BootsnAll Travel Network



Chicken Sun

11 July 2005 (Monday) – 12 July 2005 (Tuesday) – Porto de Galinhas, Brazil

Katharina’s family has an apartment in the nearby resort town of Porto de Galinhas. We headed out there with her mother late Monday afternoon to stay overnight.

Katha had asked me if I had a bikini with me. Well, yes, I do… but I do not deserve to be on the beach in my bikini as my legs are an absolute disgrace now, with all the bites and the scars! I was still itching away, and forgetting about the old wives’ tales, I recounted all my bites – 45 on my left leg and 38 on my right. I never had so many bites in my life! Katha was shocked as well, “And you don’t even have long legs!!”

Porto de Galinhas means Port of Chickens. Why chickens? Well, back in the 1880s, after slavery was banned, the bad bad plantation owners of this region still imported Africans from West Africa. But of course, they could not go out right and call them ‘slaves’ now. They used a codeword – ‘chickens’ to pass the message on that a shipment of slaves had arrived. This place was the port where the ‘chickens’ were imported.

Now, everywhere around the touristy little town are statues of chickens carved out of tree trunks. This is the typical Brazilian kitsch so fancied by the Brazilian Tourism Board. For example, the roundish, blue Telemar telephone booths found all over the country are sometimes transformed into certain symbols typical of the region. In Salvador, there are coconut and berimbau telephone booths. In Pantanal, there are macaw and cayman telephone booths. In Olinda, there are umbrella telephone booths (one of their traditional dances involved umbrellas). And here in Porto de Galinhas, there are chicken telephone booths.

But I found the chicken statues very, very cute indeed as they reminded me of the amusing-looking chickens in the movie – Chicken Run. A few were in bikini, others dressed like tourists with cameras and sunglasses, one was in her hair curlers, another was dressed like the Samba Goddess Carmen Miranda – she, with the fruit basket on her head… all very funny-looking.

The beach resort town is also famous for the natural swimming pools formed by corals and rocks near the beach which at low-tide, one could head out there for little swims or to feed the fishes in the various swimming pools.

You could either go to the pools in a jangada. This is a flat boat (almost looking like a raft) with a sail with some benches set on them. Tourists pay about R8 for the jangada guy to navigate them out to the swimming pools.

Katharina told me we could walk out there on a low-tide. But today’s low-tide was not so low, and so, we swam out there across the gentle sea. At times, Katha was able to reach the ground below and told me it was OK to walk now. But my short legs did not allow that and I choked on salty water when I tried to touch the ground. Yuck.

The water was rather murky, so we could not see the fishes properly, but she told me in some days, the water was absolutely clear and pristine and you could see many fishes trapped in the pool. We found a spot to sit on the corals, careful to avoid the spiny sea-urchins and chatted for quite a long while under the sun, until we were all pink.

By evening, we headed back to Recife. I thought that was a very nice little trip.



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