MondayMorningMutiny.com

On 13th March 2007, I arose at 5am and caught the bus to the giant megatropolis that is Sao Paulo. This was swiftly followed by an airport transfer to Guarhulos airport where I buy a ticket and almost immediately get on a plane to Florianopolis, saving myself a 14 hour bus journey.

The flight is actually to Chapeco, wherever that is, but goes via Florianopolis – home of tennis player Gustavo Kuertan, 3 times French Open winner and the largest steel suspension bridge in Brazil.

As I didn´t know too much about the area, other than it is the capital of Santa Catarina state, I decide to spend the night in downtown Centro, get my bearings and work out what to do from there.

Like any other Centro in the world, this one was unsurprisingly uninspiring – comprising mostly of streets filled with shops, 2 bus terminals and the predictably shady characters that lurk around them.

Not knowing any better, I choose to take lodging for the night on one of the shopping streets. This swiftly became deserted when night fell, so I wandered around for signs of life, eventually stumbling upon a lively piano bar playing lounge jazz, tucked away on a side street, half way up some steps to the main road running parallel above.

The guitarist was fairly routine, holding a reasonable session role for the more talented pianist who clearly loved the easy listening bossa nova that he effortless tinkled away at, adding flourishes at any opportunity.

Two oversized dark rums with ice later, I was ravenous, so ordered a mixed plate of delicious mini empanadas – fried mini pasty snacks, some filled with carne (meat) and others with a camarone (shrimp) mixture.By the time I left it was raining fairly hard but still warm enough for the vest top I was wearing.

Taking a different route back, as a way of exploring the town, I pass a `whiskeria´, which I assumed to be a whisky bar and duck inside to get out the rain. It was well lit and empty when I arrived – just a few scantily clad girls sitting and chatting in the corner.

I order a beer from the casually dressed (ripped t-shirt and shorts) barman and went to the bathroom to dry off a little.

When I returned to the bar, to my astonishment, it has completely transformed!

The same barman was now wearing a makeshift tuxedo, the lights were significantly dimmer and far more underdressed girls loitered somewhat aimlessly, all without drinks..I was suspicious at this point but had paid for a drink so decided to at least finish it. Besides it was still raining.

Two girls sit by me, speaking little English which complemented my ability to speak little Portuguese well. I gather that they want me to buy them drinks. Not being completely naive, I ask how much they would be, to which I am informed 25 Reais ($12).

I politely decline, mumbling something about just arriving and not having enough money yet.

“So you don´t want to stay with us then?”

“Er, not really, no. Sorry” was my hasty reply.

I drank my beer and left, noticing the small neon heart on the outside of the bar as I walk out the door.

At least I learn a new lesson on Portuguese – `whiskeria´ = dodgy house of ill repute / bar.

Oh well, live and learn.

This is the scond time my lack of portuguese has had undesired consequences. The first was when I picked up a tube of toothpaste looking, `creme de barbear´and proceeded to brush my teeth for 30 seconds or so before realising it was in fact aloe vera shaving cream!

First thing in the morning I left Centro for Isla Santa Catarina – a beautifully picturesque island, linked to Florianopolis by two bridges, one of which is the huge suspension bridge I mentioned earlier.

Two buses later, I was on Praia de Armaçao – a relatively remote stretch of beach with good surf close by.

Here I spent six days at the incredibly relaxing and fun filled Bell´s Company hostel, situated right on the beach and run by an exceptionally helpful and friendly man called Gecko.

A lot of the perception of a place is influenced by the people you meet and the crowd here was great – hostel staff were friendly and relaxed and so were the people staying here. There was a cracking trio of lads from from West Canada, two New York city girls, a couple from Denmark, some Australian guys with a few Irish, German and others mixed in for good measure.

Many of these had stayed for longer than intended, some up to a month – an easy trap in a place such as this.Not wanting to fall into this myself, I took the precaution of buying a bus ticket to Iguassu ahead of time, thus ensuring my timely departure.

