Seasons on the Move

Paraty to Rio de Janiero – April 22

The bus back from Paraty was another uneventful, boring ride. The sun shined in the window and torched my scalp. Fab took a Gravol and drooled all over my shoulder for most of the way. We got into Rio in the afternoon, haggled for a cab ride inside the bus station, lost the argument, walked across the street and got the cab for the price we wanted.

Since we had stayed in Ipanema the first time in Rio, we wanted to stay in a different area. We chose Santa Teresa, a bohemian enclave set on a hillside just outside of Centro. The taxi man didn´t know how to get to our hotel so we stopped constantly so he could ask for directions. At least we didn´t get charged extra reals.

We had dinner at an restaurant specializing in Amazonian cuisine. I´m not sure how `Amazonian´ it was, but it sure was tasty. For the rest of the day it poured rain. After finishing dinner, we sat on the covered rooftop patio at the rear of the hotel and wished the rain we go away. Next door, there was a raucous party going on that we wanted to be part of. Laughing, hollering, dancing and bumping samba music came over the fence. Fab and I had planned on going to a samba club at night, but when we asked the night watchman how to get to the club posted on the hotel´s information board he just shrugged his shoulders. He told it was maybe a ten minute walk, pointed down the deserted  street and then put his hands back in his pockets. We asked if it was safe to walk there since it was after 10pm. He looked us up and down,  his shrugged his shoulders again and said, “I guess”. As much as we wanted to go out, we didn´t feel like taking a cab and really didn´t want to be walking after dark armed with vague directions and an even vaguer sense of security. Instead, we stewed in our hotel room, frustrated by the rain and our inability to roam freely in Rio.

Paraty – April 21

Hooray! The sun was out and shining in the morning. We had a quick breakfast and then returned to Jabaquara beach. We had wanted to return to Trindade, the best beach in the area, but if the weather followed suit, there would be rain by mid-afternoon and we wanted to maximize our time in the sun.

The beach was full of city dwellers enjoying their extended weekend. Fab and I drank caipirinhas, a strong, hard liquor and fruit mix, followed by fresh coconut juice and terrible beach burgers with sand in them. We made friends with a beach dog, swam in the warm water and then ran back to the hotel when the rain clouds rolled in and mercilessly pounded Paraty with more water.

Paraty – April 20

More rain. We got stuck on the covered patio after breakfast and spent the rest of the morning taking with Cedric and Aurele, a French couple from Paris also traveling around the world. They had been in South America for a few months, mostly in Argentina, and were closer to the start of their trip than we were to the end of ours. We swapped travel stories, filling them in on India, while they told us about Argentina.

The rain was frustrating because it came at the wrong time in our trip. We didn’t have enough time to just wait it out, didn´t have the cash to move fast, and only had two weeks in Brazil. We didn’t want to spend the rest of our days in Sao Paolo either, only a few hours away. A metropolis of 20 million wasn´t what we had in mind. We wanted beach time, but by the look of it, unless we ventured 500km in either direction, we were stuck with  rain. We decided to give Paraty one more day and then head back to Rio.

Paraty – April 19

Rain clouds covered the sky for most of the morning, ruining yet another day we had planned to spend at the beach. For most of our trip we had been lucky with the weather. In Brazil, we were paying our dues.

The clouds cleared after dark and we went down the colonial part of town for a drink. Since it was the beginning of a long weekend, Paraty had filled with weekenders from Rio and Sao Paolo during the day. Despite the drizzly weather, the streets were packed with people. Impromptu samba jams broke out numerous corners, crowds gathered and dancing commenced. Vendors sold sweets off of carts and Brazilian hippies sold typical hippie junk: bracelets, beads and drug paraphenalia. One old man, who had apparently lost his mind in Thailand judging by his clothes, sold paper and wire butterflies that he had pinned to his hair, beard and clothes.

We side stepped the puddles on the uneven cobble stones and looked for a patio to have a drink. As the night wore on, the temperature rose and people skipped, stumbled and fell on the streets, laughing, drinking and screaming. Fab and I stopped to watch a samba band work it out and then made our way back towards the hotel.

On a deserted side street, we came upon an old black man with white hair  in an oversized cardigan sweater and rolled up jeans, no shoes, singing sweet, sad love songs to nobody but himself. His microphone ran to a small amplifier perched on top of a shopping cart. He sang softly with his eyes closed. I stopped, transfixed, and listened for a couple of songs before dropping a couple of coins in a hollowed out coconut husk.

Paraty Mirim – April 18

Another day, another beach, another municipal bus. We traveled twenty minutes south from Paraty proper to the township of Paraty-Mirim. The ride down had given us a glimpse of rural Brazilian life. Limp palm fronds slapped the side of the open bus windows. Locals crossed wooden plank suspension bridges carrying fruit and chickens and hitched rides further down the dirt road. Others loitered around the lone restaurant drinking beer and smoking cigarettes. A pay phone across from the restaurant served as the township´s communication centre, with various people rushing towards it every time it rang. Kids played hide and go seek in tall blades of grass and swung from tree vines.

