Brazil is not a place. It is a state of mind.
Stepping into that daydream is a whole new experience. Nothing prepares you for the sheer fecundity of that country and by this I mean particularly the city and the jungle, which in Brazil are pretty much one in the same. I met more plainly nice people in a shorter space of time there than in any other place I have traveled. Brazil, despite the craziness or maybe because of it, is a godsend. If I could only learn to samba . . .
Jungle Fervor
by William Roderick Richardson
My mental journey to Brazil began at the Cannes Film Festival 2000. It was there that I met an American professional football player called Ryan Black from Colorado. We were sitting by the pool on a beautiful hot day when he started telling me an amazing story that captured my imagination. It was a story of Brazil, but more specifically the Amazon. “It’s an incredible place, man. It’s like no place you have ever been. Everything’s different. And the women . . .” His enthusiasm infected me right then and there. Then he started to tell me about a fruit that I had never heard to before. The fruit is called açaí, pronounced ah-sigh-ee. It grows on the tops of slender palm trees, sixty-feet tall, which grow in the Amazon delta. Ryan was crazy about this fruit. You could see it in his eyes. The fruit has amazing, almost magical, properties, he told me. Certainly intriguing. “It’s a superfruit. The Indians call it the ‘Wine of the Amazon’ and the tree it grows on is named, the “Tree of Life’,” he said.
At first I thought he was pulling my leg. It didn’t seem possible that all this Amazon mumbo-jumbo could be true. I thought Ryan had smoked a little too much homegrown weed. He had gone native. “Ha,” I scoffed. That could never happen to me. There, in Cannes, Brazil just seemed a nutty fantasy cooked up by this very nice guy called Ryan whom I hardly knew. Poor guy. He had been out in the sun too long. You know how surfers are. A bit eccentric, unlike the guerilla traveler who is of course your basic normal . . . what I am talking about? Hell, Brazil sounded absolutely perfect for me. Sooner than I knew I would be wrestling crocodiles and native girls and finding out first hand the truth about this amazing fruit. Because basically, if it could give me the buzz it apparently gave Ryan with no nasty hangover effects, I was definitely interested. I hate to miss a good party, especially when it involves a whole country.
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Nine months later. We arrived in Sao Paulo in the middle of their summer – the first week of February. The outskirts of Sao Paulo are a train wreck. It looks like it was modeled on the famous third world city of Newark, New Jersey. It is also surprising. Sao Paulo is hilly. You don’t expect those hills. At least I didn’t. I expected a flat metropolis set out on a plain like Mexico City. What didn’t surprise me is that it is dangerous. Ryan advised me not to walk in the streets. There are nearly twenty million people in Sao Paulo, and apparently too many of them are maniacs. It was the first time I’d been in a city where walking, that most innocent of pastimes, was forbidden. Usually I love to set out on foot to explore or at least go for a run. Not here. I was tempted to go for a walk
anyway just to see what would happen. Running from muggers always adds spice to a story.
That night we went to a club called The Clock (I think), somewhere downtown. It was packed. You could hardly move. And everywhere the women, the beautiful Brazilian dancing women . . . even a tremendous jet-lag hangover couldn’t stop our enjoyment. In fact the jet-lag—we had flown in from Los Angeles via Miami-- added to an enjoyable yet total sense of disorientation. In LA We had also been jabbed against various tropical diseases and I was feeling a light touch of malaria or something brought on by the shots. Who cares? Here we were on the underside of the world in a vast city, an urban jungle with massive slums whose magnitude is beyond description. This was Latin America right in your face. The beer flowed. The faces glowed in the strobe lights. We were already buried in the heart of a strange continent. I don’t know how long it would take to get to know the environs or Sao Paulo well. The city seemed neverending.
Later that night we ended up emptying a liquor cabinet and smoking some excellent grass in a high rise luxury apartment overlooking the city. Our host, an advertising executive named, Gilberto, did his best to make us feel at home. We drank a bottle of whisky between us. Ryan doesn’t drink much except beer. A lot of surfers prefer marijuana to alcohol. To each his own.
I began to wish we had a couple more days here to explore Sao Paolo, but we had to hit the road the next morning. . . because we were headed to paradise.
