Slothful recuperation

So, we are still in Boipeba, being either mightily indulgent, or recuperating from our recent traumas, depending on how generously one looks upon spending many consecutive days reading a book on a sunlounger. Our many days here - strung out even further now that we’ve discovered a multitude of places where our good friend Visa can support our dining habits – have resulted in us crossing off the list many of the places to visit that, in a fit of unrealistic and uncharacteristic planning, we made a couple of weeks ago. This includes, unfortunately, a sloth rehabilitation centre in a nearby town which we read about in the good old Lonely Planet, the idea of which we find incredibly intriguing. How on earth do sloths recuperate? we speculate. And what are they recuperating from? They do bugger all in the first place. The irony is not lost on us that we have had to look up the word lazy (preguicoso) to explain to our new friends our own current predilections for the vertical life.

This is not to say our days here have not been without incident. A has, for the last week, been attempting to fax an insurance claim (with hand-written police report) to her insurance company. Unfortunately we realised after our first visit to the police station that in all their excitement over having a crime to solve they had omitted to write down on the report some of the equipment that was stolen with the camera. A’s daily attempts to get this rectified have been thwarted by the police’s preferences for sleeping, hanging out of the windows eating mangos, or strolling around the beach and saying “mais tarde”. According to them, the report has to be rectified by the woman who originally wrote it, who was, we gather, roped in from her job in the next-door juice bar to take the notes. She has been on holiday, or something, and apparently none of the actual police men are able to take on this very particular task of writing the word ‘lens filter’ on our now rather crumpled and sand-encrusted report.

To clarify things a little here, it might be worth me describing Boipeba police station. The station is unmarked – there’s no sign to give you a clue as to what it might be – and appears to have no fixed opening hours. It is manned by six or seven quite buff young men who all wear crisp white t-shirts with the police logo on them. The station itself consists of a desk, a fax, a couple of chairs and a notice board on the wall. The filing system for crimes seems to be that they are hand written (by the woman from the juice shop) in an exercise book with a picture of footballers on the front. We are quite intrigued by the notice board, which, in addition to photos of the policemen on their holidays, has a section entitled “thought for the week.” What is thought for the week, we wonder? “Get the woman from the juice shop to buy us some more mangoes”, perhaps.

Anyway, fresh light was thrown on the crime when Fausto, our Rastafarian friend, returned from a visit to Valenca and told us that he’d heard things about our camera being sold there. We of course went to tell the police this, who, after they’d finished eating their mango, told us to get Fausto to come and talk to them. Fausto being a man of no particular routine, this took some time to arrange. Eventually, he found us on the beach – Fausto, bless him, always seems to appear when there’s a packet of cigarettes and a bottle of beer on the table. But before we went to the police station, he had something he wanted to show me. “Meu cavallo” he declared.

Fausto is the kind of guy whose pronouncements you take with a generous pinch of salt. It always seems unlikely that it’s really going to happen – but actually, it always seems to – eventually. You can’t entirely blame us for our initial sceptism – we learnt recently that Fausto’s nickname amongst the other rastas is “Bobby Spongie”, on account of both his similarity to the great god of rastadom and his prodigious capacity to absorb cachaca, generally, it seems, on someone else’s tab. But I have a great affection for the man - in our post-robbery days, Fausto’s been a real friend to us. We spent an incredibly calming afternoon with him post our first police visit, sitting on the veranda of his friend Toshi’s reggae bar, drinking beer whilst he patiently conducted a lesson in black history for a tiny girl who lived in the house next door and had come to sit on his lap. “Who’s that?” she repeatedly asked him, turning the pages of the book on Bob Marley which he’d brought out to show us and pointing at the pictures. “Marcus Garvey” he explained. “Who’s that?” “Peter Tosh”. “Who’s that?” “Bob Marley” “Who’s that?” “A Rastafarian” “Who’s that?” “Another Rastafarian”. As well as cooking us delicious moquecas (he used to be a chef) Fausto has been playing seguranca and escorting us back along the dark beach at night.

Fausto had also been the person to arrange some horses for us, which had involved a day of walking around the entire village asking all and sundry if they had cavallos. The next day, sure enough, four beasts materialised and we all spent the day trotting off round the island, stopping off for an hour or so of crab-smashing at his friend’s place on a nearby hill. Fausto had his own cavallo, he informed us, but it was in Valenca, a nearby town three hours away on the boat – hence the reason for his visit. Anyway, to cut a long story short, post his Valenca trip, his horse appeared to be in Boipeba. “Where?!” I exclaimed, when I finally managed to grasp this improbable bit of information. “Alli. A perta do camping” he told me, striding off in that direction with me in tow. I tried to get him to explain how he got the horse here, but he just waved his hands in the air vaguely.

“Ele e um burro, nao e um cavallo” he admitted, as we neared the camping ground – a mule, not a horse. But they are stronger, he assured me, and they eat anything. Sure enough, there was a rather beautiful large tan-coloured mule, tied to a tree, eating mangos. What’s his name? I asked Fausto. Amarillo – “yellow man” – he replied. The mule looked at Fausto with what seemed like fondness as he retrieved it another mango.

And that was how we found ourselves in the unlikely and somewhat surreal position of riding to the police station on a large yellow donkey, accompanied by a slightly tipsy Rastafarian. Once inside, Fausto solemnly related his information to the policeman who’d parked himself behind the desk. Ultimately, all this lead to was another long round of talking about the crime – who might have done it, how it might have happened, where they might be now, who might buy such a camera - with Fausto and his friend gleefully adding to the speculation. “They’ll probably sell it for thirty reales for crack” they all agreed, which I could see A visibly wincing at. Every now and again, the fax on the desk next to the policeman rang, at which point he would pick up the receiver, look confusedly at it, and put it down again. The policeman related once again, with some pride, that when our bags had been handed in, he’d deduced that they were ours as he remembered seeing us taking photos of a coconut seller outside the day before. Aha! Everyone once again nodded approvingly at his feats of deduction. A and I sat looking at each other as the same pronouncements in Portuguese flew about over our heads, our suspicions being confirmed that despite this being the first exciting crime they’ve ever had to solve, possibly in their careers, the police in Boipeba actually prefer speculating and gossiping about it at great length to doing anything in particular to solve it. Perhaps, we agreed forlornly as we left, our expectations of what can be achieved by active policework have been unrealistically raised by The Wire. “I might bring them the box set so they can sit there and learn something while they’re eating their mangoes!” said A, crossly, as we left the station for what felt like the zillionth time. Given that they’re so sure that the culprits, as they frequently repeat to us “are from outside, ” and given that we’re on an island and there’s only one boat port with two daily departures, which is about a hundred metres from the police station, it wouldn’t have been too hard, we grumble to ourselves at least once a day, for them to check for two boys matching our description leaving Boipeba with big grins on their faces, big retro Polaroid sunglasses and a big fuck-off camera.

Anyway, the police now have other things to occupy their time. A few hours after our ride to the police station, while we were all hanging out in the reggae bar drinking “caipitoshis” (Fausto’s grinning friend Toshi’s concoction, with lime and ginger) Amarillo managed to escape from where Fausto had left him in the front garden of a friend’s cousin and was last observed trotting off towards the beach. No-one has seen hide nor hair of him since. “Where’s your burro?” we ask Fausto, when he comes to join us at the beach. “ah, I don’t know” he says sadly. “I think he’s got a girlfriend and has gone to live in the forest. I’ve got to go to file a police report”. And then, generally, he settles back for another beer.

Such is life in Bahia.