We left Boipeba, mainly because we had to, not because we wanted to. Although our frugality and our good friend Visa had helped stay there about four times longer than we’d anticipated, our last remaining cash had to be spent, sadly, on taking the boat out.
Leaving Boipeba is no easy feat – and made no easier by the fact that we’d unintentionally stayed up til 4am the previous night drinking always mais uma cerveja with our rasta friends. Boipeba (off the coast of Bahia in the North-East) to Belo Horizonte (capital of the interior state of Minas Gerais) in one day was the mission, and this involved 14 hours of travelling – a boat, a bus, a mini-bus, a ferry into Salvador, then a taxi to the airport, a plane, then another bus and finally a taxi to our destination.
It’s sad to leave a place that you’ve loved – and that you fear might have fallen victim to progress and lost its soul if you ever make it back. Too tired, too pensive (and frankly, too hungover) to speak on the boat that left the village in the intimate hush of the early morning, I appreciated the quietness and stillness of the miles of mangroves that we journeyed through. Apart from the occasional fisherman (who, in this part of the world, still use the same method they’ve used for hundreds of years, with motorless wooden dug-out boats) and the odd incomprehensibly remote settlement, the mangroves seem impervious to human progress. At one point a huge rainbow arced above us, a complete semicircle with both ends finishing in the water. I tried to form some metaphorical significance to this optical phenomenon - but, in my barely-awake-and-still-somewhat-drunken state, failed miserably, told myself off for trying to be cleverer than necessary, and reconciled to just sitting there looking at the pretty colours.
After taking several hours to cross the stretch of mainland in a succession of slow cramped vehicles, we took the ferry from Bom Despacho to Salvador, sweating out the previous night’s alcohol in what we knew to be the last of our Bahian sun on the upper deck. Approaching the city from the sea, our second arrival, made us think of the anticipation of our first airborne arrival there exactly one month (and a carnival, and two robberies) previously, how much our perspectives had shifted.
I often think that getting to know cities is similar to getting to know people – the initial impression always giving way as the complexities and contradictions are discovered. Salvador, for me, was like a broadly smiling, beguilingly badly-behaved new lover, all non-stop fun until one day he lays you out with an unexpected and vicious punch.
A was glad to see the back of the city. I couldn’t help feeling sad that I hadn’t found what I was looking for there – we’d been in the wrong place at the wrong time (on the wrong bus) but every city is a never-ending set of permutations. Our perceptions had been irrevocably shaped, but I still wished I could go in again, from another angle, and find a different pathway through it, and forgive the city its misdemeanours. Saying that, I don’t think there’s any getting away from the fact that Salvador makes you feel your vulnerability as a young, clearly foreign, woman. There’s a territorial machismo there, present in all public spaces, which you can’t confront, that you have to avoid, or move around. It’s hard work – a lot of wasted energy - and not a sensation that I think would ever disappear, no matter how long one lived there - nor indeed, a way of living that I think I’d want to get used to.
If you’ve ever watched Capoeira closely, you can see how each player works to occupy space, and to push their opponent into a difficult physical position – and how good players have the physical flexibility and mental dexterity to escape in any number of improbable directions from the positions they are made to occupy. In the enclosed ring of the roda, capoeristas move away from the foot that’s flying towards their head, drop to the floor, reverse the flow, turning a defence into an attack and taking out with a sweeping low kick the other leg of their opponent, forcing them in turn to take their weight on their hands and move out of the way. An accomplished capoerista makes it seem that there is no direction that they can’t travel, and no position that they can’t move their body through, as stable on their hands as on their feet. Neither the normal limits of muscle and sinew nor the restrictions of gravity seem to apply. The body and the mind are highly trained to get oneself out of trouble and reverse the situation to one’s one advantage. And that, metaphorically and literally, it seems to me, is the way that you are able to successfully claim your space in Salvador. Capoeira is often dismissed by those who don’t understand it as some kind of ritualised dancing. It’s not – it’s about training oneself, mentally and physically, to survive in a difficult environment – not through blocking or confrontation but by finding escape routes.
