Postcards

Bonete beach, with a traditional canoa in the foreground.

There is a Dutch saying that goes: "Nederlanders zie je ook overál!" ("You run into the Dutch everywhere".) Well, in the case of Bonete, an isolated fishing (and surfing) community on the island of Ilhabela, that is definitely the case.

Believe it or not, but less than three hours from the third largest city in the world, São Paulo, there is a village of just 250 souls living in what Edna O' Brien would call 'splendid isolation'. Bonete, on the island of Ilhabela (off the São Paulo coast) can only be reached by following a dangerous but fun path (I walked 12km in the sweltering heat (with my 18kg backpack on), crossed two reasonably deep waterfalls, saw one small snake) or by motor boat.

Bonete has no mobile phones, no electricity, no pollution, no stress, no nightlife. It only has traditional fishermen and (less traditional) surfers. There is a beach, there are hills covered in subtropical rainforest (the Mata Atlântica), there is a really nice waterfall to swim in, the pousada (a Brazilian concept somewhere between a hostel and a hotel) where I stayed was good. Basically, it's heaven on earth. But I found out that, after a day or two, heaven gets extremely boring: paradise is the same all day long.

So after two nights, I decided to hit the road, or rather, the waves. I took the easy way back, a motor boat. This is where I found out about Bonete's past. I asked Fernando, the fisherman who gave me a lift back to civilization, if he had ever met a Dutchman before.
"Of course," he said. "I've got plenty of Dutch blood myself!"
It turns out that the traditional fishermen of Bonete (not the surfers) are the descendents of Dutch pirates who married with the local Tupi-Guarani native tribe. In the 15th and 16th Centuries, the pirates used Ilhabela as a hiding place from which to launch their attacks on the Portuguese settlement of São Sebastião, on the mainland. The Dutch pirates must have liked paradise better than I did, because they stayed.

Just seconds after I met Cintia, www.couchsurfing.com 's ambassador in São Paulo (more about couchsurfing later!), we were accosted by a news camera crew outside the TV station Gazeta's enormous office on the Avenida Paulista.

Gazeta's TV Crew, my friend Cintia on the far left

Of course accosting innocent bystanders is what I do every day as a news reporter in Ireland, so I made Cintia do an interview. The reporter, a tough lady wearing suede pumps and dark sunglasses (I would love to see reporters dress like this in Europe!) thanked me profusely for helping her drag poor Cintia in front of the camera. Little did I know that Gazeta is a TV station aimed mostly at housewives and their news coverage consists mostly of recipes and horoscopes. In fact, they made Cintia ask a question rather than answer one, the question was going to be a lead-in to an advise session with a relationships expert. The question they made Cintia ask was: "I want to stay a virgin but my family is giving me trouble about this, what should I do?"
I'd love if reporting was just as easy in Ireland!

Well, I promised the next entry would be less heavy... Here comes soap! I just had dinner in a great little Japanese restaurant in Liberdade, São Paulo's Japantown (São Paulo has the world's largest Japanese population outside of Japan.) Next to me at the counter where I was eating my yakissoba a Japanese man who spoke no Portuguese but was apparently visiting his Brazilojapanese relatives sneezed for a full ten minutes, which made everybody in the place laugh. Full blast on the TV, the telenovela (soap) Páginas da Vida (Pages of Life) was on. There was a lot of emotion as one of the main characters had apparently become paralyzed, but when the (female) doctor massaged his legs, slowly working her way upward towards his thighs, he got his feeling back, and all the characters cried.
Soon though, the real drama was happening in the restaurant. On my left, a girl who was meeting her boyfriend at the restaurant was getting increasingly worked up and after a while she was inconsolable. This was happening right next to my yakissoba, which I still managed to eat (with chopsticks.) Anyway, I suppose you had to be there. Or maybe this scene needs Bret Easton Ellis. More later!
Alex.