fresh n juicy chunks of oyster :: RTW travel blog

I've left Lencois and refreshingly the most unxmasy and least predictable Xmas of my life behind and have arrived in Rio de Janeiro several days ago (after my legs atrophied and I caught up on some sleep during 36 hours of bus rides).
Here in Rio I've been doing the Rio thing: lying on Copacabana and Ipanema, looking for the girl (lame joke, sorry) and enjoying the vibes.
My camera's gone on an extended holiday again (I won't go into details) so unfortunately there'll be no pics of Sugarloaf, Christ the Redeemer and the usual postcard shots for a little while. I will upload some Ipanema sunset shots soon though.
Anyway, almost all here is set for New Year, a party of two million people all dressed in white on Copacabana beach. Should be interesting.
But I may use this New Year instead to remember all the dead foreigners and Iraqis, now that people seem to have been forgotten after a certain son of an ex-president has finally gotten over his Oedipal inferiority complex by finally catching something, if not words before they leave his mouth (sorry, I promised I'd stop the ranting but the hostel here has cable and I've been watching too much late-night BBC and Fox News. That always gets my blood curdling.)
Apologies, happy New Year and all the good things for everyone in the next one! :)

As threatened here come the words to accompany the Arembepe / Aldeia Hippie pictures:
Once upon a time Arembepe, about an hour North of Salvador, used to be a small fishing village with beautiful beaches, palm trees and all the rest. Then, the Hippies came. They occupied the nearby land, built their huts for them and their kin and brought lots of drugs. This attracted other Hippies and people like Mick Jagger and Janis Joplin and others who liked doing drugs, having sex and rockin and rollin. Now Arembepe, the village, looks like any other holiday resort on the Brasilian coast and is packed with native tourists. Bloody hippies, they ruin everything.
But seriously folks, the actual Aldeia Hippie (which roughly means Hippie commune) still has a hint of paradise about it. No electricity or running water, but other amenities such as a very friendly community (which is nowadays more Rasta than Hippie), wind-bent palm trees everywhere and a clean river for bathing and the sea -both about 2 minutes away. People there don't live off much and the money they do need seems to come from selling art and crafts to tourists or homemade bread and the like which is sold from a basket, walking door-to-door in the commune. Ultimately, it is a very cool place for doing nothing (or any other such thing) for a couple of days.
That's about all I can currently remember or care to tell about Arembepe (I am notably leaving the stories of some of many of the crazy people there for another time).
My current home is Lencois which is a pretty amazing place so I've decided to spend Xmas here, instead of dodgy Salvador. A good way of describing the area is as a natural Disneyland for Brasilians and a lot of families seem to come here to relax. Lencois lies in the middle of a national park with seemingly endless possibilities for hiking to waterfalls, caves, lakes, rivers, mountains, horseback riding, another alternative commune and who knows what else. A main attraction seems to be a natural water slide. Natural in this case means it is made out of mostly smooth rock. Mostly in this case means that your ass (or other parts) tend to hurt quite badly after a good slide down and that it tore a nice hole into my swimming trunks. The less said the better, but I ended up flashing half the people there for a good while before being told.
Anyway, moving swiftly on and repeating myself, the town Lencois is very lovely, however, I will not delve into details now but instead wish everyone a very happy Xmas, Hanukkah, days off or whatever else people may be celebrating. Peace, love and rock n roll to all!

I have just arrived back at the Salvador bus station from Arembepe and had a couple of hours to kill here before a bus leaves to Lencois later tonight.
I will hopefully write more on Arembepe and its nearby 'Aldeia Hippie' (Hippie commune) soon, but for now there will only be pictures of the place to entertain you (the usual link on the right).
And yes, I do realise I am cramming a lot into the space of a few days if I intend to return to Salvador for Xmas. Silly festive season messes up my schedule and still seems to have a chokehold of nostalgia over me - a.k.a. I can't yet picture myself hanging out during Xmas in the middle of nowhere by a waterfall - I need lots of bright lights and tacky music, damnit!!! argh.