Our escape route (I blame my slipped disc) was a taxi to the airport. On our two hours sleep, we became fairly delirious around the time we found ourselves pushing our backpacks around on trolleys in Salvador airport and for some reason pretending to be two mothers with pushchairs. It all became rather surreal, me with the open laptop wedged in the trolley’s front basket, pursuing a fluctuating broadband signal round the airport and trying to find the best place to pilfer wireless with my office on wheels. We thus managed to find ourselves a bed for the night at our destination before getting on the plane – and as we left Bahia airborne I finally dropped off to sleep.
Getting off the plane in Belo Horizonte, the capital of Minas Gerais, was like arriving in a different country altogether. For a start, we couldn’t understand anyone, nor make ourselves understood (there’s a funny accent in Minas, which sometimes sounds a little like people are talking into their own mouths). Everything was calm, and organised, and, we quickly realised, no-one was looking at us funny. (There’s a look that we’ve been on the receiving end in Brazil more times than we like, where the person staring too intently – and it’s always a man - looks disturbingly like they either want to fuck you or kill you, but it’s impossible to tell which. We’ve taken to calling it “the fuckmekillme”, as in, “oh bloody hell, he’s giving it the old fuckmekillme”.) Anyway, Minas Gerais is renowned for its friendliness, and it appeared to be true – from the off, everyone in Belo Horizonte was incredibly friendly, and smiley, and helpful.
We had a couple of days in the city, which we spent enjoying the v
ery-European-ness of it. Designed to plan, the centre of the city all fits together in a very sensible manner – none of the chaotic sprawl of Rio, Sao Paulo or Salvador. There’s lots of 1950s architecture, clean concrete curves and tiled surfaces, and a particularly beautiful of-the-age fonts used for the names of the edificios (I’m in love with fonts.) There’s a lot of intellectual capital in Minas Gerais, and Belo’s got a huge student population, and so there’s loads of excellent bookshops, lots of theatres, lots of art galleries, lots of good nightlife, and a kooky, alternative scene. It also felt, to our instant relief, incredibly safe.
What is it that makes one whole city feel safer than another? I’d put it down to the body language - a detail that you don't always register conciously, but, as human animals, I think the body language and the tension levels of those around us affects us profoundly. All the time, in a city, one has thousands and thousands of tiny, non-lingual transactions with others, and there is an over-riding quality to these transactions, which we quickly appropriate - which in turn, affects our own brain-chemical levels, our levels of adrenalin, seratonin, dopamine. In Belo Horizonte, I found myself analysing it - watching people out and about, watch their breathing, their tension, the way their eyes are moving. They’re just more relaxed, calm, efficient. The machismo is absent, and with it the sense of imminent threat. People don't move territorially, intentionally stepping into each other's space. People haven’t cultivated a habit of attempting 360 degree vision. Their eyes don’t flit to check out everybody in the vicinity. They don’t look as if they have to be aware, all the time. They’re lost in their own thoughts. Stepping from one city to another and finding people behaving, en-masse, so differently, really was incredibly palpable.
We were staying at a backpackers, and fell in with a motley crew from all over and spent a very well-needed evening drinking beers and speaking in English. The relief to be back in our mother-tongue, language at full speed, jokes rapid-firing and hitting with accuracy, was immense, almost giddying. (We’d spent a lot of evenings in Bahia getting stuck in very basic conversation, usually with men who spent a lot of time telling us repeatedly that we were linda or belleza, which is immensely boring. By the end of our time in Bahia, in our efforts to dispense with these guys, I had become engaged to my imaginary namorado and A’s had miraculously moved to Brazil. If we’d stayed much longer, we joked, we were going to have to change our names to Linda and Belleza and invent imaginary namorados who were definitely in the same city, if not the next room, and preferably members of the Tropa Elite.)
