Sitting on a terrace bar outside Katharina's House in Foz, tackling a caipirinha, the world's strongest alcoholic drink, chit-chatting with the hyper boss, "sober for 15 years", whizzing around working, and two Hungarian chicas, leaving the next day for Sao Paulo where they worked as dancers in a city with a quarter of a million Hungarians emigres, and this song came on and is my favourite of the year (an award was offered but none of them bothered to come and pick it up from the ceremony held in the pub on Rumburk Station platform one summer's evening when Tonda Novak memorably puked up on the 00.22 express to Seiffhennersdorf, which he'd mistaken for the pub toilet) ... The website weather.com forecasts up to 10 days ahead and 10 days ahead of now in Florianopolis meant 10 more days of cloud and rain, no hint of the sun anywhere on the page - time to hit the road, Jack. Making my way to the bus depot, the idea of getting a ticket to Rio de Janeiro 800km north was still running through my mind: yet it was similarly rain-drenched and home to way more dodgy crackheads and desperados roaming around looking for el turisto Gringo ... and you pay for such entertainment with Rio prices more than doubling ... which meant that I bought a ticket 700km west instead to Foz da Iguacu one of Latin America's showcase natural sights on a 2.7km series of waterfalls (Foz) set in the Parana jungle on steamy river borders with Argentina and Paraguay. Not quite as pretty are the suburbs of Floripa, which took a while to get out of on an over-night bus travelling via the Parana state capital of Curitiba and scheduled to arrive at 8.30am in Foz. I got my head down; all that rain had worn me out. By late afternoon, heading inland, the sun appeared like a long lost friend and accompanied us past plots of circular trees, huge fields recently harvested of their wheat and barley grown on the famed and fertile red soil of this region, home to huge herds of cows and flocks of sheep munching on grass in lush pastures as condors soared above on thermals a mile high. Soybeans are one of the country's chief exports, along with iron ore, crude oil, sugar and poultry. We arrived as the day stirred into life and were let off at a sleepy bus station 8km from the falls and where I got steak and eggs for breakfast then a short walk to the sleepy main street which certainly had a cosy small town feel to it as I sat and slurped an edifying coconut milk as the Brazilians began bustling off to work in a boom-bust economy riddled with government corruption. Even President and lesbian with a wife Dilma Rousseff is under investigation. The advantages of using booking.com were all too apparent as I stood in the lobby of the Hotel Taroba and mulled over how easy it is to travel nowadays. Back in those barren times before internet, the global caravan of didicois had to make calls from grubby booths in dodgy stations where the phones often didn't work or were coated in gunk, weirdos in the shadows; or you had to tramp the streets looking for a half decent place within the budget; or buy a cheap ticket to the road; but nowadays you can do it all online, even get a look at the breakfast selection or the pot plant or the curtains in the room, before you've even got there. Are there tea making facilities? is a question of vital importance one simply must have the answer to, pre-trip. Experience tells me that the later you book it, the cheaper you get it with hotels wanting to fill as many beds as possible. So this one was only $35 with rooftop pool. Bag in room, brush remaining teeth, trunks dredged from pits of bag, while the sun has got his hat on! Other than a hefty happy-as-Larry black kid repeatedly doing back flips into the water, clambering breathlessly from the pool, splash everywhere, watched by his even heftier Dad who sat smiling and listening to soft salsa from his phone, the pool was empty and soothing after the bus trip, and from the roof I found views of Argentina and Ciudad del Este in Paraguay, about 5 kms distant, see below. Brazil doesn't even allow foreign boats to dock on their side of the rivers due to a high volume of