Imagine the Pitcairn of the Atlantic. A friendlier St. Helena. If Napoleon had been a surfer or scuba diver, he might have enjoyed an exile here. There is nothing to do here but relax. Life just doesn’t get any better. No TV. No radio. No modern distractions. Fernando di Noronha is a tiny archipelago of twenty-one islands with a population of only 1800 about 525 kilometers out in the Atlantic, due east of the port city of Recife. From the air the main island looks like a vast mountain jutting out of the ocean. And that is in fact what it is, a huge volcano 321 meters above sea level at it’s highest point and 4300 meters above the ocean floor. The interior is lush with a collection of twenty-six wonderful beaches, all of them virtually deserted. You can swim with turtles at Baia do Sueste, but you can’t swim with the dolphins at Baia dos Golfinhos (Dolphin Bay), unless you want your stay to be terminated with deportation at the hands of some intensely focused, armed park rangers.
The Brazilian government is serious about conservation here. As a result, there are some common sense guidelines provided:
Don’t dump rubbish or food on the ground, in the sea or on the beach.
Don’t remove coral, shells or marine creatures.
Don’t use spear guns or traps.
Don’t take any plants or animals to or from the archipelago. Don’t swim with the dolphins.
Don’t hunt underwater.
All this seemed fair enough. I had no intention of hunting underwater, for instance. Besides I doubted a shotgun would work at ten fathoms. Dynamite maybe. Anyhow, spear guns are for girls. What was fairly annoying was the island tax you have to pay. The state government imposes a daily tax of $13 per day which is about the cost of a room. Two weeks cost $240 and a month is $1300. A long stay here is definitely not for everyone. Which is exactly the point.
We spent five days there “adapting” to the climate of Brazil. The rainy season, which runs from February to June, had begun, a merciful punctuation in the incredibly hot and humid days. You crave air conditioning. Everything is wet. There is no point in even attempting to wear normal clothes. A bathing suit and flip flops are all that you can bear. . . and a towel to drape round your shoulders when the sun burn starts to kick in. That’s the thing about being near the Equator. The sun is intense even when it is overcast. You are burned red as a crab in no time flat, especially if you have just arrived from a rainy or snow-blown winter. Ryan is a surfer. We spent long days on the beach. He surfed while I lolled about on the sand, occasionally sprinting into the ocean where I would swim out among the surfers and body surf back to the beach on the huge waves. It was splendid. The water was warm and crystal clear, so you could actually see the sharks pretty easily when they came at you . . . just kidding. For transportation we had a curious sort of dune buggy, which burped and farted like a dyspeptic warthog. That’s the main form of transportation on the island, these crazy buggies with suspensions like WWII Jeeps. . . In the evening we met other surfers and drank coconut drinks in small bars on main street. It was better than a health spa, especially for my wintertime brain. It was there that Ryan introduced me-- finally --to that peculiar life-giving Amazonian palm fruit called “acai.” The suspense had been killing me. Acai is a cult food in Brazil and is becoming so across the US now, thanks to Ryan. Kelly Slater, the Michael Jordan of surfing and former Baywatch star calls acai his favorite food. Harrison Ford eats it everyday. Dennis Richards foams at the mouth over acai. It gives Bo Derek an orgasm and so forth. Even the NBC Today Show ran a short piece recently about it (for more information see the website www.sambazon.com).
What is acai? It is purple and viscous and grainy and served blended with bananas and ice and guarana syrup and plopped in a bowl topped with granola. But Brazilians put it in everything from ice cream to fish sauces. Indeed the Amazon Indians virtually live on this formidable and nutritious staple. The guarana really makes it work. I don’t know how, but Brazilian athletes swear by it. The jujitsu people especially give acai a mystical connotation and the Brazilian jujitsu artists are known to be the best in the world. I suggest we don’t challenge them on the point. I got hooked immediately of course. It gives you a curious high this acai. It is hard to describe—some chemical reaction with the guarana, which contains loads of caffeine, except you don’t get the jitters, just an amazing amount of energy. It is a true buzz. No wonder Ryan wanted to sell this stuff in the US. It was apparent from the start he was onto something. A new drug for the starving American masses. It was sure to piss off the Food and Drug Administration which is responsible for investigating new products in the US. I can see them now.
FDA guy 1: “Hey this stuff makes you feel great with no chemical additives.”
FDA guy 2: “There must be something wrong with it.”
FDA guy 1: “We better shut ‘em down. This stuff is better than marijuana. Could cause a revolution.”