Salvador de Bahia, a.k.a. simply Bahia, is a place of many faces. The current face is full of Xmas decorations, colourful lights, choirs of old women and small children singing carols in the evenings and gigantic Santa statues are guarding the major squarees, watching over a chunky overgrown baby Jesus in the arms of the kings or have been attached to and made to climb various buildings and other surfaces.
The historic town, Pelourinho, is rife with colonial architecture, narrow cobbled streets, wide open squares and what must be many of the 166 churches of the whole of Salvador.
Apparently Pelourinho is where Michael Jackson pranced around the streets in with a lot of poor but happy kids in one of his later videos (one of those dedicated to racial equality, peace and loving children (in which sense of the word no-one including himself seems to know anymore).
There are plenty of good restaurants and street vendors (many serving African dishes - the strong African influence on Bahia is everywhere, from religion, to music, to dress, etc...). There are many good swimming beaches, great live music and loud, loud Afro-Bahiano drum ensembles in the street and generally a lot of touristy, fun things to do here (although incomprehensibly a lot of nightlife here finishes at 12 while in the rest of Brasil it only seems to get started around then or later!)
All this entertainment and relative peace for tourists, however, seems to have been bought in Pelourinho through a massive police presence on every street corner, barely ever more than 30m away, 24 hours a day. I get the distinct feeling that Pelourinho is surrounded by Favelas and the only thing stemming the tide of crime, poverty and crack-smoking (which literally starts just one block away from the town centre in most directions), is a uniform and holstered gun.
During the day the only real signs are legions of people asking anyone remotely gringo-like for cash, but then late at night a lot of unsavoury start prowling and picking fights and I only really feel safe when in viewing distance of a copper or two. Can't live with 'em, can't live without 'em - I guess I'll never be satisfied...
Anyway, it looks like tomorrow I'll head off to a beach village, Arembepe, a little way from here and then return to Xmas decorations and carol singing in a couple of days. Then again, for me, the obligatory cold weather and sleet is missing so I may not get into the mood anyway. :)

[in the Xmas spirit here's an Onion article I found amusing, check it out if you're bored.
I also want to thank everyone for the overwhelming response to the Xmas poll: a grand total of 3 votes ;) have decided (2-1) I'll be staying in Salvador :).
I also want to apologise for the barrage of photos on the gallery - please let me know over the new poll whether you would prefer a shorter edited gallery with only half-way decent pictures or (unflatteringly to my photographic non-skills) to keep including almost everything (including all the rubbish and random memory-pictures)
Cheers for your participation :) ]

A short post: I have arrived in Salvador de Bahia and all is well.
They have lovely Xmas decorations here - I have uploaded random test pictures from Fortaleza and here taken with my new digital camera :) and you can check them out via the 'picture' link on the right, as usual.
More some time later...

From where I left off last week in Sao Luis I don't quite know where to begin as it now seems like almost months ago, so I may just have to do things chronologically, day by day, as any other order would get me very confused.
Day 1: I arrived in Tútoia at 5am in the morning and watched the sun rise over the river. Tútoia is a smallish village in the Parnaiba delta, with donkeys and goats tethereded to chunks of rubble wandering the streets (or not in the case of the tethered goats). The market was starting to buzz with limited life shortly after (South Americans get up incredibly early!) and I set about finding the boat to the city of Parnaiba. However, that boat's engine happened to have died earlier in the week and I was starting to look forward to another exciting bus ride, missing the entire river route.
As things sometimes tend to do they turned out well in this case after starting to chat to several stoned fishermen (all of them there are, I later find out) who were heading to Parnaiba to sell their catch at a higher price than they would get in Tútoia. So, several hours later we were all cruising lethargically down the winding river in their five-man trawler.
In contrast to the boat from Manaus this one was much more entertaining with beautiful shores on both sides, heavily wooded then occasionally a white sand beach and dunes. There is also a point in the river where one second you taste the water and it is still salty and the next it has turned into freshwater. And the fishermen could cook, easily beating any of the grub served on the Amazon boats!
After a good six hours we arrived in Parnaiba where I met some fellow Gringos at the bus station and we made our way to Camocim that evening (another small town with the only nightlife being the 'bar' next to the bus station) and the next morning found a jeep that would take us over sand dunes and along deserted beaches to Jericoacoara. Jeri, as it's also known, is officially a nature reserve and used to be a small town with beautiful beaches, sand dunes, strong winds, a coconut grove and a healthy Capoeira culture. It is still all that but now it is also full of hostels, Italian windsurfers and a handful of backpackers (almost all of whom have stayed or decided to stay there for months and months). They seem to sleep most of the day in hammocks when not learning Capoeira, surfing or such like. In the evenings it is a tradition in Jeri for visitors to gather on a large sand dune overlooking the ocean and watch the sun drown into it while watching the sandboarding competition that sometimes gets going (or just the informal tumbling down spectacularly without a board competition). This is followed by everyone watching Capoeira on the beach - the acrobatics are pretty mind blowing - then sleeping a little more and towards the end of the week starting to go out in the bars (including more cheesy Brasilian Forro music for me :).
So, all in all, Jeri has a great atmosphere even if it does lie firmly on the Lonely Planet trail and it's probably only a matter of time before they'll build a Holiday Inn there. The locals are already ecstatic about the prospect! ;)
They say a picture is worth a thousand words and in this case I feel that even a camera roll full of my words (making around 36000 - a bit of a thesis) wouldn't really get the place across, which of course is another way of saying that my cameras have been nicked in Jeri (along with some other stuff, including my diary which was a particular bitch!).
At any rate, I have moved on and am now in Fortaleza where I've gotten a police report and am hoping that my travel insurance will stand up for what they're being paid for (Jeri only has a token police force that doesn't seem to have paper...). I'm also hoping to score a new, overpriced camera here. The city itself has beaches, beaches, beaches and gorgeous sea, all lorded over by skyscraper hotels. But it's a pleasant enough place and the cleanest city I've yet encountered in Brasil and I hear the night life ain't half bad either.
Several chores lie ahead for the next few days here, including deciding whether to go back to Jeri for a little while or whether to move on down South, and Xmas and New Year plans are currently completely undecided which may mean I'll have to greet 2004 with my backpack on when all the hotels are full. Oh, and I desperately need a haircut (I guess it may be a good thing that I have no camera anymore...)

