the Astral Travelling Surfers
I arrived in Floripa in torrential rain, it was 9 degrees celcius outside, I was alone and didn’t speak the language. Sounds horrible, but I was so excited to be back here that it overshadowed everything. I was greeted at the bus station by a man called Adão, “A what?” I said. “Adão” he replied. The “ão” sound in portuguese was so foreign to me at that stage, it sounds like nothing in English. It sounds like you are saying “owng” through a very blocked nose. Anyway, Ads wanted to find me some accomodation in Floripa. Now, I reckoned I wanted to stay down on the beach for a month and get some portuguese going before I went anywhere else. It was hardly beach weather though. Ads found me a place right on the beach and I signed up for 4 days just to start off.
After a few days in the rain I was wondering why on earth I wanted to stay here for a month. It clearly wasn’t even close to summer here yet and I was in one of the coldest parts of Brazil. Then one day I caught up with a lovely woman called Ananda who I know through friends in the Rebirthing Breathwork community. We had a great day out, I tried to learn some Portuguese but by the end of the day just ended up like Marcel Marceaux without all the cool makeup and hats. Spanish and Portuguese are different enough to be annoyingly similar, which makes the initial transition to Portuguese from Spanish a bit tricky, and being my impatient self I wasn’t having any of this “Just speak Spanish” talk, I wanted to speak Portuguese and I wanted to speak it now. We went to see a film in Portuguese and I asked Ananda whether there would be subtitles. She gace me a funny look “Why would there be subtitles on a Brasilian film being shown in Brasil”. Good point Ananda, it was a long bus trip.
After a great day out with Ananda, things were looking up for a good month here despite the weather. I grabbed a bus back to the beach and after about 5 minutes on the bus I had a feeling that I was on the wrong bus. I asked the bloke next to me in my best Portuguese “Am I on the bus for Barra da Lagoa”. “Yes” he replied in English. It turned out he had spent a year in New Zealand recently and spoke pretty good english. So me and my new friend, Eduardo got chatting about things. I asked him if he knew anyone who could teach me Portuguese and he said he did and that I should come back to his house so we could call his friend. That sounded like a very good plan.
At Eduardo’s house he asked me if I wanted to smoke a joint with him. I am not much of a smoker but I didn’t want to disappoint my hospitable new mate. Later on we called his Portuguese teacher friend to enquire about lessons. By that stage I was struggling with English let alone Portuguese and after a very confusing conversation I just decided that perhaps lessons could wait, at least until I was back on the planet anyway. Eduardo and I got talking further, he said “What do you do?”. I told him I was a healer and was travelling the world looking for places that are having great success healing people of Cancer, AIDS and everything. About 5 minutes and 3 dictionaries later, Eduardo understood what I was saying. He spoke good english but the word “healer” has a few translations in portuguese and can mean anything from medical doctor to witch doctor, a bit like in English really. When he finally understood what I meant, his eyes lit up. Seems that he was into this stuff too and told me him and his next door neighbour were Astral Travellers. I had met an astral travelling surfer.
We continued to talk about healing, astral travel and all things metaphysical and had a great time. A little later Eduardo showed me the website of an event that was coming up starting on the following Saturday in Alto Paraiso, Goias State, near Brasilia. The event was called the “Chamado da Beija Flor” (The call of the hummingbird) and was a 13 day festival for peace, ecology, healing, music, art and dance. When I saw the website I said “I’m going and your coming with me”. I just knew I had to go and somehow I knew Eduardo had to come too. But Ed had university exams so it wasn’t looking good.
Later on Eduardo’s neighbour and fellow astral travelling surfer Cristiano came over, suprisingly he simply walked through the front door, he even opened it first. We talked more about the festival and I told him he had to come too. I just knew these boys had to come with me. Cristiano said “Actually, we have been waiting for a sign that we should go, where the fuck did you come from you crazy Aussie. You are the sign”. It felt like I was in a cross between the Matrix and Point Break, then Keanu showed up. He didn’t really, but he bloody well should have, it wouldn’t have seemed out of place in the slightest. Perhaps it was just the pot. At that stage the boys gave me the nickname “Doidão” which means “very crazy man” in Portuguese. Apparently its an affectionate term but I wasn’t so sure. To add insult to injury, I couldn’t even pronounce my own nickname which sent my new friends into fits of laughter. They couldn’t believe that this bald Aussie had appeared from nowhere and was dragging them half way across the country to attend a peace festival and now couldn’t even pronounce his own nickname.
It was truly bizarre for me but for them it bordered on ridiculous.
Ed worked out that he could probably go to the festival and not lose 6 months of University but would have to return early. It was exciting, these lovely blokes already felt like brothers and we are going to what looked like an amazing festival. Aline and Mariane two local girls who were keen to go joined us and the five of us were off on a 36 hour busride to Brasilia to attend the Chamado. After 28 hours on a bus days earlier the prospect of getting on another bus for 36 hours was far from appealing. But once again the excitement of adventure and the company of my fantastic new friends overshadowed everything.