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Then we were in Belem, the main port of the Amazon, 1500 miles from that island paradise. This was a horse of a different color. In fact this was a lot of horses of a lot of different colors. And they all seemed to be free to roam the streets without a care in the world, dodging cars, hanging out on street corners, and generally making a nuisance of themselves. There is something about seeing ponies cavorting about on a city street that is unnerving and at the same time pleasing. It suggests chaos. It suggests a general, who gives a shit attitude. It suggests weirdness. Who did these ponies belong to? Was their some bizarre religious connection? The cult of the mangy horse? Who knew? But on the way to the hotel from the airport I counted at least half a dozen of these devil-may-care beasts enjoying the “freedom of the city.” Belem is a hive of activity—an elegant 18th century downtown wedged against the Amazon by dilapidated urban tenements of compelling proportion, if not nearly as intimidating as the slum mountains of Rio. It is all very confusing at first. It takes some getting used to. Here on the edge of the largest jungle in the world is another city where Ryan told me not to walk the streets, unless we were downtown. At first glance, the Novotel sucks. It’s set smack in the middle of the seediest dockside area imaginable. It was certainly nothing to write home about. I was disappointed, but I tried not to show it. We walked into the strictly eastern European-style hotel lobby. Ryan looked at me and said: “I know, but just wait a minute.” We checked in took the elevator up. The Hallway looked like Orbis circa 1975. This was a Novotel? I couldn’t believe it. At least we had cable. I was ready to veg out in front of the tube with some beer and potato chips and catch some Brazilian tube.
Ten minutes later we were going through the doors skirting a good sized patio and swimming pool, crossing a wooden bridge to an amazing restaurant built on stilts in the open air over the Amazon River itself. “Well, what do you think now?” Ryan asked. “I think I am going to like this hotel.” “Wait until you taste the food.” The food was wonderful: fish straight from the river, fruit like none you have ever tasted and direct from the jungle as well as an assortment of white rice (arroz), black beans (feijao) and manioc flour (farofel) and vegetables that make your mouth water. The beans are cooked with bacon, the white rice is thick and starchy, the farofel, once you get used to it, is also tasty, especially mixed with the beans. The fish is fried lightly and is tender and delectable. You will not go hungry in Brazil.
And there on the restaurant deck, on the wall before you, is a huge mural depicting a cheerful native holding a basket of açaí. Belem is the center of acai-worship. There legend is that the first acai palm sprang from the grave of an Indian princess. The food here is extraordinary. The fish comes straight from the river. Drinks made from fruits like cupuacu, graviola, acerola and caju are wonderful. They have their own Brazilian version of Baskin and Robbins with fifty flavors all made from Amazon fruits you most likely have never tasted before. The names alone taste good.
There was very little fun to be had at the hotel beyond eating. It was virtually deserted. Most foreigners head for the Belem Hilton, which costs about three times as much but has the advantage of being located on the city’s main street, a stone’s throw from the riverfront walk. The drive from the dockyards near the Novotel to the center was again punctuated with arresting sights. The streets are lined with colorful ramshackle buildings. The roadway hums with activity -- an overflowing sea of the walking, the wandering and the loitering maintaining a spiritual samba. Bathtubs in the street, legless men on rollers, sauntering young women, boys kicking soccer balls, the whole gamut of entertainment among the poor. It was oppressive and eye-rubbingly absorbing. It smelled too, like dirty clothes on a hot bus with the windows rolled up.
And there’s more: the gringo is a marked man here, especially if you are fair-haired. The women, especially the young girls, stop and look. They can’t believe you are real. The constant pointing and staring makes you feel strange, even exalted or more often as if you left your fly undone. It’s an odd feeling being treated like a movie star for no good reason. But then again, most show biz personalities, especially TV heads, are treated like stars for no good reason. We had a good time out on the town flirting with girls in the Bar do Parque. We put on our best Indiana Jones charm. We were after big game, that is, big fruit. Nothing would stop us in our mission to deliver a better buzz to the American public. As such we were kind of stars. We were not the usual oil executives pumping crude from the sea for foreign exploitation. “What are you doing here in Belem?” asked one fair-haired beauty, the obvious scion of a family of
slave-traders.
“We are here to bring acai to America,” said Ryan.
“Where are you from?”
“California,” said Ryan. The golden word.
“Oh, California,” the girl’s eyes grew big.
“Beautiful.”