The beach itself wasn´t all that fanstastic, littered with driftwood and seashells, but it was isolated and peaceful. We laid on the narrow strip of sand behind the drift wood against the green chaos of the sprawling undergrowth that backed the beach. Juice was drunk from fresh coconuts through straws. When we had sucked them dry, the man from the restaurant hacked them open with a machete and we scraped the flesh from the insides using a sharpened piece of coconut rind. We sat in the sun until our skin ached, swam, and ate fried shrimp, black beans and rice for lunch, all washed down with a large bottle of cold beer.

Trindade – April 17

In the morning, we took a bus full of screaming school children 30km south of Paraty to Trindade, home to more beautiful Brazilian beaches. The gut turning road plummeted through sub-tropical forest before coming to an end near a cluster of beach huts and grounded boats. We had seen the area´s beaches on the descent into town and noticed that the white capped waves were more suitable for surfing than swimming.

We got off the bus, walked down a dirt trail that cut between beach side restaurants and out onto Praia do Meio, two semi-circles of sand, pinched in the middle by a group of grey boulders, that billowed out like sails against the palm trees and bars that rimmed the beach. We grabbed a couple of brown laquered chairs, reclinable, and ordered some refreshments. Fab plugged away at her book while I scribbled notes for a feature film and listened to Ween´s latest, “La Cucaracha” (They still got it).

By the time the album came to a close, dense clouds had rolled in and forced everyone on the beach to seek shelter from the driving rain. Fab and I decided to make the most of our time and ordered some fresh fish and drank a couple of beers before returning to Paraty and treating ourselves to dessert, an açai smoothy and a block of dark chocolate covered Brazil nuts.

Paraty – April 16

The rain clouds cleared overnight so we hit the beach. We passed through the colonial heart of Paraty, up a hill that snaked out of town, across a bridge and back down to where the land flattened out and Jabaquara beach, a long sickle of golden sand, came into view.

We pulled together two chairs and soaked in the sun, looking out at the calm water and tiny islands dotting the bay, all containing beaches within reach by way of hired motorboat. We had the beach mostly to ourselves save for a couple of people who came and went as the day grew longer. Fab escaped to the wintry Russia of “Anna Karenin” and I wrote and listened to music in between dips in the water.

When we were done in the sun, we visited the colonial part of town, an area pushed up against the town´s shoreline that once served as a major Portuguese port for shipping gold back to the motherland. Paraty was declared a protected area in the 1970´s by the Brazilian government and as a result has been carefully restored and well maintained. Palm trees shot up behind the white washed buildings, the doorways and window frames brightly hued in a variety of colours. No vehicles are allowed in the historic centre, so all transport of goods and tourists is done by way of horse drawn carts.

At the port, a line of for-hire boats, all individually painted and customized, bobbed up and down in the water and jettied in and out of the harbour. Portuguese cannons aimed defiantly out at the water. When our ankles became tired of navigating the uneven cobbled streets, we returned to the hotel to sit in the garden, listen to the crazed, late night sermonizing from the nearby churches and rub aloe vera into our pink flesh.

Paraty – April 15

We spent another rainy, tropical day aboard a bus bound for Paraty. In front of me, a man with no teeth molested a guava fruit with his gums, his flaccid cheeks moving up and down like pistons, juice trickling down his arm. Across from me, a woman vomited on the floor, at first trying to catch it with her hands, then using a small plastic bag that she proceeded to fill thoughout the rest of the trip. Outside the fogged windows, moisture clouds sat low, dumping their contents on the green, green forest.

The rain continued to fall in Paraty. Fab and I wandered around lost, soaked, and looking for a place to stay. A kind woman with a dark tan, blonde hair and an umbrella guided us to a pousada run by an ex-pat Belgian man with a flat-top head who spoke four languages.

Fab and I stuffed ourselves with tenderloin steak at a pay-by-the-kilo restaurant for dinner and then walked back to the hotel. Christian places of worship, like shops in a strip mall, lined the streets, lit up inside with green fluorescent light. People praised the lord in the fervent way that only denominational Christians know how. One of the churches had a rock group made up of teenage girls who gently rocked out in Portuguese to the delight of a small group of senior citizens. By the time we got back to the hotel, rapture must have been near because things really sounded like they were heating up. The praising was now replaced with crazed screaming. Fab and I sat on the covered garden patio, surrounded by trickling rain, tropical plants, and stereo sound worhsip, played a couple games of Yahtzee and drank a terrible bottle of vinho that tasted more like fermented grape juice than red wine.