Continuing with our strategy of not having a plan and just riding the tide of our Brazilian friends, we abandoned the original plan of New Year’s Eve in Rio and instead opted to accept the invitation to their party. As in previous years, they had made a plan to rent a house for a week in a remote fishing village called Ponta Negra. Anatole arranged all the details, and we had very little idea of what to expect, being reliant on his series of sometimes rather cryptic emails. We got the general gist that things would be pretty basic, and that we’d need to bring food; as he put it “there are two restaurants there, but it can take a long time to get any food. No one has ever died of starvation, but people have been known to get very upset.”
So, following his email instructions we took a bus to a tiny place called Laranjeiras, and then, after a long confusing conversation with an old man in very gruff Portuguese, eventually managed to find someone arranging Combis to where the boats were stationed. Having not quite managed to decode quite how basic the shops were in Laranjeiras from Tole’s email, we raided the shop for what it had left, deciding to overcompensate for our sorry looking vegetables with large amounts of alcohol, and so ended up in a little boat with bottles of vodka and onions rolling around our feet – off out into the sea, around the uninhabited forested coast, to pitch up twenty minutes later on a tiny but exquisite beach; forest fringed, bracketed by smooth climbable boulders, pristine water as still as a pond.
Ponta Negra really is a remote place – a fishing village of about 150 inhabitants. Most of the (pretty basic) houses are hidden by the forest which comes down to the beach, so from the sea, it looks like there are just a couple of simple beach shacks and some wooden boats. It’s charms have been discovered by young Paulistanos, and over the festive season, the locals rent out their houses to those who make it to the beach. The nearest road is a two hour walk away, otherwise it is access by boat only, if you can find someone with one and get them to take you. Our house was a couple of steps up from camping – a basic concrete three room structure, with a veranda, containing enough beds for about 70% of the people who we were expecting, a gas cooker (with bottled gas), a table, two chairs, a bench, two hammocks, and a bathroom with cold shower. We swiftly discovered that there was no electricity, rendering our immense collection of technology redundant. Tole pointed out with some amusement progress is occurring – since last year, a public telephone has been installed in the village. We dug our torches out and set off to procure some candles.
I love places like Ponta Negra. As we swiftly discovered, it’s a place where you find you have everything you really need – but absolutely nothing more. The guy who’d rented us the house wasn’t overly keen on providing us with anything else – every time he saw Anatole coming, he actually hid in the nearest bush – but the bars
have a great little operation going to satiate the needs of the incoming hoards. Within a couple of hours, we’d set up what was to become a very very long bar tab and were busy getting stuck into the first of many “pingas com mel” – short drinks of cachaca and very very runny honey, which, as with most things here, you share. And so began an amazing week of utter relaxation in beautiful surroundings, enjoying truly excellent company. Slowly our group expanded to eleven, including Ju and Fabian (with whom I used to share the flat that A and I now inhabit in London) and their respective partners, a couple of Fabian’s friends who I’d previously met in Madrid, and one of Anatole’s friends from school, Junior (who, it emerged, was like an incredibly courteous Tarzan). Everyone somehow interlinked, and between us all, when you added up how long everyone had known each other, there was over 150 years worth of solid friendship to be exploited.
Time quickly became an irrelevant concept as we settled into a pretty blissful soporific hedonism. We spent a lot of time discussing, planning and practising for a Grand Beach Olympics (designed around making use of the Christmas catapult) – but in the end, even that amount of organisation was too much for us, collectively. Days came and went with long hours spent in hammocks, on the beach, talking, playing, laughing, swimming, eating vast quantities of freshly caught calamari, getting slowly drunk on ice-cold Itaipava beers, caipirinhas and pingas and slowly caned on gentle brazilian ganga, continuing by candlelight as night fell and utter pitch darkness descended until eventually everyone fell asleep, or didn’t, in a bed or hammock, or until sun rose and it all began again.
And after all, it was the most incredible New Years celebration, and I ended the year with one of the most pleasant days I can ever remember. I decided that I’d done too much work in 2007 and needed to redress the balance, and so stationed myself firmly in a hammock and abstained from decision making, which led to a delicious slow state of soporific absorption as I gratefully imbibed anything that was passed to me. The Brazilians got stuck into preparing a huge meal of different fish stews, rice and lentils which was left to cook for about 10 hours while we all took ourselves off to the beach. I worked off the morning’s laziness in the afternoon by heading off into the sea with Junior for our daily ‘expeditions’, swimming, diving, looking at fish, rock-climbing and floating about for a couple of hours until our fingers were completely pickled. We headed back to the house after dark and prepared our feast on a table in the garden, finishing up with our (English) contribution of bananas done in foil in the oven with chocolate and whisky. As 2008 rolled in we headed back to the beach, which had become a party with lanterns in the sand, music from the bars, and local boys setting off huge fireworks from bamboo canons. We jumped the waves and made wishes for luck (in the Brazilian tradition), swam in the sea with the phosphorus, and danced in the sand until the early hours, finally stumbling back to the house and falling asleep on the cushions in the garden under the stars.