smuggling, so I guess it goes by road, or by donkey through the jungle, and crosses the river on pitch black moonless nights ... or maybe they just fly it in. Later that day, as I sipped on a coconut, the 34th Battalion of the Mechanised Infantry of the Brazilian Army went roaring past, maybe in pursuit of an urban guerrilla or a wildman of the jungle or both. Back on Taroba Street I had this disarmingly deja vu moment opposite the hotel and found myself momentarily transported back to the Middle East, later learning that Foz contains a sizable Arab population mostly from Lebanon, Palestine and Syria, with a big mosque and kebab shops on the main drag, keeping to themselves in sober, gated communities, the men gathering outside restaurants in the evening to smoke hubbly-bubbly, chat and sip tea. Meanwhile, the Brazilians, proving to be huge fans of both football and beer, drink the evenings away outside 'cantinas' like the one above left. Men and women on separate tables, live soccer played endlessly out on TV screens hanging above. Dining saloons, like the one above right, are also common and serve up wholesome Brazilian nosh - ie. steak plus some other stuff - at good prices, arriving with cheeky quips from chirpy Afro-Brazilian waitresses. In one place, two of them roared with laughter at my attempts to speak their lingo, slapping each other playfully and mimicking my Portuguese. It's good to laugh ... ... and if I lived in Foz, this is definitely the club I'd join. Jamaican Mike gave me and a bike a lift along busy highways out of the city onto busy, much smaller, roads serving the island villages and resorts. Restaurants and hostels and bucket and spade stores were everywhere but so was the traffic. It wasn't exactly Robinson Crusoe and with almost constant rainfall - sometimes soft cloud, sometimes monsoon - I bought a massive see-through plastic Mackintosh and pedaled around the potholes and puddles in the popular seaside village of Barra da Lagoa, which was downcast and empty of tourists and looked very ghetto in these conditions. Too much water soon fills up the sewers and then the sewage over-spills into the streets and out comes the stench and the rats ... it's never pretty. The fishing industry carried on regardless and these boats have to navigate this tricky exit and entrance to the harbour, the heads of two surfers visible in the open water beyond where sharks can lurk, waiting to pluck what they think are seals off the surfboards. Screw that for a sport. The Jaws theme tune still makes me jump. And for all parents out there: that film should NOT be shown to children. I've lived with shark-phobia ever since seeing it at Sevenoaks cinema back in the 70s.. For $40 a night I'd booked a condominium, which reeked of disinfectant, mainly as it had a pool which I never dipped even a toe into and in the evenings I'd trudge down to the hot dog place where women with bright red bows in their hair served up a big one with onions and mustard then across the road to the liquor store where the jovial owner served me red wine from Argentina and I drank a bottle each evening with a supply of Becky at hand, rain drumming relentlessly onto a corrugated roof, and at one point during a rear garden piss into the undergrowth on the jungle's fringe, I swear I looked up and through the foliage saw a man blacked-up with shoe polish, wearing a bowler hat and pointing at me with a smile. Daylight brought out the most annoying bird I've ever heard, plus more rain. On the final day I was down on the beach photographing surfers in surreal light when a group of children came slowly crocodiling out of the low cloud and sea spray (see below). Surf was up and so were the kids on a beach trip, getting a good dose of ozone.. Soft drizzle fell on the beach for weeks while other parts of the region were flooded and dams were breaking up and mines were collapsing and mudslides were wiping out villages, mixing highly toxic substances into the rivers and streams and water cycle ... but that didn't stop the surfers because bad weather brought wind and wind brings surf and surfers can spend the whole day out there ...
Jesus wept. I'm telling you, in a former life as a tour manager, if I had taken a group of tourists on a bus tour of Santa Catarina island, like the one Jonjo the fast-talking Colombian hotel receptionist from New Jersey sold me, maintaining it would start at 8am and be all over by 4pm then sat a group on the bus for 12 HOURS until EIGHT PM, I would have been hung drawn and quartered, and they would still have written a letter of complaint to HQ demanding compensation and/or free holiday. 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. There are 42 beaches on Santa Catarina island and Guido our non-English speaking guide seemed intent on showing us them all, but hey a beach is a beach, we don't want to look at every grain of sand ... ... mind you they are very nice beaches and at one of them a scruffy man wearing a thick coat, smoking, grey hair all over the shop, approached me. He was a professor of music from a city north of Rio and had spent 3 years in Edinburgh drinking whisky after his first wife had left him and his father had asked his son what he wanted to do and his inconsolable son said "I'd like to go to Scotland and study, father" but instead of study he went there and drank away his blues ("no ice!") and completely forgot about his wife because he "fell in love with Scottish pubs" yet was now here standing on a Brazilian beach talking with a Scot's lilt, his second wife still at his side, and when I said I'd heard Rio was dangerous the second wife told me to just wear sandals and shorts and t-shirt to blend in, as I was then, and as she spoke she began doing a kind of dance demonstrating sandals with her feet and she began pulling at her own shirt and began twirling around and all the while doing this she sang a happy song, maybe from the favelas. At one stage we stopped at this beachside bar which encourages guests to leave a message on paper that is then stuck to the ceiling and walls. No idea why. That's the Scotch loving Brazilian and his second wife in the photo, bottom centre. 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. Cricket in Brazil, with a woman bowling! Who would believe it? And the brazilian professor who loves scotch made an amusing joke about cricket by pretending to fall asleep as he said the word. One of the stops did take in a turtle sanctuary which looks after cute sea creatures after they have been caught up in fishing nets or on barbed hooks, often with nasty results. We had to pay the entry fee. As 4 turned to 5pm then another beach with a fort that no-one could be bothered to traipse up to apart from a Spanish bloke so we had to hang around waiting for him for half an hour and then with the sun setting we were in the rich part of town where, as if the highlight of the day, Guido the guide leaped from his seat, pointed at a mansion and exclaimed, "Casa Filipe Massa!" which woke most of us, then added, "the racing driver!" and did a steering motion to fully explain who the hell he was.
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." Just about the only Brazilian that I remember meeting elsewhere in the world introduced himself with, 'I'm Foot Soldier on Spaceship Earth, man'. Thereafter we referred to him as just Foot Soldier. He was as lanky and thin as a two year old trunk of bamboo, well over 6 foot, in his thirties, unruly long hair, draped in baggy t-shirt, tiny (verging on obscene) shorts, of unclean appearance, scruffy sandals on truly long feet, while most of his face was hidden by a huge beard, blue hat and huge bug-eyed sunglasses, which I reckon he brought into fashion 20 years before their time. He didn't really speak much but his mouth whispered conspiratorially, eyes darting left and right, movement jerky and exaggerated. He'd just spent two years in a Japanese jail for importing weed into Tokyo.
Whenever he turned up at the noodle restaurant - our (me and Chris, my Californian sidekick) midnight rendezvous, to which he was always late - the tiny Chinese waitresses screamed in abject terror and raced away, peeping with fearful eyes from the kitchen doorway while he roamed round the tables like a human tarantula. That was about 20 years ago in Jinghong, which back then was a slow-moving, dusty, one-horse market town in the rainforest, surrounded by banana plantations, wooden houses on stilts above the colourful wildlife, down on China's border with Laos, Thailand, Burma and Vietnam in the days before the tourism boom of the 21st century. It was just about untouched by western civilisation and an idyllic location for trekking around on a bike, which me, Chris and some mad-assed French chick did for a few weeks; dodging donkeys and carts, eating fantastic fruit sold dirt-roadside, watching Buddhist monks playing pool, then peanut satay for dinner with sticky pineapple rice, and a joint with foot soldier who also slurped rice wine from the bottle across the day and night. Today, especially considering the huge numbers of Chinese people now travelling, Jinghong must be horrific (and is), plastered in modern hotels, golf courses, blue mirrored glass, airport terminals and runways, great highways cutting through virgin forest, and the accompanying vehicles ferrying tourists and conference attendees back and forth, plus