Unless you are trapped on the freeway at six PM, yes, but leave that aside. We were exotic guerilla travelers bringing Brazilian jungle products to the white man. I tried to look like Harrison Ford. Her friends, a gang of lovely ladies including a general’s and a local judge’s daughter joined us. If we played our cards right we would have both legal and military protection, something of use for the intrepid jungle explorer. We were doing all right and it was only our first night. The next morning broke with rain. Belem is the rainiest city on the face of the earth. There is no dry season. From December to June it rains very hard everyday at least once. The torrent is often a welcome relief from the heat. Locals apparently often arrange their meetings as such: “I will meet you tomorrow in such and such place after the rain stops. . . At dawn on the river all is quiet, and then just as the sun comes up the birds start the loudest racket you have ever heard. It’s a cacophony: a savage dawn chorus echoing from the edge of darkness. The canoe splits the water. The jungle sinks in on you. Pretty soon we are edging up to a village. The Indians greet us. They, like the birds, rise with the sun. Later we are watching a skinny kid climbing up a tall acai palm. He is bringing home the bread for his family. Acai is the richest cash crop in the Amazon. The natives not only eat it, in all manner of delicious forms but they sell it at market, earning as much as $5,000 a year – a huge sum in the Amazon. We follow another canoe upriver. It has been a long day.
It begins to rain.
The next day we flew into the interior of the jungle. Below great swaths of jungle were being obliterated by strip farming. Smoke rose. Our twin-engine Cessna set down on a dirt air-strip about 300 kilometers from Belem. We had come to see the good people of the cooperative, a Japanese farming community set up in the 1920s and run since then as a fruit export firm. They process mostly fruit in their factory and send it to Japan and across the world. Ryan made an export deal with them and we had a tour of the small town, stopping off at the museum for a look at the history of the Japanese in this remote part of the world. The next day Carnaval began. We moved to the Belem Hilton, which had a special rate for the weekend. It was something. That Friday night there was a party in the hotel for all the local bigwigs including the mayor of Belem and all the local stars. We managed to sneak into the party, two gringos in a sea of Brazilians. We were soon picked up by a couple of dusky sisters called Dana and Patricia, real beauties, who insisted on including us in the festivities with their family at their table as if we were long lost relatives. We danced and drank until the sun came up and then toured some of the discos with the sisters and their friend, a transvestite, who kept trying to pinch our asses. They like their travestites in Brazil. They have a special place in the culture.
Don’t ask me why it is, but no Carnaval is complete with tons of mincing men in women’s clothes, some of them tall enough to play in the NBA. The next day we spent down by the river near the vast estuary, sunbathing and drinking caipirissima, a mixture of rum, lime, sugar and crushed ice. This is a dangerous drug. I got so looped on six of them that I forgot my shoes by the river. We went swimming (the piranha was in the back of my mind the whole time) and a little boy laughed at our white bodies and hairy chests giggling uncontrollably and calling me and Ryan, “Bears!” Patricia said: “What do you expect. He probably never saw a white man in person before.” The Amazon is huge here like some hihgly improbable gigantic inland sea more than a river. You cannot see across the mouth the river here. At least I couldn’t that day. The water is warm and there are even little waves.
Feeling the call of nature, I relieved myself in the water, and then flashed panic when I suddenly remembered the invisible parasites which live in the river and supposedly can swim into your penis while you are micturating, causing you more pain than a divorce for an even longer period of time. Thankfully, the little beggars must have been on holiday because my equipment remained happily intact.
On the way back to Belem we stopped at a little jungle café and enjoyed acai freshly ground into a purple paste. It tasted blander than at Fernanda di Norohna. In the jungle they eat their acai straight with only a sprinkling of sugar, no granola, no raisins, no ice. It still hit the spot.
The most dangerous activity in Belem, apart from dancing with a transvestite in a disco, is the Mercado Ver-o-Peso, the main market, which extends for several blocks along the water front, operating all day everyday. It smells bad, like someone forgot to flush to toilet for several days, but the fruit, fish, animals, vegetables and plants are fresh as can be. The most striking thing, apart from the general atmosphere of having stumbled into a den of pirates, was the mura fish, which is as big as a Great Dane and a lot tastier, they say. There was also the usual macumba paraphernalia on sale: potions guaranteed to give you an erection for days, amulets to ward off your wife’s family, incense to counter the “evil eye” and necklaces which provide a connection to the spirit world.