So now in Belo Horizonte, we were dealing with a whole different species of men – the Solo Male Backpackers, and it was a welcome change - they’re all far more interested in each other to start giving it the linda. We’d wondered before on this trip how it is that male backpackers can stand to sleep all crammed together in sweaty overcrowded dorms, but gradually we’ve come to the opinion that they like it. Male backpackers, we have decided, form packs for safety, kind of like little army units. There’s a bit of jostling for position when someone new arrives, but they tend to get the pack order sorted out fairly rapidly, and from that point on put up with each other’s snoring, inanities, strange habits and idiocies, form a little temporary unit and from thereon find each other’s jokes hilarious, and a great deal of joy in insulting each other. That’s male bonding for you.
Not to say that this lot weren’t fairly funny. We were regaled with horror stories, war stories, and – the favourite - stories of those who’d taken on the odds and won. Raphael, a witty American (who had the lot of us going for quite some time that he had a gun in his locker) told us about his time doing Salvador carnival. He’d been part of what sounded like an Elite Troupe, consisting of mainly reckless and enormous Australians, who all did non-stop pipoca for seven days. It sounded like they’d gone out with a mission to take on Carnaval and win. The leader of the pack, Ian, who Raphael described with some awe (“he was the size of a bear”) had, on discovering himself being pickpocketed in the carnival crowd, responded by putting his bear-size hand in the would-be-robber’s pocket, taking all his money, and telling him in no uncertain terms to fuck off. The way these guys were described to us, they sounded like some kind of heroic warriers, leading the charge in the Uprising of the Robbed Tourists.
We also heard the tale of some crazy (and, again, enormous) Finnish guy who’d recently passed through the hostel. “He was stabbed in Rio” our new friends told us with awe. The story was that Thor the Finn had been hanging out in Rio with an American guy (“who was like, an ex-Iraqi vet, completely crazy”). The American, on finding himself being pickpocketed, had pulled a knife and stabbed the kid through the cheek. A few days later, the stabbed kid’s mob caught up with them, and Thor had been caught in the middle of the ensuing ruckus. On closer interrogation, however, it turned out that Thor had actually just been attacked with a broken umbrella handle, which had glanced off his collarbone. But, I suppose, in the language of war stories “he was jabbed with an umbrella” doesn’t sound as cool as “he was stabbed in Rio.”
This, we decided, is the male way of dealing with feeling unsafe.
Leaving Boipeba is no easy feat – and made no easier by the fact that we’d unintentionally stayed up til 4am the previous night drinking always mais uma cerveja with our rasta friends. Boipeba (off the coast of Bahia in the North-East) to Belo Horizonte (capital of the interior state of Minas Gerais) in one day was the mission, and this involved 14 hours of travelling – a boat, a bus, a mini-bus, a ferry into Salvador, then a taxi to the airport, a plane, then another bus and finally a taxi to our destination.
It’s sad to leave a place that you’ve loved – and that you fear might have fallen victim to progress and lost its soul if you ever make it back. Too tired, too pensive (and frankly, too hungover) to speak on the boat that left the village in the intimate hush of the early morning, I appreciated the quietness and stillness of the miles of mangroves that we journeyed through. Apart from the occasional fisherman (who, in this part of the world, still use the same method they’ve used for hundreds of years, with motorless wooden dug-out boats) and the odd incomprehensibly remote settlement, the mangroves seem impervious to human progress. At one point a huge rainbow arced above us, a complete semicircle with both ends finishing in the water. I tried to form some metaphorical significance to this optical phenomenon - but, in my barely-awake-and-still-somewhat-drunken state, failed miserably, told myself off for trying to be cleverer than necessary, and reconciled to just sitting there looking at the pretty colours.
After taking several hours to cross the stretch of mainland in a succession of slow cramped vehicles, we took the ferry from Bom Despacho to Salvador, sweating out the previous night’s alcohol in what we knew to be the last of our Bahian sun on the upper deck. Approaching the city from the sea, our second arrival, made us think of the anticipation of our first airborne arrival there exactly one month (and a carnival, and two robberies) previously, how much our perspectives had shifted.
I often think that getting to know cities is similar to getting to know people – the initial impression always giving way as the complexities and contradictions are discovered. Salvador, for me, was like a broadly smiling, beguilingly badly-behaved new lover, all non-stop fun until one day he lays you out with an unexpected and vicious punch.