Most of my days were spent on the beach, playing football and then swimming to cool off. The beach where we were playing football had reasonable surf, which often means bad swimming conditions. It shelved off gently, so you would have to go out a fair distance for the water to be above head height. One day, after a brief storm, the waves were consistently above head height – 6 to 8 feet rollers crashing down with high frequency. Body surfing in on these was great fun but as it got later, a rip tide would suddenly develop every half hour and a strong pull out to the ocean was hard to resist. On one occasion, a few minutes of hard swimming was necessary to break free of the relentless draw away from the beach and crash of waves down on top of me.

Early evenings were spent relaxing on the hammocks located at the top of two towers overlooking the sea, reading books, catching up on sleep and idly chatting to other hostel guests.

Being a quiet area just out of high season, there was little to do at night, so we kept ourselves entertained by playing games, eating out, cooking meals for each other and drinking.

Dark rum tends to be my drink of choice nowadays. Due to language difficulties, I haven´t had much recently. In Brazil, rum is pronounced a bit like `hoom´ but just subtley different enough such that whenever I order, few understand me!

The book I had been reading here whilst reclining in the hammocks was `The Rum Diaries´by Hunter S. Thompson (thanks Paul) and nearly every page involves some sort of activity, washed down liberally with copious amounts of Puerto Rican rum.

This had the effect that marketeers aim for and made me more determined in my quest for rum, so I was delighted to find that the local supermarket stocked Barcardi Black – to be my drink for the week.

This came into full force when a group of us played a dice drinking game called “F**k All” – a relatively simple game where the aim is to score more than the person to your right and also not roll the dice and score f**k all. To score you need to roll a 1, a 5 or three of a kind. You can stop at any point as long as you have more points than the person to your right. Each roll of the dice you need at least one scoring dice, otherwise you have to drink. If you get a scoring roll, you can keep as many of the dice as you like but they remain fixed on the table and the next throw you roll the remaining dice. Three, four or five of a kind get the big scores.

It´s pretty much a game of luck – the only stategy is deciding how many and which dice you want to remain fixed each roll.

With this in mind, it should have been fairly even. Not for me!

I had the worst run of luck imaginable – a combination of bad scoring on my part and the Danish guy, Phillip to my right consistently getting high scores. After the first 20 rounds, I had lost 15+ times. This meant the same number of shots of dark rum. I even managed to lose when I had no score to beat by rolling no 5s or 1s when rolling a fresh set of 5 dice. For the mathematicians out there, that´s a pretty small percentage chance.

Anyone want to work out the odds of that?

Luckily I really like rum, so took it galliantly.

One particularly memorable meal was at a seafood restaurant in Pantano do Sol, where the interior decor was made up solely of paper notes written by customers, completely covering all free space on the walls and tastefully draping down from the ceiling. Here I ordered the `Seafood Parade´ – written as being for two people to share, this monster of a meal could easily have fed four.

There were 5 or 6 starters, including a variety of prawn dishes, stuffed crab, the biggest mussels I have ever seen, grilled oyster with cheese topping and a kind of bitesized popcorn fish dish. Then came the main course! More fish in a prawn and onion spiced sauce accompanied by a small paddy field of rice and whole world of fries.

One heavily loosened belt buckle later and I was ready to waddle home, where I had an hour or two of rest in the hammocks and then played some more dice.

The bus I had pre-booked left at 4pm, arriving in Foz de Iguassu (Brazilian side of the falls) at 6am the following day. The long distance bus daze coupled with the early morning left my brain sluggish, so whilst I sat at the terminal in Foz wandering what to do at a leisurely pace, I start chatting to a French Canadian from Montreal, called François.

We decide to make tracks straight into Argentina and visit the falls together.

One note to add about my time at Armaçao – I nearly forgot, or perhaps was just in denial – on the last night at the hostel, Gecko, an affectionado of karaoke had set up a machine and was singing, mostly by himself for most of the evening.

I´m not sure how it happened but before I could tell myself not to, I found myself on the mic, singing Frank Sinatra. This goes against some of my strongest principles and I´m sure I have probably lost a bet and now owe someone money as in the past, I have frequently and vocally vowed that I will never participate in such activites.

Don`t tell anyone.. But secretly, I really enjoyed it..

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This entry was posted on March 29, 2007 at 9:12 pm and is filed under Brazil. You can subscribe via RSS 2.0 feed to this post's comments. You can comment below, or link to this permanent URL from your own site.