One taxi ride and phone call later we made it to the ‘Aussie in Belem’s' house. Here I was reunited with some distinguished aussie culture and euphemisms…in the Amazon! A 3 storey apartment with a ‘college day’ appearance, beer bottles clattering corners, piles of dishes waiting to be washed and at least a couple of weeks of messiness hanging about. We slept our nights on the roof, under the stars with a glorious view of the city. One night we watched the street light catch on fire after a small explosion took place. It was attached to a fuse box that looked awfully close to the flames to not explode. Luckily it didn’t.
The aussie in question is a singer. She ended up in the port city of Belem by accident after following a band who’d hired her to sing. She has been on the road in Latin America for 5 years and was able to get residency in Brazil by sheer luck, a new law in place for immigrants from surrounding poorer countries, not created for aussies! She has now developed a love for Belem, it’s constant concerts and outdoor events, the heat, the musicians and friends she has met and the night lifestyle that she holds. Without loosing her Australianisms she managed to pick up a Portuguese sprawl that runs out of her mouth like a true Brazilian.
Belem has an amazing market with a wonderful variety of Amazon fruits, vegetables, herbal tinctures and remedies,
fresh fish, traditional items such as straw hats and baskets and of course, big bowls of acai, the wondrous antioxidant-rich palm fruit that’s eaten along with fried fish and farofa (toasted manioc flour that’s served with every meal in Brazil). Our attempt to hitchhike out of Belem lasted a mere 6 hours after being kicked out of the petrol station where we were asking truck drivers for a ride at. At this point we were worn-out, especially of hitchhiking with little success but also of moving every couple of days, living out of a backpack, having fleeting friendships and not having a place to call home. Brazil was meant to be our last big trip before arriving in Argentina; it was meant to be enjoyable, but instead it was being challenging and demanding on the both of us. So, we decided to reduce the amount of stops that we were to do in Brazil so as to try and enjoy what we were to visit; quality not quantity.
Sao Luis, our next stop after Belem, is the capital of reggae in Brazil so we were told and so it was true. With its strong African influence reggae is in all corners of the centre, leaking through the cracks of the beautifully, flaking, nostalgic buildings that give Sao Luis its reputation. Laneway gigs emerge around many corners and singers take a seat at bars under the stars while liquids are consumed and sounds are swung to. Sao Luis is also about beaches: 5 km’s of it such as Sao Marcos which stretches out from the tip of the centre of Sao Luis, wide and long, pure sand and sea with nothing else polluting it.
A night market greeted us one dusk where we were offered a variety of traditional Brazilian street food. Famished, we ate beiju, a tapioca and coconut pancake, tapioquinha (tapioca with cheese and coconut), tapioca flan and guarana de amazonia, a guarana, banana, avocado, milk and cashew smoothie. All so good!
We stayed in a studio with two other couch surfers squeezed into the room. Along with this we had 100 reales to last us a week as I waited for money to clear from my transfers. It was a challenge and one which we united with the task of visiting the sand dunes and oasis in Santo Amaro, 250 kilometres from Sao Luis.
We accomplished the mission and managed to hitchhike most of the way there apart from the last 36 kilometres which we thought we could walk. The midday sun hit as hard as we set off down an off shoot road, leading us through endless barren landscapes with houses dotting the scenery on occasion but with not a soul to be seen. Two hours later we arrived at a village where we did meet some people. Their laughs greeted us when we shared that we were planning on walking all the way to Santo Amaro. “You will be met with knee-high sand for kilometres” said one. They all agreed that it was an impossible task and convinced us to sit and rest and wait for the jeep that was to come in a few hours. Minutes later one appeared. We tetrised our way through the sand and held on during the 2 hour drive of bumps, swerves and out of control veers.
That night we camped on the sprawling sand dunes, the fine sand sticking stubbornly to our bodies while the moons reflection slithered in the small lagoon that we had come across (the dry season drying up all the oasis’s). In comparison to daylight, the night bought a cool breeze which gave us an excuse to make a campfire and enjoy the flickering flames.
The next day we walked the vastness of the sand dunes, the undulating beige hills creating a beautiful contrast with the crisp blue sky.
Not a soul was to be seen for miles. We headed back to town and watched the women washing their families clothes in the river while the kids played by their side. Cashew trees offered their fruits to us as we walked the streets of Santo Amaro. We managed to hitchhike back to Sao Luis in just a few short hours as the daylight hours were dwindling; one of our rides was a taxi driver who offered to take us if he didn’t find any paying passengers (which luckily he didn’t) and we proceeded to have a ‘lost in translation’ conversation, e.g. explaining what joven (young) meant for half an hour in various ways until he finally understood and said the very same, exact word with a slightly different accent. That night we saw two roadside gatherings, one where an 80-year-old woman had been robbed, raped and very sadly, murdered, her body found in a trench on the side of the road. The other where a car had fallen into a gully after being pushed off by a passing truck. The driver was unhurt but the car on the other hand was squashed in a very awkward position.
From Sao Luis we set off for a long 1900 kilometre adventure to Salvador, which lasted 4 days. We got a ride to the outskirts of Sao Luis by a postie who had given us a lift a few days back to the sand dunes. It was nice to see a familiar face again!