the obligatory wherever-men-gather army of prostitutes, or 'chickens' as the Chinese call them. I had no idea what Foot Soldier was doing there - "I'm checking out the land, man" was one reason he gave - other than rolling joints made from hash that he said he'd imported by swallowing and crapping out then drying out ... and I believed him. At one point a very prim and proper Chinese ... or was she Japanese ... woman in a massive flowery sunhat turned up on the scene, thus demonstrating the rather strange lengths some people will go to get laid. And during this current Brazilian sojourn my mind has gone back to him, wondering where he might be ... maybe jumping out from behind Amazonian trees pretending to be a species unknown to zoology... or maybe he actually is ... but more than likely he's in prison or dead, living life like he did, right on the edge. After all, foot soldiers are always cannon fodder for the officer class. Nb. THIS song should be listened to at time of reading. 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. When checking in, one of the receptionists interrupted his colleague and began shouting over to me in rapid fire, strong American English, blithering on about stuff I should see and do on the island and tours he could offer to do just that. He was a Colombian, stick thin, jet black hair, going by the name of Jonjo, who had spent 15 years in New Jersey. I liked his enthusiasm but was struggling to keep up with whatever the hell it was he was saying; tuning the shrivelled British mind into the American's hyper-speak. In the evening as we smoked out on the empty street next to Personal Hot Dog, he told me, "When I first came here man I was living in the favela. It was awful - like hell. I had to walk up this real steep hill home every night at midnight and when I got there man there were rats man and cockroaches the size of my hand in the bedroom man. They didn't even leave when I came in! Can you imagine that man? Living like that?" 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. I'd see the favelas the next afternoon (see above) from the seat of a bike that Jamaican Mike had not only rented me but delivered to the hotel door and so I headed downhill to the Ramblas next to the sea, finding big gangs of aging bikers gathered on Harley Davidson's and the faces of the well-off men were unmistakably Germanic and central European.
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." Man, I nearly choked on coffee and laughter this morning as I read the paper outside La Pasiva restaurant on a windswept morning next to the South Atlantic, because FIFA, the openly corrupt governing overseer of world football, has announced its five candidates to stand for election to a presidential post having just got rid of former officials hired on their sensational ability to lie through their teeth.
First up is a Bahraini sheikh (tribal leader) and member of the ruling Khalifa clan whose family's kleptocracy keeps all the nation's cash and shoots or, at best, imprisons anyone who disagrees with them. Bahrain, as we all know, is a pub and whorehouse for Saudi Arabia. Apart from a proliferation of sports bars, the little island state isn't exactly known as a sporting powerhouse. It's very well known as a pub and whorehouse catering to Saudi Arabia as well as the home of the American 5th naval fleet ... say no more. The second candidate for total command of FIFA is a Jordanian prince (keep it in the family) whose country is also not exactly known as a sporting powerhouse ... say no more. Third up is Jérôme Champagne of France who already has FIFA experience in how to collect cash and whose name suggests a taste for the high life; a bon viveur ... Fourth comes a man with an intriguing name, Gianni Infantini, from Switzerland, a nation famous for shady bank accounts extremely beneficial to the very well-off with shady money ... And fifth is the improbably named South African businessman Tokyo Sexwale ... insert wide-eyed smiley. They should give it to someone involved on the playing side of the game and obviously doesn't care about money, like Dennis Bergkamp who gave away a lot of his salary to charity, or Arsene Wenger who openly expresses a distaste for how it is corrupting the game. My command of the Portuguese language broadens by the day. Eg:-
The Spanish Ola (hello) becomes 'Oi ' in Brazil. Frango - chicken Batata - potato Mamao - papaya Con bacon - with bacon Obrigada - thank you, although I knew that one already Bom - good Cafe con leche grande - big coffee with milk Pele - Pele Porco - pork ... and most useful of all is Beque (pronounced) becky - weed/pot/smoke End of lesson It's amazing what you learn when on the road. |
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‘I don’t understand why when we destroy something created by man we call it vandalism, but when we destroy something created by nature we call it progress.’ Ed Begley Jr. * "The more I see of Humans the more I like my dog." Mark Twain * Only when the Last Tree Is Cut Down, The Last Fish Eaten, And the Last Stream Poisoned, Will Man Realize That Money Cannot be Eaten Cree Indian proverb Nb. Doesn't work in Google Chrome, no idea why not...
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