Dec 2006

Since I started my trip in Brazil, many people have asked me if it isn't lonely, travelling on my own. I won't deny that sometimes it is (see Crabby Crabs, a previous entry) but other times it is exactly the opposite: you meet and get to know people faster than you think is possible.

I am writing this from Maceió, but my head is still about 600 kilometres south, in Salvador, where I spent over a week in the company of three fantastic people, all couchsurfers: Ksenia, from Russia, Mikael, from Sweden, and our host Nilton, from Salvador.

The Fabulous Foursome

Sometimes, by pure fluke, travel throws people together in what Mikael calls a 'bubble', a space and time in which friendships are formed faster than you think is possible, and where you feel induced to tell your entire life story, including things you would not even dream of telling your best friends, to a complete stranger - all over the course of a bus journey across town.
The best example I can give of the 'bubble' phenomenon is Alex Garland's book 'The Beach' (which was also made into a pretty mediocre film starring Leonardo DiCaprio.) Except for that our 'bubble' happened in a poor neighbourhood in Salvador, without a beach in sight.
What it reminded me of most was some weeks spent at Mary's Hostel in Gleann Cholm Cille in the early 1990s when I was learning Irish.

But all bubbles must burst. These periods of enlightened, sped-up reality don't last forever. Sunday night, I blew out of Salvador on a driving refrigerator (a Brazilian bus, more about Brazilian buses soon!) Tonight, Tuesday, Mikael is flying out of Salvador on his long trek home to Gothenburg. Before the end of the week, Ksenia will be in Belo Horizonte to spend Christmas with a friend there. Nilton and his family will have their house to themselves again.
The ads for Aero bars (or Bros bars in Holland!) are right: the bubbles taste better than the chocolate.

Thursday night Nilton, Mickael (a Swedish couchsurfer) and I went to a Candomblé ceremony in the Cidade Baixa. Nilton's brother Bruno is a Pai-de-Santo ('Father of Saint') - a Candomblé priest. Candomblé is an Afro-Brazilian religion, a mixture of beliefs brougth to Brazil by slaves from Africa, with a little bit of Catholicism. In Candomblé, the Orixás (gods, or spirit forces) double up as Catholic saints. The Orixá of Bruno's house of Candomblé, Iansã, doubles up as Saint Barbara, for example.

It wasn't the first time I had gone to a Candomblé ceremony in Salvador, but this was the first time I went to a ceremony I had been invited to, rather than as part of a tour for tourists. Describing a Candomblé ceremony in words is nearly impossible. You need to be there to hear the beat of the drums, the bell-like sound of the agôgô, the rattle of the metal shakers used to call the Orixás. You need to be there to see the fantastic costumes made of metal and cloth, to see people become possessed, to see people dance the intricate steps of the dance of each Orixá. You need to be there to feel the heat and to smell the sweat of more than thirty people having a frantic religious ceremony in the tropical heat in a space smaller than the average European kitchen. But most of all, you need to eat the food that everybody shares after the ceremony. Food that is prepared with meat that comes from animals that were sacrificed. Everybody takes part, iniciates and visitors alike, to renew the energy of the house of Candomblé and the people in it. (Sacrificial meat tastes exactly the same as meat from the supermarket by the way.)

I always thought that it would be very hard to talk to people who practice Candomblé about their religion, because it was persecuted in Brazil for such a long time (it was in fact illegal until the 1970s) and because even today there are strong prejudices against the Afro-Brazilian religions in Brazil (Candomblé is not the only Afro-Brazilian religion.)
But the opposite appears to be true. Two days before the ceremony, Mickael and I spent an entire afternoon talking to Bruno, the Pai-de-Santo, about Candomblé, and today, one of Nilton's cousins, a girl of maybe 11 or 12, was explaining to us about the ritual scars on her upper arm.

Tancredo Neves, the neighbourhood in Salvador where I am staying at the moment is not a slum, but it is not far from it. Still, the internet is always around the corner. I am writing this in Antônio's internet café, which links this part of Tancredo Neves (which is big) to the rest of the world.

Antônio, the proud owner himself!

There are just four computers here, but they have everything you need from e-mail to skype to msn. Next to me two kids are playing computer games. Outside, there is a congregation of kids, teenagers and men in their twenties, just hanging around and talking. In 4 months time, Antônio's internet café has become a central point in the neighbourhood, like a proper café - even though there is no coffee here!

