Cultural differences

A brief stop in Sao Paulo

   Paraty was a beautiful little town, it was only a shame we didn’t see its beaches in the sunshine.  Kizzy was well-pleased with her breakfast table though.

   We met up with another couple, Dan and Gita (Aussies, again, although they lived in Lime Grove in Shepherd’s Bush until recently) as we were waiting for the bus out to Sao Paulo.  That was quite fortunate as they were much better organised than us and knew where they were going and what needed to happen to make the transfer to Foz do Iguaçu.  It was also quite handy having company around when I inadvertently struck Kiz in the face with the cricket bat.  I bent down to pick up my hand luggage and the bat handle extending over my right shoulder made a beeline straight for her forehead.  I’m not sure how much longer it will be travelling with us. 

   While Dan and Gita travelled on the 17:30 bus to Foz do Iguaçu, we decided to brave the monster and head into central Sao Paulo, city of 18 million people, before following on the 20:00 bus.  I’m glad we did.  It was raining (it has rained every day that we have been in South America) but not too heavily and we found a tube map that looked a lot like London’s, making us feel very capable in navigating foreign mega-cities.  We headed to the Pinacoteca do Estado for our fix of contemporary art, and swung by the Teatro Municipal and Praça da Republica to take in some of the architectural delights. 

 

   I wasn’t overcome by Sao Paulo as a tourist destination and I’m sure that there are better ways to approach it as a visitor than to spend two and a half hours wandering around a small patch downtown.  What was startling was the very present reality of desperate and pitiful poverty that coats the surfaces of what our guidebook describes as “the gastronomic, fashion and finance capital of South America”.  Where we exited the tube at Luz we were surrounded by rundown buildings.  One office block, 20 stories high, was boarded up and no windows intact below the 10^th floor.  It showed all the signs of having been derelict for a decade, and yet it was crowded with people living there to the point that they were spilling out onto the street, sheltering in its cornices under sheets of blue plastic. 

   As we wandered 900 meters from the art gallery to the theatre, we passed countless homeless and also a woman in tears outside the police station, clinging to a cart with a meagre load of plastic carrier bags and a few sheets of cardboard.  It’s not that cold in Sao Paulo in January and I get the impression that the main change in climate is that it rains less from May to September.  However, the number of people bedded down under any shelter, be it viaduct, doorway or underpass came as a shock in this epicentre of the oft-referenced economic miracle of Brazil.  The favelas of Sao Paulo are a good deal further away from the city centre than is the case in Rio and that seems to have created a space in which those with little or nothing can be stranded between begging in the centre and somewhere to sleep at night.  Although that said, no-one asked for money.  To be truthful, there weren’t really many other people around on a wet Saturday afternoon to beg from. 

Beaches and body image

   Vincenzo asked for more pictures of all the beautiful people that Brazil’s beaches are so famed for.  There have been a number of men on the beach with a great interest in photography.  They stand out and look somewhat sinister.  I’m not trying to cultivate that look and Kizzy has refused to take the photos, so sorry to disappoint you Vincenzo. 

   There is a frank appreciation of the human form on the beaches, especially in Rio.  While we were lazing about on Copacabana there were two guys, dressed in bikinis and wigs, doing television interviews as they passed.  My Portuguese is terrible but from what we could gather they were interested in finding pretty girls in their early twenties and then discussing with their subject an appraisal of their boobs and bum.  The girls were mildly embarrassed but didn’t really seem to mind; they were possibly even flattered, judging by the reactions.  It was also surreal in sleepy little Paraty to see a car going down the main drag towing a billboard advertising the local sex shop.  But that seems the way of it here.  On the beach, it was very clear that Kiz and I were tourists, not just from my white or pink glow, but by virtue of us not wearing a thong and speedos.  They seem to be the national uniform, often accessorised with a large tattoo covering a shoulder or a calf muscle. 

   The young are indeed good looking.  Kizzy holds that the men are actually better looking than the women.  But there is a strange diet in the places we have been and it seems to take its toll on people past the age of thirty.  The five fruit and veg a day is actually eight a day in Brazil, but that is no doubt to make up for the other two food groups being stodge (doughy baked goods with any cheese or meat filling you might want) and grilled meat with an enormous amount of salt.  The men over thirty all seem to have developed beer bellies.  I actually hold my own quite well against my contemporaries, although perhaps not with my presently “bubbly” complexion – the sunburn has settled down into hundreds of mini blisters: not at all appealing.  The women over thirty have an almost universal furrow to their brows, as if they are regularly shaking their heads at the deteriorating state of the menfolk.

It's the journey, not the destination

   The hard thing with writing is that when you leave it a little while you fall out of the habit and by the time you sit down with intent you have too many ideas that should have previously been expressed in a much better order.  So I’m going to put one down up front that just came to me: mum, why haven’t you commented on our blog yet?