[Here's the cheesily entitled 'Official Website of Paradise' I googled, but it does have some pictures of Jeri but they are pretty crummy and probably only worth about 50 words each.]

On a whim I've decided to only make it half-way to Fortalezza and ended up in Sao Luis whose current claim to fame includes being a UNESCO world heritage site and having gotten a lot of cash for the honour. Most of this cash seems to have flowed into springing up very helpful tourist information offices everywhere (a rarity so far in Brasil) and a tourist information museum of sort, with not much content, a couple of exhibits on a local 'bull death' festival (all symbolic!), many video screens with slickly produced films praising the region and 20 odd guides/wardens standing around not doing much at all. But then some of the money has apparently gone into restoring the beautiful colonial buildings many of which have walls clad in bathroom tiles, which is a little weird. There's also a lot of arts, handicrafts and live music and dancing around, making it quite a pleasant place.
Tonight, however, I'm moving on by bus to Tútoia, a town in a river delta and from there I'll make it on to a beach town called Jericoacoara which, they say, is nice. I assume though, that it won't have internet so you'll all be spared more posts from me for a little while...

I am in a bit of a foul mood for various reasons and not many events of much interest have occurred anyway, so I will attempt to keep this one short and uninteresting!
Indeed most of the past week has been spent on two different boats, first from Manaus to Santarem, a one-night fairly pleasant, if not especially noteworthy, stay there and another boat to Belem from there. And after all this cruising of the largest waterway in the world I think I've decided I don't want to be a sailor: being on a boat 24 hours a day is DULL! A few interesting people here and there, a few of whom on the second boat even spoke Spanish, but for the rest there wasn't much to do except gaze at the riverbank (far, far away for most of the trip), listen to incredibly cheesy and very samey Northern Brasilian music (I became very intolerant of Calypso & Co) and a very monotonous diet (which also happened to be quite disgusting on the first boat). I also confirmed I don't make much of a fisherman as my attempts at catching Piranhas with left-over meat from lunch were all unsuccessful.
At any rate, it was an experience, maybe interesting for bits like the crowded sleeping deck that had one hammock next to and across others, tinned sardine style.
As seems to have become a trend with my interesting experiences so far I usually crown them with an attack of the killer stomach bugs, as also in this case. Suffice it to say, I have left a part of myself with the Amazon river, and it wasn't my heart that I threw off the back of the boat. I'm hoping that at the rate I'm going I'll be able to eat sewage for breakfast, no problem.
The last three days in Belem I've been mostly recuperation and looking around the city a little, which is kinda interesting but I wasn't particularly interested in general I guess. Tomorrow morning I'll probably catch a bus to Fortalezza (or Bahia) where I'll be hoping for some beach R&R and interesting things to happen. Or not.

[you may have noticed the website's back up with limited functionality and ads. I'm working on it. Slowly :)]