Funny to think how my mother in Holland, her friends Sister Beatrijs and Magda, and all my friends in Ireland and elsewhere are only a click away from this community on the other side of the world!

It's been a while since I posted anything new on the blog, but I have been busy making new friends in Salvador.

I later killed this crab. Vegetarians: you are advised to stop reading now.

In Olivença, near Ilhéus in the south of Bahia where I stayed for a couple of days last week, it got so quiet (I was the only person staying in the youth hostel) that one day I had a conversation with a small yellow crab on the beach. I think the crab was afraid of me and was trying to be polite while I was talking to it. It only went away after I told it I was finished talking.

In Salvador, there is no need to talk to crabs, because I made a load of new friends through www.couchsurfing.com. Nilton Reis, a 24 year old couchsurfer from Salvador, started inviting couchsurfers to stay with him and his family last year so that he could practice his English, and in turn he is very good at teaching Portuguese. Perfect!

Nilton is also a very good teacher for killing crabs.

Tancredo Neves, the neighbourhood in which Nilton lives, is not one of the richer neighbourhoods in Salvador. He lives with his parents, his brother and his brother's wife and their baby, a dog and a puppy, but this week, there was still space for three (3!) couchsurfers, myself and a girl from Russia and a boy from Sweden. When we counted the languages that could be spoken fluently in Nilton's bedroom (which was just big enough for four matrasses on the floor) we came to a whopping 9: Portuguese, Russian, Swedish, Dutch, English, Irish, Spanish, Esperanto, and Farsi.

But back to the crabs. Like I said, in Salvador, there was no need to talk to crabs (in any of the nine languages mentioned above.) Instead, we ate them. We bought two strings with ten crabs each for 14 reais (that is less than 5 euro.) They arrived at the door in a wheelbarrow with the mud from the mangrove in which they were caught still on them. They were also still alive, and trying to crawl out of the sink the whole time, where they had to be cleaned.

Some people boil the crabs alive, but Nilton's mother prefers to stab them first with a knife. Of course, I had to kill and clean one as well. This took a long time, obviously because I had never done it before, but also because the crabs are quite dangerous - they have large claws! In the end, I succeeded, killed the crab with a knife, and then cleaned it with a pink toothbrush.

One of the crabs wasn't killed properly though (not mine!!!) Just after Nilton and me sat down on the couch to relax, we heard a scream from the kitchen: an un-dead crab had crawled out of the enormous pot on the stove (which was already filled with onions, coriander, dendê oil and coconut milk) and bit Nilton's mother's finger.

A final note on carangueijo crabs: it takes just as long to eat them as it takes to kill and clean them.

Hello Europeans and North-Americans currently experiencing stormy weather or snow...

This is me drying my shirt on the beach in Ilhéus. It got wet, with sweat, because it is 35 degrees Celsius here.

Yes, I am in the land of the endless summer. Bahia does not have any seasons. It also doesn't have summer time (and for that reason, even though it is in the same time zone as Rio de Janeiro, it is still an hour earlier here... confusing!)
For someone who has grown up in north-western Europe (like me) it is difficult to imagine life without seasons. But here, it is always summer, the sun rises early (5am) and goes down early (6pm). No such thing as a long summer evening!

Yesterday I spent most of the day in Ilhéus, a nearly perfect little city on the coast, in Bahia's Cacaueira region. As you might be able to tell from the name, everything in Ilhéus and the area around it revolves around cocoa - and chocolate. (They have even invented chocolate that does not melt in 35 degrees heat - basically, it does not contain milk, and is rock hard, but very, very tasty.)

A church and a phone box. I can't think of a funny caption, but there has to be one.

Ilhéus, which also happens to be the birthplace of one of my favourite authors, Jorge Amado, was built in colonial style during the cocoa boom in the 19th Century. The buildings might be pretty, but the history is not. Even after slavery was abolished, the working conditions on the roças (plantations) were pretty grim. Jorge Amado paints a stark picture of this in his early books, Cacau and Terras do Sem Fim (both have been translated into English, and Dutch.)

Ilhéus is nearly perfect. It is Galway-sized, it has brightly painted colonial architecture, a good café called Barrakítika, beaches, a fairly good transport system... Nearly perfect, because it turns pale in comparison with the splendor of Salvador... more about which in the next update.