Christmas on the beach
For a 24 hour bus ride, it really was not all that bad. The bus stopped every few hours, where we could buy food (I’ve become addicted to salgados mistos, which just means mixed snacks…really, they’re just ham and cheese sandwiches, croissants, or the like…) The bathrooms along the way were also quite impressive – surprisingly clean, and always with toilet paper. Yay! Despite that, though, I did witness one little girl squat down and pee on the ground while no one did anything about it as people proceeded to walk in it. Lovely.
The bus actually took us to a small ton called Camamu, from where we took a ferry over to Barra Grande and found ourselves a pousada to stay. By the time we got there, it was something like 8:30 the next night and we had been traveling for about 30 hours, so we didn’t do much except sleep. The next day, we went to the beach and walked. And we just kept walking….probably for a good 2, 2 1/2 hours, when we came upon a rather large crowd of people, so we sat down and joined them. Apparently we had found the beach of Taipu, which was highly recommended to us. It was a very beautiful beach, probably the most beautiful beach I’ve ever been to – clean, white sand extending in either direction forever, clear water, palm trees lining the back fringe of the beach, and no one trying to sell you stuff or threatening to steal your bags. It was great. And the sun! Man was it hot. This was the closest I’d ever been to the equator, and while it wasn’t too bad in the shade, the sun was unrelentless, which is probably why we spent a good while in the water, just swimming around for a bit and renting snorkling equipment to check out the reef.
After a long day in the sun and a long walk back, we headed out for some food on this cute little island (it’s actually not an island, but rather like a little peninsula, but it felt like an island, so let’s just pretend it’s an island). The streets here are made of sand, and there are few cars (really only larger truck-type vehicles for transporting tourists to the beach). Walking around barefoot is fairly common, and I took to this quickly.
We stumbled upon a really great restuarant that night and I had probably one of the best meals of my entire trip – a shrimp stew of some sort, served in a pumpkin, with a side of rice and mashed potatoes. Yes, rice and mashed potatoes, which we thought was a little overkill on the carbs. And they give you so much food! That’s one thing about Brazil – they give you more food than you ever could eat. Most of the time, meals are made for 2 people, so in this case, it really helps to be traveling with someone else, to cut down those costs…often times they’ll charge you 60% of the price to make the food for one person, if they’ll even do it at all. A lot of times we just order food for one person, which tends to be more than enough for the two of us; they really serve so much.
We made friends with the waiter that night, despite our horrible Portuguese; he spoke English but refused to, which probably ended up helping us in the end. Vanessa whipped out her Portuguese phrasebook, striking up conversation with gems like, What do you do in your spare time?, the answer to which we understood nothing, of course, but he was friendly enough to oblige us. After a few capirinhas (the local drink, made with ice, lime, and sugar, all crushed together, added to a good helping of cachaça, liquor made from sugar cane), the restaurant was closing and we headed out to another bar, conveniently located right next door to our pousada. That night I made marked improvement in my Portuguese…with a slight lubrication of a little alcohol, I was speaking Portuguese like a native; I surprised even myself. I met a lot of the locals, who aren’t really locals, but a bunch of 20-somethings from Belo Horizonte (the third largest city in Brazil), who just come to this little place to work for the summer, save money (they all work 7 days a week), and have a good time. I also got to play some sort of weird version of pool, where all the balls are solid colored and, well the rules were all weird and I lost.
We spent the next few days doing nothing…laying on the beach, laying in the hammock, that sort of nothing. On Christmas Eve, we decided to treat ourselves to a nice dinner of lobster, at a little less than $15 a pop. Unfortunately, it was quite disappointing, a little on the dry side, and not quite what we were looking for, but we didn´t lose that much on the deal. While we sat there, enjoying a few beers, we were joined by a few self-proclaimed hippies who I had noticed in the square selling jewelry. One of them was just completely insane, who would make weird faces and blurt out weird sorts of noises; the other one was a little more interesting, who seemed genuinely interested in talking with us just for knowledge (although he had a hard time spelling out the word in portuguese so I could look it up in the dictionary).
After dinner, we headed down to one of the bars on the beach, where they had live forró (pronounced fo-ho) music playing. It had a sort-of reggae beat with a zydeco sound (due to the accordian) to it. It seemed like almost everyone on the island was at the bar that night – it was packed. Vanessa’s hippie friend made her a little copper wire ring as a Christmas present, and my little hippie friend gave me a shell necklace as a Christmas present, so we did not go without this year. However, they did get a little annoying after a little while, particularly Vanessa´s buddy who donned her with another present of a hair wrap, much against her will.
Christmas day on the island was pretty dead…it just seemed like any other day. There were no decorations, no music, nothing. Shops were open just like normal (which, at a tourist place, I suppose is necessary, though I would like to note Vanessa and I may have been the only non-Brazilian tourists there). We spent most of the day laying around, on the hammocks, on the beach, and went back to our favorite restaurant to get our favorite meal once again (all the other meals were continuously disappointint).
I was kind of tired, and wanted a nice strong drink, so I ordered a vodka martini, although I did ask how it was made (knowing I would never get a shaken dirty martini like I really wanted). Well, supposedly it was just poured over ice, which would do. When I got it, it tasted like it was made with sweet vermouth, and there was way too much of it, so much that it had a slight brown color. So, next time I ordered the same with less vermouth (or martini, as they called it). Well, this time it tasted the same, and was the same color, there was just less in the glass. Finally I realized that maybe I was just drinking ‘martini’, without vodka. I asked and confirmed this; furthermore, he wouldn’t let me have any vodka in the drink “because it would be horrible”. So, I just switched to caipirinhas, which I knew he knew how to make I spent the rest of Christmas night drinking caipirinhas, listening to some acoustic live MPB (Brazilian popular music – a very general term for music made in Brazil), writing in my journal. And that was Christmas.
Tags: Brazil, Tag Index
Tania
January 16th, 2006 at 5:36 pm
Well, Merry Christmas and Happy New Years! I’d say it in Portuguese, but that seems like a lost cause. I just caught up on all the journel entries, and will write you a separate email. This is the first of many comments to come.