Sao Paulo :: Brazil
Places: Florianopolis, Ilha de Santa Catarina (Barra da Lagoa, Jurere, Lagoa, