Colombians from New Jersey, huh?
In the event he did manage to fill a 32 seater and off we set, half an hour late, and drove for about 3 minutes before stopping down the road at the Mercado - an old dockside market building, today apparently Floripa's top tourist draw, and full of expensive restaurants selling burgers like Covent Garden in London does.
I'd already looked at it the previous day on my own and once was more than enough so I got a coconut milk in the shell and sat on a bollard to watch the world go by for 45 minutes when cloud cover broke and the Brazilian sun pounded down and a black bloke with a worse limp than me shuffled up, big smile, shook my hand and said, "Hey gringo! You come for surf?"
"No man ... I'm sampling your coconuts."
"Oh yeah?" he paused to run his eyes round the vicinity. "Want some Becky?"
With Becky stuffed in pocket our group of middle to late age latinos re-boarded the bus and off we went to a beach for 10 minutes then we got back on the bus and went off to another beach and it went on like this until lunchtime spent on another beach packed with sunbathers sitting around in big groups slurping beer from litre bottles - Brazilians love their beer - while a few brave souls waded slowly out into numbingly cold South Atlantic water.
Back on the bus a young lady with short red skirt politely asked if the seat next to me was vacant and so she sat and introduced herself as Julia from Medellin, Columbia, and a bio-engineer, down this way for a conference/junket spent on trips like this. She complained about the cold that I thought was hot and said that Medellin was much warmer and she squeezed my forearms with cool palms to demonstrate and then began to show me 1000s of photos of herself in pretty much the same pose, sometimes with arms held seductively above her head, at various sightseeing spots in southern Brazil. After one beach stop she spent the whole time until the next beach stop staring at the 100s of photos just taken.
Darkness fell as we left behind fantastic villas with pools and spotless Beverly Hills style boutiques and headed back to the big city and finally fell through the hotel doors to ring Jonjo's scrawny neck and later that evening when we smoked Becky by the Personal Hot Dog shop we chatted about Julia from Medellin.
"You'll have to get engaged."
"Eh?"
"A nice Colombian chick like that will want to get married?"
"What for?"
"For you to fuck her."