to wonder as today there are about 190 million of them, and in our past month´s experience here, a happier, more smiling bunch of south Americans you will not find.
We flew from Santa Cruz de la Sierra in Bolivia at some ungodly hour over a month ago to Sao Paulo, where we did not crash on landing. This was a good thing. We hung out for a couple of days there and somehow we ran into Jonathon, the Paulista we met at Paracas National Park in central Peru a couple of months earlier. We still boggle at the likelihood - or unhlikelihood - of running into the sole person you know in a city of 20 million. Still, Jon was his usual helpful self and his missus told us that Brasil was not entirely full of gun-toting banditos waiting for the next unsuspecting tourist to wander down their street. We had no problems in Sao Paulo, but the weather was crap so we hit the bus station and made for the coastal route to Parati.
Parati was an old gold and coffee port on the Costa Verde founded by the Portuguese about 400 years ago. It grew rich and the merchants built fine houses. A little more than a hundred years ago the trade in coffee and gold from the mines in Minas Gerais slowed to a standstill and the town fell into disuse and was eventually abandoned. Thanks to this, the merchant´s houses lay untouched for a little under hundred years until, in the 1960´s, it was ´rediscovered´ and restored. These days it is a truly beautiful piece of colonial Brasil. We spent three days there.
Rio de Janeiro was as it looked in the postcards, but it was far cooler down on the streets. We lobbed at first into Botafogo and were good tourists and checked out the Pao de Azucar
(Sugarloaf), Cristo Reventador (Christ the Redeemer) and the neighbourhood of Santa Theresa. We also managed to head out to one of the seediest bars I have been to since a squat party in Hackney and got rather trashed on cheap beer. It was fun. But we decided after visting Ipanema one day that we should move across town, so this we did and began to enjoy our time in Rio even more. Ipanema is an uber cool part of Rio, close to the beach and with loads of things to do every day. I ended up meeting with Mr and Mrs Westcott at the northern end of the beach most afternoons for a chat and a few body waves, initially to plan our assault on Lapa on a Friday night.
We hit the streets of Lapa well after midnight and the scene that greeted my eyes reminded me immediately of the late Sunday session at the Notting Hill Carnival. Every bar was teeming to overflowing, every street was full of people, all with a bottle. Guys walked around like waiters with trays selling shots of tequila complete with fresh lemon while others cooked chicken skewers over hot coals and others still sat on massive eskies containing beer, beer and more beer. I was in my element. Our mate Leo, a local lad, was showing us all the nooks and crannies of Lapa and we finally decided on a club to get into, which we did: 5 Reais for women, 10 Reais for men. While not everyone in our party was overwhelmed with the music, I thought it was ace. The deejay played a mix of garage and dubstep and breaks-that-weren´t-breaks and it sounded top class to my ear. Think Bucky Done Gun and Sergio Mendes and heaps of other Brasillian funk and you´re somewhere close to getting it. But 6:30am rolled around and we made it back to our room. We missed breakfast.
We bought a flight and flew from Rio to Fortaleza on the northern coast a few days after the
Lapa episode. Fortaleza gave us both the creeps but we were only there to catch a bus a few hours further north to Jericoacoara. We planned to spend five days in Jeri but ended up spending 10. Jeri is a town with streets made of sand, surrounded by fixed sand dunes and two large beaches. One was a haven for windsurfers and kite surfers while the other was more suited to regular surfng on it´s light, easy wind waves. We did have the pleasure of watching Pepe, the Brasillian national kitesurfing champion, practise his moves in the waves; What that kid can´t do on a kite ain´t worth doing. We also met Beto who taught us to surf. For me, I´d ridden bodyboards from a very young age - about four from my recollection - and petered out at about 20 or so, but for some reason had never tried standup surfing. Amy and never ridden a surfcraft of any kind but was very determined to learn. So we went out every day with Beto on our soft-top mals and surfed surfed surfed. We are getting better.
We left Jeri and travelled down to Canoa Quebrada which was about three hours south of Fortaleza and spent two nights there. The high sand cliffs backing the beach and the profusion of barracas (beach bars and restaurants) combined well with the gentle sea and went spent the day getting some sun and drinking beer. But we decided to move on to another beach further south, this one called Ponta du Mel. Ponta du Mel was hard to reach and when we got there, we discovered that we were the only tourists in town. All of the barracas were closed and there appeared to be nothing to do. So we stayed there for the night and ate the delectable food at our pousada and made tracks the very next day. Only one taxi comes to Ponta du Mel each day so we waited and waited for it and got on board for the journey back to Mossoro. Then we waited some more for the bus to Natal. We spent the night in Natal and caught the short bus to Pipa which is where we are right now.
Pipa is a well developed town (it has cobbles in the streets instead of sand) with loads of places to eat and drink. But better than all that are the three beaches nearby. We spent all of yesterday on our sunchairs at Praia do Madeiro, a coconut palm lined curving bay with a great righthand longboard wave rolling off the point and water filled with dolphins and turtles. Throw the plates of fresh fruit and hand-delivered caipirinhas into the mix and you have what we have been seeking in Brasil: Paradise. And the reason we decided to come here is that I am 30 years old on this 26th day of August. We booked into very a nice pousada and are enjoying ourselves immensely.