Black Magic is as important here as voodoo is in Haiti. Witch doctors are as normal a part of the jungle community as pythons. The leading religious cult is called Candomble, brought by slaves from West Africa. In Rio the cult is called Macumbo. If you go to one of these ceremonies, wear white clothes, no black, purple or brown and a hat. Do not wear shorts. It sounds a lot like voodoo to me. At any rate the gods are rapacious bi-sexuals, who are especially open to homosexuality, which probably explains the reverence accorded to transvestites during Carnaval, which is after all nothing more than one big black magic fiesta.
The next night was the big parade. We went down to the center of Belem where the whole Carnaval passed, lit by what must have been all the electricity in the remote vicinity. It was almost like daylight. Everyone knows what Carnaval looks like from TV, but what they don’t know is what it feels like. There on the street, not in the calm reviewing stands, Carnaval has all the ingredients of the biggest riot you have ever attended. The noise and crash of the people around you is intense. Pickpockets are plentiful. Teenage ruffians with bad attitudes looking for trouble give you the real evil eye, which says: “Hey white boy, what are you doing on our turf?” I was less uncomfortable on the street during the last great Brixton riot in London. Patricia seemed oblivious to it all, holding me by the arm and negotiating the crowd like a princess. In fact she had been herself a Carnaval Queen some years before. I saw the pictures of her outfit and she looked strictly from another strata, as proud and curvaceous as Venus herself. In fact, being the daughter of a rich jewel importer she was as close as it comes to being a queen in this part of the world.
Suffice to say, we survived the perils of one of the world’s most famous celebrations. Memorable to say the least. The next day, Ryan’s acai was bought and paid for, and we flew to Rio to spend a relaxing post-Carnaval three days at Angra dos Reis, three hours by car from Rio and the place about which Amerigo Vespucci said: “Good Lord, if there were a paradise on earth, it wouldn’t be very far from here.”
Angra is a paradise. It is as far removed from the masses of the Amazon or Sao Paolo as you can imagine. Here the rich from Rio and Sao bask in the sun, owning little islands adorned with haciendas and puttering about on motor yachts which cost more than mansions.
It was quite a culture shock and it is “savagely beautiful,” just as my guide book said. The main town of the area is called Parati. The jungle-covered mountains spring from the sea. The water is calm and clear as a Swiss Lake, but warm and comfortable. We checked into our hotel and went to the seaside to have a drink and waste time with the idle rich. We were after-all, businessmen ourselves, big-time American importers of acai and aficionados of Brazilian culture. The main burning question, apart from my red sun-stricken nose, was: how do we meet a nice young lady or two with a yacht. “It should be like shooting fish in a bowl,” I said to Ryan. In fact sure enough after an hour or two drinking caipirinhas, which are an art form in themselves, made of strong sugar cane alcohol, lime, sugar and crushed ice, I spotted a couple of attractive young ladies. Soon I introduced myself and Ryan. Ryan looks like the All American hero so most women take to him like ducks to water. The girls were called Carla and Maria. And they were cousins. To cut a long story short we spent the next two hours talking to them and drinking. Carla was stoned. She doesn’t drink. Maria had a few beers. We hit it off perfectly well. In fact, as luck would have it, Carla’s father was a big-time industrialist, who just happened to have a big-time industrialist’s boat moored nearby. I will let you guess how we spent the next three days. Paradise indeed. But we took our leave for one evening as Ryan had organized for us to meet two of his friends from Sao at a famous club on one of the islands in the bay. You can only get there by boat-bus so we squeezed aboard and took off. Yes, this was the high life.
The disco itself is about the nicest I have ever seen, a combination beach house and bar on many different levels with various docks for strolling and being romantic. Again we were gringos in Paradise. Girls eyed us like commodities, especially Ryan who was soon dancing with several at once. As for me I hung out at the bar. Suddenly I was approached by two inexplicably shy girls. One of them, obviously very high or something said to me: “Excuse me, I hate to bother you, but I know who you are.” Considering my own personality conflicts and the nature of black magic in Brazil I wondered if she were a witch trying to fathom my innermost mysteries.
“You do?” I asked.
“Yes, you are Sting, aren’t you?”
I started to laugh. Roxanne is definitely out of my range. I thought: it’s true all of us white people look the same. “He’s my brother. He learned everything he knows from me,” I said.
That seemed to satisfy them. A brush with stardom. They smiled. Yes, Brazil may be only rock n’ roll, but I like it.