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Published: November 14th 2006
Sugar for my sweet, sweets for my honey
Paula & Daniel beside sugar cane. Awww!It was Sunday morning, bright and early and our weekend was but halfway through. Today's trip was to be up north to Joao Pessoa for some beach time with our driver from yesterday, but as had been the case a lot of times in Rêcife, this was not to be. Since the elections were on, Pedro and Monica had to work a lot more (they are both journalists) so it didn't look like they were coming. This brought numbers down significantly so we decided to tell Paddy Busdriver to take an early shower and we'd make our way down in a few cars. The choice of destination had changed also, it was to be Porto do Galinhos (Port of Chickens) about a hundred clicks south of Rêcife. Easy peasy, right?
After going around the ring road outside the airport for the second time, it became clear to Mam, the girls and me that it was going to be an interesting drive with Telma at the wheel. First of all, she had only limited English, and I limited Portuguese, so on paper, conversation was going to be strained at best. For one of the first times in my life I really
had not wanted to ride shotgun, but I'd been outvoted by the family's "woman power" and fastened myself in beside an oblivious Telma.
Where to begin... ok, Telma was chatty enough and clearly out to talk to us, but seemed to lack the multi-tasking abilities common to most women; any time she started talking in English to us, she turned towards the person she was talking to - yes, she was still driving - and totally forgot about the road ahead. This resulted in quite a few hairy moments as she veered off course towards the side of the road, other cars, and pedestrians. I had noticed that she didn't do nearly as much crazy driving when speaking her native tongue, so I selflessly took one for the team and tried to engage her in conversation in my suspect Portuguese. This seemed to calm her for a while. Unfortunately, there were other aspects to Telma's driving that I could do nothing about. She liked to drive in the inside (fast) lane at a slow speed, as if the other Brazilian drivers weren't frenzied enough as it was. She had a thing for driving over potholes, slowing down by JAMMING
Primo e prima
Me & Monica looking serious on the brakes, and shifting to third gear at high speed, thinking that she was going into fifth. I really felt for the poor car.
We finally made it to the beach town of Porto do Galinhos, which was positively buzzing with people. The weather was great: the sun was high in the sky and there wasn't a cloud to be seen. It's the highest I've ever seen the sun in my life. Having made contact with Aidan and his passengers (Dad, Paula and her husband Daniel) we arranged a meeting place and pulled the cars into a spot beside some shops on what seemed to be the main street - not three bad. Aidan was on at me to move a shop sign so that he could tuck the car in more satisfactorily, but I didn't fancy the looks the shopowner was giving me so I tried to be subtle about it, nudging it with my hips - a bit like when you're playing on the coin-loading machines in a dodgy arcade and the coins are just hanging on the edge and you reckon they need a little help out. Got away with it anyway.
We went
Queen Alannah
... surveying her kingdom down to the beach only to find out that Monica, Pedro, the two scamps and Mirza had come along too! Fantastic! It was a real family occasion now and much fun was had mucking around on the beach. Pedro, Daniel, Matheus and I quickly got some barefoot football going, and some other mongs joined in too. We were no sooner getting a great game going than the fucking fascist lifeguards/beachwatchers came along and told us we weren't allowed to play ball games on the beach. This is typical fucking Brazilian shit, as we found out later on, but initially it really surprised me. Anywhere that looks like it's a touristy area, they clamp down on the fun big time. The water was really warm, and was once again sheltered from the powerful ocean by a natural reef about 200 metres out. We paddled around for a while and generally had a good time.
The Corinthians jersey (see pics) was getting a few looks at this stage from the local boys, especially on the shoulders of a clearly pasty gringo. We went back up into the town of Porto do Galinhos to look for somewhere to eat. Aidan recommended a
Marilyn
Your order, ma'am? place and since we were a large enough group and this place seemed to have big ol' tables, we were happy to comply. Big mistake. It took about five years for the food to arrive; I even caught Aidan saying "We could have gone to Rêcife and back and the food still wouldn't be ready". He had a point - but I'm doing a lot of complaining here so I better stop.