We flew from Santa Cruz de la Sierra in Bolivia at some ungodly hour over a month ago to Sao Paulo, where we did not crash on landing. This was a good thing. We hung out for a couple of days there and somehow we ran into Jonathon, the Paulista we met at Paracas National Park in central Peru a couple of months earlier. We still boggle at the likelihood - or unhlikelihood - of running into the sole person you know in a city of 20 million. Still, Jon was his usual helpful self and his missus told us that Brasil was not entirely full of gun-toting banditos waiting for the next unsuspecting tourist to wander down their street. We had no problems in Sao Paulo, but the weather was crap so we hit the bus station and made for the coastal route to Parati.
Parati was an old gold and coffee port on the Costa Verde founded by the Portuguese about 400 years ago. It grew rich and the merchants built fine houses. A little more than a hundred years ago the trade in coffee and gold from the mines in Minas Gerais slowed to a standstill and the town fell into disuse and was eventually abandoned. Thanks to this, the merchant´s houses lay untouched for a little under hundred years until, in the 1960´s, it was ´rediscovered´ and restored. These days it is a truly beautiful piece of colonial Brasil. We spent three days there.
Rio de Janeiro was as it looked in the postcards, but it was far cooler down on the streets. We lobbed at first into Botafogo and were good tourists and checked out the Pao de Azucar
(Sugarloaf), Cristo Reventador (Christ the Redeemer) and the neighbourhood of Santa Theresa. We also managed to head out to one of the seediest bars I have been to since a squat party in Hackney and got rather trashed on cheap beer. It was fun. But we decided after visting Ipanema one day that we should move across town, so this we did and began to enjoy our time in Rio even more. Ipanema is an uber cool part of Rio, close to the beach and with loads of things to do every day. I ended up meeting with Mr and Mrs Westcott at the northern end of the beach most afternoons for a chat and a few body waves, initially to plan our assault on Lapa on a Friday night.We hit the streets of Lapa well after midnight and the scene that greeted my eyes reminded me immediately of the late Sunday session at the Notting Hill Carnival. Every bar was teeming to overflowing, every street was full of people, all with a bottle. Guys walked around like waiters with trays selling shots of tequila complete with fresh lemon while others cooked chicken skewers over hot coals and others still sat on massive eskies containing beer, beer and more beer. I was in my element. Our mate Leo, a local lad, was showing us all the nooks and crannies of Lapa and we finally decided on a club to get into, which we did: 5 Reais for women, 10 Reais for men. While not everyone in our party was overwhelmed with the music, I thought it was ace. The deejay played a mix of garage and dubstep and breaks-that-weren´t-breaks and it sounded top class to my ear. Think Bucky Done Gun and Sergio Mendes and heaps of other Brasillian funk and you´re somewhere close to getting it. But 6:30am rolled around and we made it back to our room. We missed breakfast.
We bought a flight and flew from Rio to Fortaleza on the northern coast a few days after the
Lapa episode. Fortaleza gave us both the creeps but we were only there to catch a bus a few hours further north to Jericoacoara. We planned to spend five days in Jeri but ended up spending 10. Jeri is a town with streets made of sand, surrounded by fixed sand dunes and two large beaches. One was a haven for windsurfers and kite surfers while the other was more suited to regular surfng on it´s light, easy wind waves. We did have the pleasure of watching Pepe, the Brasillian national kitesurfing champion, practise his moves in the waves; What that kid can´t do on a kite ain´t worth doing. We also met Beto who taught us to surf. For me, I´d ridden bodyboards from a very young age - about four from my recollection - and petered out at about 20 or so, but for some reason had never tried standup surfing. Amy and never ridden a surfcraft of any kind but was very determined to learn. So we went out every day with Beto on our soft-top mals and surfed surfed surfed. We are getting better.We left Jeri and travelled down to Canoa Quebrada which was about three hours south of Fortaleza and spent two nights there. The high sand cliffs backing the beach and the profusion of barracas (beach bars and restaurants) combined well with the gentle sea and went spent the day getting some sun and drinking beer. But we decided to move on to another beach further south, this one called Ponta du Mel. Ponta du Mel was hard to reach and when we got there, we discovered that we were the only tourists in town. All of the barracas were closed and there appeared to be nothing to do. So we stayed there for the night and ate the delectable food at our pousada and made tracks the very next day. Only one taxi comes to Ponta du Mel each day so we waited and waited for it and got on board for the journey back to Mossoro. Then we waited some more for the bus to Natal. We spent the night in Natal and caught the short bus to Pipa which is where we are right now.
Pipa is a well developed town (it has cobbles in the streets instead of sand) with loads of places to eat and drink. But better than all that are the three beaches nearby. We spent all of yesterday on our sunchairs at Praia do Madeiro, a coconut palm lined curving bay with a great righthand longboard wave rolling off the point and water filled with dolphins and turtles. Throw the plates of fresh fruit and hand-delivered caipirinhas into the mix and you have what we have been seeking in Brasil: Paradise. And the reason we decided to come here is that I am 30 years old on this 26th day of August. We booked into very a nice pousada and are enjoying ourselves immensely.
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