Departure from Porto Alegre - one of those places with no 'sights' as such, yet which sticks in the mind for reasons unknown - but the show goes on, and after checking out the cute dark receptionist one more time and then checking out of the cool Hotel Continental I did a tour of the block before the bus pulled out at 08.45.
The streets were full of rubble, smashed kerbs, open sewers, huge cracked indents in the tarmac, and the area chock full of engineering workshops, car mechanics and petrol pumps, and more potholes and puddles and dangling electric cable and on one corner under a store's awning stood a well-loaded, as in hefty, young lady in yellow hot-pants and vest top. As I tripped and stumbled by, she flashed me a big smile alongside her assets, built like coconuts just off the tree, and I couldn't help but notice that written across them in English were the inexplicable words 'Yorkshire Trendy'. I gave her an 'ola' and she gave me a big round one back, flicking her top teeth with her tongue as a finale. It was about seven thirty in the morning.
Before long the bus was heading towards the beach 300km north at Florianopolis, apparently 'the new Rio de Janeiro' but much safer.
I was giving Rio a miss because I hear it's now full of wild packs of crackhead street urchins, an epidemic plaguing the entire country, as crack is so easily produced by putting cocaine in the microwave and ten times more dangerous for your health. Close proximity to the world's coca centres in Bolivia and Peru helps too.
"Rio's dodgy" was the gist of what a Brazilian bar manager told me as he cut off a large lump of weed from a block out of Paraguay at his plastic kitchen table in a scruffy breeze-block apartment next to the beach. Rio can also be very expensive, in a sprawling mass of humanity where garbage goes uncollected and sewers often flood, and it was raining there too and these days I can't run fast, if at all.
On a half-empty bus (passenger trains barely operate any longer in Latin America ) we were accompanied by dense cloud all the way along the coast and the landscape was becoming jungly with thick foliage matting low hills, wrapping around telegraph poles and climbing over squat buildings next to the highway, then on towards the concrete jungle on the island of Santa Catarina where there are waves that attract surfers from all over the world and a nightlife that attracts DJs from all over the world as well as Brazil's rich and famous who have holiday apartments in posh high-rise blocks in the Centro quarter of Florianopolis which by day is clogged with huge vehicles screwing the atmosphere, annoying all and sundry and immediately destroying the imagined idyll of palm trees, coconuts and white sand on sultry beaches ... and it was raining ... and still is.
I could but didn't really want to.
"So not much different from New Jersey, eh?"
He got the joke and bent over double in cackles of laughter then almost coughed til he dropped on the cigarette that he was sucking rather than smoking.
"Were you working here then?"
"Yeah man. I had to come to work all neat and tidy when I'd spent the night kicking vermin off my bed. I never had no vermin in my bed in New Jersey man."
He'd soon got out and had a half-decent place by then, but most ghettoistas never leave the favela.
Just behind the swish seafront began the shanty shacks piled high on top of one another, right next to the Porsche showrooms, fancy restaurants and international schools, snaking up hillsides criss-crossed by webs and nests of makeshift electrical wiring. The police don't go in there, not necessarily out of fear, more to do with the fact that that they have no jurisdiction in areas outside the civic area, which is where these illegal, unofficial settlements are located, so there are no government schools either nor clinics nor ambulances, and likewise the sanitation and electricity departments don't enter a favela either as it's not in their jurisdiction and this explains how the gangs take-over and rule with the gun, and why you can pick up an automatic weapon for $200 in the corner shop because 200 big ones to the ghetto boy is a serious amount of dough, won only by the best gun.
The buildings in the photos below are in the hoity-toity part of town where the hotel is located, and in the evening the streets were incredibly quiet, the rich tucked up in bed, or off in the bigger cities where they worked. Heavy duty police vehicles were on patrol, shooing away any vagrants or favela dwellers and as I wandered up to the pizza place I barely passed another soul other than smartly attired security guards smoking outside gated entrances.
The pizza place was posh too. As I walked in, a young boy walked out singing a soft lullaby, and when I sat down, a large family at a long candlelit table broke out into Happy Birthday and a white and red cake arrived decorated with strawberries and later was the first time I'd ever paid $20 for a bit of baked bread with tuna and onion. I couldn't finish it either and took a carry-out, spotting another waiter filch my tip from the wallet on the table.
As I smoked outside, a guy's shady countenance peered at me from behind a tree and whispered, "Becky? Coke?"
"Neither, thanks bud. But ..." and, taking a hint from mad old ladies I'd met in Montevideo, added "... you have the pizza."