My one year and a half of travelling clocked off on this first day of hitchhiking from Sao Luis, waiting in Magnolia petrol station with little hope of moving after being repeatedly told by truckies that the public holiday the next day meant that no one was going anywhere. After most of a day of asking truck drivers for a ride in our portoñol (Spanish/Portuguese), luck blew our way and a truckie named Marcos, agreed to take us who was heading most of the way to Salvador with a stop to pick up cargo along the way.
He turned out to be the slowest truck driver this world has ever seen and perhaps the laziest. A mere four hours of driving a day was all he had in him and the rest of the time was filled with stops for water bottle refills, toilet needs, meal stops, oil checks, tyre checks and any other excuse that came to mind.
On the road mango trees dangled, dazzling their ripe fruits in our eyes. We stopped and harvested a bucket full of the sweet fruits and the rest of the trip was mango filled, covering our faces with the fruit, the fibres wedging themselves in our teeth, quenching our hunger and thirst and providing for laughs for when we had nothing to say to Marcos in our minimal Portuguese. The landscape on the journey was mostly barren, roads continuing on for many kilometres, straight as rulers with dry and bristle bushes sketching the land. Heat emerged in the early morning and became unbearable by midday. No man’s land was what we crossed, with few towns and villages to be seen. The two nights we travelled with Marcos we slept in our hammocks tied up in petrol stations, passing noises causing me a bit of angst but generally sleeping tranquilly. Marcos was to pick up a bulldozer but when we arrived, the paper work wasn’t ready and another night was tallied to our journey. To add to this, the reverse gear was playing up and Marcos announced that we would probably arrive in Salvador three days later than what we had planned. That was the tipping point for me and after some conversing with Agus, we decided that the we would search for another ride the next morning, a mere 600 kilometres away.
Our conversation with truck drivers was amazingly quite complex at times considering how little Portuguese we knew. But Spanish is very similar to Portuguese and so you’re able to figure out many words as they may be different by only a few letters or it’s the accent that changes. Of course this is not true for everything and I found it harder than Agustin to understand truckie conversations especially as many had quite distinct accents and spoke quickly, restraining from opening their mouths.
The next day I turned 28. I spent it on the side of the road waiting for a ride, acquiring one amazingly quickly but a mere 100 kilometres on the journey, being told that the paper work wasn’t complete for us to pass the state border, causing us to wait for many hours for another ride and finally being picked up by the same truckie who had bought us there, papers all sorted out this time. Not the way I had envisaged the passing of the day, I grouchily got through the hours, weary after day four of non-stop travel.
But vivacious Salvador da Bahia was near. We arrived on a Friday morning, the chaotic streets full of life and animation. The Afro-Brazilian culture bubbling and at its strongest in this part of the country, influencing the food, the music and the energy of the place. The first capital of Brazil, it is known as the happy state for a reason. People are always outdoors, enjoying the sun, countless parties and home to the best carnaval in Brazil. Our couch Pareta, a street artist who reads poetry out to the masses on buses and at bars, is an eccentric, born to be an actor with a big heart who lives to talk and has a smile for all occasions. We stayed with him in his shoebox apartment but with a view of course!
Beaches is what we mainly visited in Salvador. End beautiful they were. Bahia’s reputation is upheld to have some of the nicest beaches in the world. And right on the doorstep of the city of Salvador, the beach culture blending with the everydayness of day-to-day living. But many other faces are apparent in Salvador apart from the beach. The historical centre in the cidade alta is made up of cobbled streets and colonial architecture, impressive and charming but with a distinctive tourist feel to it. The street stalls and markets (with a lot of cheap tropical fruit available) is where a lot of life is effused, sellers calling out with voluptuous voices, their goods and their prices; people eating acaraje, a deep-fried ball stuffed with shrimp paste, cashew nuts, tomatoes and chilly sauce while drinking beers (what I consider to be light) on the street or coming back from a beach trip from one of the many islands and being amongst a sudden bus drumming and singing session which materialised out of thin air. The traditional food of Bahia is one of my favourites, usually involving seafood or fish such as the famous moqueca, a seafood stew consisting of fish, onions, garlic, tomatoes and coriander, cooked slowly. The cocadas made from sugar and coconut (gives you a good energy boost) or abara a type of tamal made from cowpeas and served like acaraje (my favourite food which I ate every possible day that I could!).
Brazilians are very loud and boisterous at any moment and time, yelling, shouting, laughing loudly, over anything and nothing, showing much more emotion than your average Joe. This is especially true in Bahia and is part of the many things that make this place special. Another thing that makes this place unique (Brazil in general) are the men’s swimming trunks that are fashioned on the beach. Almost no Brazilian male goes swimming without them, sitting a little longer on the leg than Speedos, it allows men to tan their legs and is actually really not all that bad if you ask me! Of course it goes without saying, the Brazilian bikini is sported by many, girls doing all sorts of activities in them from jogging on the beach to beach volleyball and lying with tanning oil under the blazing sun.
a coninuar...
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