A was glad to see the back of the city. I couldn’t help feeling sad that I hadn’t found what I was looking for there – we’d been in the wrong place at the wrong time (on the wrong bus) but every city is a never-ending set of permutations. Our perceptions had been irrevocably shaped, but I still wished I could go in again, from another angle, and find a different pathway through it, and forgive the city its misdemeanours. Saying that, I don’t think there’s any getting away from the fact that Salvador makes you feel your vulnerability as a young, clearly foreign, woman. There’s a territorial machismo there, present in all public spaces, which you can’t confront, that you have to avoid, or move around. It’s hard work – a lot of wasted energy - and not a sensation that I think would ever disappear, no matter how long one lived there - nor indeed, a way of living that I think I’d want to get used to.
If you’ve ever watched Capoeira closely, you can see how each player works to occupy space, and to push their opponent into a difficult physical position – and how good players have the physical flexibility and mental dexterity to escape in any number of improbable directions from the positions they are made to occupy. In the enclosed ring of the roda, capoeristas move away from the foot that’s flying towards their head, drop to the floor, reverse the flow, turning a defence into an attack and taking out with a sweeping low kick the other leg of their opponent, forcing them in turn to take their weight on their hands and move out of the way. An accomplished capoerista makes it seem that there is no direction that they can’t travel, and no position that they can’t move their body through, as stable on their hands as on their feet. Neither the normal limits of muscle and sinew nor the restrictions of gravity seem to apply. The body and the mind are highly trained to get oneself out of trouble and reverse the situation to one’s one advantage. And that, metaphorically and literally, it seems to me, is the way that you are able to successfully claim your space in Salvador. Capoeira is often dismissed by those who don’t understand it as some kind of ritualised dancing. It’s not – it’s about training oneself, mentally and physically, to survive in a difficult environment – not through blocking or confrontation but by finding escape routes.
Our escape route (I blame my slipped disc) was a taxi to the airport. On our two hours sleep, we became fairly delirious around the time we found ourselves pushing our backpacks around on trolleys in Salvador airport and for some reason pretending to be two mothers with pushchairs. It all became rather surreal, me with the open laptop wedged in the trolley’s front basket, pursuing a fluctuating broadband signal round the airport and trying to find the best place to pilfer wireless with my office on wheels. We thus managed to find ourselves a bed for the night at our destination before getting on the plane – and as we left Bahia airborne I finally dropped off to sleep.
Getting off the plane in Belo Horizonte, the capital of Minas Gerais, was like arriving in a different country altogether. For a start, we couldn’t understand anyone, nor make ourselves understood (there’s a funny accent in Minas, which sometimes sounds a little like people are talking into their own mouths). Everything was calm, and organised, and, we quickly realised, no-one was looking at us funny. (There’s a look that we’ve been on the receiving end in Brazil more times than we like, where the person staring too intently – and it’s always a man - looks disturbingly like they either want to fuck you or kill you, but it’s impossible to tell which. We’ve taken to calling it “the fuckmekillme”, as in, “oh bloody hell, he’s giving it the old fuckmekillme”.) Anyway, Minas Gerais is renowned for its friendliness, and it appeared to be true – from the off, everyone in Belo Horizonte was incredibly friendly, and smiley, and helpful.