   We left Rio for Ilha Grande on Monday and since then we have been without internet or even a reliable power source so I’ve continued writing in my diary but it becomes silly trying to transfer daily prose into the past tense.  We spent our last full day in Rio ascending Pão de Açucar (Sugarloaf Mountain), after reinstating all of Kizzy’s bank cards that had seized up in the flurry of international transactions.  The views across the harbour to Corcovado and the Christo Redentor were spectacular but the day was a bit hazy for good photos (see photo, Panu).  We ended up strolling the beach in the afternoon where the atmosphere was more relaxed than on previous days.  It seems like Rio has a lovely family day vibe on Sundays, certainly along the beaches.  It was as though there were more women around and fewer young-ish men and that happened to relax things.  Occasional bars along the beachfront had live music and there were markets in the near side of the road which was closed to traffic for the day.  There were also three girls dancing suggestively to the live music at one bar and that was a trap that had drawn a certain type of men all into one discreet place that was easily circumnavigated.  Sadly we were too terrified of being mugged (guidebook: "do not take anything to the beach") that we left our camera behind on the first day with the lovely blue skies and sunshine.

   We journeyed to Ilha Grande the following day, by minibus and schooner, with our destination Camping e Cabanas Paradiso.  The camping is obvious – reserve a pitch by the beach, simple.  The cabanas?  We were in a tent.  I don’t mind but the booking was for a cottage.  There are no cottages so I didn’t make a fuss about the tent. 

   To get there we walked for an hour and a quarter in the rain, up and down a very slippery hill.  In a way the rain was a blessing – it gave me an excuse for being drenched on arrival.  In actual fact I was dripping with sweat having carried 25kg (still too heavy!) up and down the hill.  Incidentally, some chap who writes for the Rough Guide tested this and the average backpack weight is 17kg, so between the two of us (Kizzy: 11kg) we’re not far off that.  I need to get more stuff into her bag while she sleeps.

   At “Paradiso” it really was quite lovely.  It’s a small campsite (let’s be honest) on a small beach just a short walk from a slightly less small beach (Palmas), a good hour from anything approaching a link to civilisation.  When we were in the cable car up to Sugarloaf Mountain Kizzy remarked that it was strange to have days in which your attention was focussed on the events before you and not on some more distant anticipation.  Lying on the beach in that remote-ish corner of Ilha Grande I could not think of a more apt thought.  After the rush and bustle of the last month in London, to be in a place where filling your day takes attention to each relaxing detail was a staggering change.  However, I must admit to also being staggered by the ridiculously alcoholic welcome Caiprinhas at that point.  I think I have a fair constitution but two of those at Paradiso (Kiz was gone on the first mouthful of hers) and I was struggling to walk straight. 

Am I not adventurous?

   Kizzy has something of a bone to pick with those who suggested that she might not be the adventurous type.  She has now braved the journey between Palmas and Abraão – one hour and 15 minutes up and down a slippery and treacherous clay track (see photo, Panu) no fewer than 5 times, one of those carrying a heavy pack in the rain.  On two occasions she braved the “rock of death” (again, see photo, Panu) and on Wednesday morning took a valiant role in the massacre of the invading ant horde (no photos – still dealing with post-traumatic stress).  She is very brave and I am very proud of her.  Incidentally, she managed to reconcile the massacre with her vegetarianism: “they’re invading our cottage!”, “It’s self-defence” and my favourite, “they’re like machines, they just won’t die!”

   We recovered from that ordeal with a lovely few hours on what felt like our own private beach with blue skies and morning sunshine topping up Kizzy’s tan and threatening to burn me through my factor 30 sunscreen.  In fact it did burn me (see photo) but on the bright side I have discovered that that my new sunglasses have a super-power: they can tell how burnt I will look in an hour’s time, long before it is visible to the naked eye.  I thought they were rose-tinted at first – I looked a little pink through the sunnies but without them I retained an unblemished pasty hue.  I stayed in the sun for another 30 minutes and then went for lunch, still luminous white.  Over the next hour the pink emerged, finally settling on a tender fuscia.  Lesson for the day – listen to the sunnies and stay out of the midday sun!

   We met a lovely couple at Paradiso, Wellington and Tachi, two missionaries from Sao Paulo travelling with Wellington’s sun Viktor and a friend Marcel.  Viktor must be about 14.  He’s a sweet kid who speaks English well and has an endearing habit of patting me on the shoulder every time we passed each other, although with the sunburn I had to stifle the winces for fear of hurting his feelings. 

   Yesterday (finally, almost up to date) we took the water taxi back to Abraão (no way were we doing that journey again with packs and sunburnt shoulders).  Although it was prohibitively expensive (£40 for a twenty minute trip) it was actually quite nice to see the island from offshore and Kiz was very excited at her first trip in a “speedboat” – it was a tinny with a 40hp outboard on the back.  

   Ilha Grande was lovely – we made new friends on the transfer there and then on departure too so I was able to give out the first of the calling cards (very exciting and self-fulfilling moment!).  It seems that couples naturally gravitate towards couples, and unsurprisingly the two couples we’ve met are both from Australia.  The cricket bat seems to attract them!  I knew it was a good idea.  We had a lovely dinner in Paratry last night: we’re cheap so we went somewhere (with our new friends Ben and Zac from Melbourne) that you pay by the kilo so we could load up on almost weightless salads and then treated ourselves to some Acai for dessert – thanks for the tip Farhan.  Paraty is a charming seaside village with cobbled streets and pretty little shops and lots of beautiful beaches.  Now that it’s stopped raining we might go visit some of them.