Onwards and downwards. We headed off south to a place called Maracaipe which has some of the best waves in Pernambuco. I was holding out a faint hope that I'd be able to rent a bodyboard down there, and it certainly seemed promising as we travelled down the back roads towards the ocean; I could see signs for board rentals all over the place. Not wanting to upset the apple-cart, however, I waited til we got down to the beach, where with Monica's help I rented a board for ten reals. However, the board was slick, the guy had no wax, I had no flippers, and worst of all, the board had no leash, so I was basically screwed from the get-go. This partially explains why there
Distraction Time!
Aidan handing out trinkets are no pics of me sailing gloriously down a wave or two! 'Nao pegei a grippe' as the Brazilians would say - 'I didn't catch cold!'
After coming out of the water, I relaxed for a while and let my clothes dry. Monica and Pedro had to set off for Rêcife as Pedro was working at 5.30pm due to the election coverage needing extra work. We got ready to go and filtered into our respective cars. Turns out Telma had left her car open by mistake - surprise surprise - but it didn't get touched, luckily enough. We stopped off at a few ultra-exclusive beach holiday communities that Aidan wanted to drool over, but I stayed outside as I was fairly tired from battling with the Atlantic on that dodgy bodyboard. Light was fading fast and we needed to get back onto the road to the state capital.
After a hellish drive back which I'm almost certain will have coronary implications for me in later life, we were very happy to land back at Hotel Aconchego and our welcoming hosts. Turns out Aidan had been rear-ended (though not badly) in traffic. We'd run into some serious returning-from-holiday traffic
Tuck in!
Telma and Paula get to grips with the food that took about 2342897123 hours to arrive so something was bound to have happened; thankfully that was the height of it and nothing more dangerous had befallen us.
You might think I was crazy getting back in the car with Telma, but Daniel had invited me to see his brother playing a gig over in Olinda that night, so I was more than happy to tag along and accept Telma's lift. However my delight waned somewhat when Paula insisted that I leave my wallet at home and take off my tacky Casio watch! Where the fuck were we going?
Daniel spoke the least English of anyone I had met yet so this was going to be interesting. I did a lot of nodding and smiling on that night, but a combination of him talking Portuguese slowly and knowing the general jist of what he was on about meant it wasn't so hard to converse after all. We got onto the bus and took it pretty far into Olinda. It was clearly driven by a Rio ex-pat as he came closest to emulating the 464. Getting off the bus deep inside a darkened, clearly run-down area, it transpired that Daniel hadn't a notion where this pub
was. We wandered around for a bit, Daniel asking the locals where it might be, me nodding my head as if I could work out what they were saying, and coming out with "ta bom" (the equivalent to 'cool', I suppose) a lot so as not to look so much like the pasty rich gringo that I was.
We eventually found the place - but it weren't no pub - it was a bunch of gazebos in the centre of a favela with Daniel's brother and his band rockin' out to maybe 15 or 20 people. Of course at this stage Daniel sodded off to work on the sound system leaving me on my Tobler to shoot the breeze with the other dignitaries at the show. I spoke to one young black guy who was a friend of Daniel's and who was drinking this absolute piss-water excuse for wine. He had some English so we were able to carry on a conversation about the usual shit; whether I knew U2 or not, if I had ever caught a leprechaun, and all that kind of carry-on. The band was called 'Tao' and the music was surprisingly good; punchy Brazilian punk/rock
Trying his luck
Aidan beside the ubiquitous Lottery result signs that sounded like Anthrax - Daniel gave me a CD later and I have listened to it a couple of times.
Once they were done, they started packing up their equipment. I had wondered where they were getting their power from, and I soon found out - a guy shimmied up a wooden ladder and removed a pair of hooks from the supply cables! Seriously fucking dangerous - all for a bit of free rockin'! We headed back to Daniel and Paula's gaff after this and I laid the head down. It had been a long day.
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