We had a couple of days in the city, which we spent enjoying the v
ery-European-ness of it. Designed to plan, the centre of the city all fits together in a very sensible manner – none of the chaotic sprawl of Rio, Sao Paulo or Salvador. There’s lots of 1950s architecture, clean concrete curves and tiled surfaces, and a particularly beautiful of-the-age fonts used for the names of the edificios (I’m in love with fonts.) There’s a lot of intellectual capital in Minas Gerais, and Belo’s got a huge student population, and so there’s loads of excellent bookshops, lots of theatres, lots of art galleries, lots of good nightlife, and a kooky, alternative scene. It also felt, to our instant relief, incredibly safe.What is it that makes one whole city feel safer than another? I’d put it down to the body language - a detail that you don't always register conciously, but, as human animals, I think the body language and the tension levels of those around us affects us profoundly. All the time, in a city, one has thousands and thousands of tiny, non-lingual transactions with others, and there is an over-riding quality to these transactions, which we quickly appropriate - which in turn, affects our own brain-chemical levels, our levels of adrenalin, seratonin, dopamine. In Belo Horizonte, I found myself analysing it - watching people out and about, watch their breathing, their tension, the way their eyes are moving. They’re just more relaxed, calm, efficient. The machismo is absent, and with it the sense of imminent threat. People don't move territorially, intentionally stepping into each other's space. People haven’t cultivated a habit of attempting 360 degree vision. Their eyes don’t flit to check out everybody in the vicinity. They don’t look as if they have to be aware, all the time. They’re lost in their own thoughts. Stepping from one city to another and finding people behaving, en-masse, so differently, really was incredibly palpable.
We were staying at a backpackers, and fell in with a motley crew from all over and spent a very well-needed evening drinking beers and speaking in English. The relief to be back in our mother-tongue, language at full speed, jokes rapid-firing and hitting with accuracy, was immense, almost giddying. (We’d spent a lot of evenings in Bahia getting stuck in very basic conversation, usually with men who spent a lot of time telling us repeatedly that we were linda or belleza, which is immensely boring. By the end of our time in Bahia, in our efforts to dispense with these guys, I had become engaged to my imaginary namorado and A’s had miraculously moved to Brazil. If we’d stayed much longer, we joked, we were going to have to change our names to Linda and Belleza and invent imaginary namorados who were definitely in the same city, if not the next room, and preferably members of the Tropa Elite.)
So now in Belo Horizonte, we were dealing with a whole different species of men – the Solo Male Backpackers, and it was a welcome change - they’re all far more interested in each other to start giving it the linda. We’d wondered before on this trip how it is that male backpackers can stand to sleep all crammed together in sweaty overcrowded dorms, but gradually we’ve come to the opinion that they like it. Male backpackers, we have decided, form packs for safety, kind of like little army units. There’s a bit of jostling for position when someone new arrives, but they tend to get the pack order sorted out fairly rapidly, and from that point on put up with each other’s snoring, inanities, strange habits and idiocies, form a little temporary unit and from thereon find each other’s jokes hilarious, and a great deal of joy in insulting each other. That’s male bonding for you.
Not to say that this lot weren’t fairly funny. We were regaled with horror stories, war stories, and – the favourite - stories of those who’d taken on the odds and won. Raphael, a witty American (who had the lot of us going for quite some time that he had a gun in his locker) told us about his time doing Salvador carnival. He’d been part of what sounded like an Elite Troupe, consisting of mainly reckless and enormous Australians, who all did non-stop pipoca for seven days. It sounded like they’d gone out with a mission to take on Carnaval and win. The leader of the pack, Ian, who Raphael described with some awe (“he was the size of a bear”) had, on discovering himself being pickpocketed in the carnival crowd, responded by putting his bear-size hand in the would-be-robber’s pocket, taking all his money, and telling him in no uncertain terms to fuck off. The way these guys were described to us, they sounded like some kind of heroic warriers, leading the charge in the Uprising of the Robbed Tourists.
We also heard the tale of some crazy (and, again, enormous) Finnish guy who’d recently passed through the hostel. “He was stabbed in Rio” our new friends told us with awe. The story was that Thor the Finn had been hanging out in Rio with an American guy (“who was like, an ex-Iraqi vet, completely crazy”). The American, on finding himself being pickpocketed, had pulled a knife and stabbed the kid through the cheek. A few days later, the stabbed kid’s mob caught up with them, and Thor had been caught in the middle of the ensuing ruckus. On closer interrogation, however, it turned out that Thor had actually just been attacked with a broken umbrella handle, which had glanced off his collarbone. But, I suppose, in the language of war stories “he was jabbed with an umbrella” doesn’t sound as cool as “he was stabbed in Rio.”
This, we decided, is the male way of dealing with feeling unsafe.
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