The week’s only moment of high drama occurred in the early hours of New Year’s Day when the lovely A stumbled to the toilet and discovered that the shower head was on fire, having been melted by the candle which had been burning on top of it to illuminate the toilet in the night. A spent some time frantically running back and forth from the kitchen attempting to dowse the growing inferno with pans of water and trying unsuccessfully to wake up the men. She eventually managed to rouse Junior from where he’d been sleeping in the garden. Not understanding her panicky English, it took quite an urgent mime show on A’s part before she could drag him into the bathroom, where he sensibly turned on the shower, which put out the fire. The first day of the year was spent with A telling us all how she’s saved us all from burning to death in the night and Junior massively downplaying his firefighting prowess. In the end, the owner of the house didn’t mind about the immolated shower head (and, bizarrely, we thought, didn’t even ask how it had happened).
There’s something about places like Ponta Negra that are incredibly restorative – the absence of all but the essentials. It all served to make me think how extrapolated city-living is from the way human beings are naturally evolved to function. Of course it’s easy to naively idealise the simplicity of the pastoral idyll, and of course it would be hard to forgo the advantages that city life has to offer (variety, intellectual stimulation, culture, innovation, etc etc), but I do feel quite strongly that city living does have profoundly unhealthy effects on us.
In the absence of the loud white noise of advertising that you get living in a city, all craving leaves you and you stop wanting anything that you don’t have. Where I live in London, our living room overlooks the high street, where you can purchase more or less anything you could imagine wanting, pretty much on a whim, pretty much at any time of day or night. As a result you become very divorced from appreciating where any of these things come from. It’s never dark there, so night and day don’t have the same meaning. Aside from the plants on my windowsill, we don’t see things grow or die.
In cities, I think, people develop a malaise of empathy fatigue: you come into contact with so many people on a daily basis that you can’t possibly care about all of them, so you end up unresponsive to the needs and emotional states of all but those closest to you. In London, this distrust of strangers is particularly pronounced; if someone even looks at you on the Tube, you presume that they must be mad and move away from them. How is it possible, we often wondered in Rio de Janeiro, for people to walk past young children living on the streets? – before realising that it’s just an extension of the same alienating function that allows us to ignore homeless adults in our own city, telling ourselves that they’re not our personal responsibility. In Ponta Negra, everyone is treated as a friend and looked after from the word go. This was borne out on our last night in the village. A visiting family with two children had gone off on one of the trails through the forest to visit another beach and had not returned. The locals had noticed their absence at nightfall when they had not appeared at either of the beach bars for dinner, and a search party was mounted to look for them. In the end they were located at the only other bar in the village which is halfway up the hill. The same principle applied with the local alcoholic who would wander over a couple of times a day to cadge cigarettes. As Anatole put it “it’s a small place and we’re gonna see him over and over again, we can’t ignore him, so we might as well make the interaction as pleasant as possible”.
It was a type of friendliness we found at times difficult to get our heads around. One night, fancying a change of scene, we decided to seek out a place where the year before, a guy called Pedro had run a bar from his house, which is constructed around a massive boulder in the middle of the forest. This was possibly the most remote bar in the world, up through the winding forest paths. “It’s not too far” Anatole had told us “but you do have to cross two small rivers on the way” – no easy feat, as we discovered, by torchlight when slightly inebriated. We arrived to find that Pedro had decided not to bother this year and was not in business. However, he was more than happy for us to sit on his decking and treat it as a bar, so we retrieved our own cachaca and limes and somewhat oddly, found ourselves conducting a little party in their front garden and popping in every now and again to use their toilet, before an even more difficult stumble across the rivers and back to our place in the wee hours.
The children in Ponta Negra have an amazing freedom. School being out, they spend their days on the beach, mucking about in boats, collectively looked after, when needs be, by anyone who’s around. On one of our expeditions one day, Junior and I came across a boy of about five rowing his way out into the cove in a plastic tub, out in deeper water than some of our adult party were happy to swim in. I remarked to Junior how incredible it seemed to me. “Ellos são os filhos dos pescadors” he shrugged. (They’re the sons of fishermen).
When it came to time to leave, we couldn’t quite bring ourselves to do it, and ended up staying another day. This wouldn’t have mattered overly, as we’d allowed ourselves a day in Rio before our friend E had to fly back to London. Unfortunately, the next morning, as we were packing, E checked her plane tickets and realised that she was actually flying a day earlier than we thought, which meant that at 6.30pm she needed to be in Rio airport which was a boat ride, a combi-van, a 1 hour local bus, a four hour coach ride and a taxi away, a matter made no easier by the fact that we were still firmly ensconced in a place where time and urgency were negligible concepts.
Somehow we managed to get ourselves to the bus station back in Paraty by about 2pm, having formed a plan B of sending E to Sao Paulo instead of Rio to pick up the second leg of her flight at 10pm - only to be told at the bus ticket kiosk that all bus tickets to Sao Paulo had been sold. A rather unkind reintroduction to the real world, we tried everything we could think of, E on the phone trying to change flights, me trying to bribe the ticket seller, the bus driver and the other passengers in my crap Portuguese to no avail. In the end, with little time to spare, we commandeered a taxi and bundled her in it for a very expensive four hour drive to Sao Paulo airport, with the scribbled phone numbers of everyone we knew in Sao Paulo just in case, and strict instructions to email us as soon as she could to let us know that she made the flight.
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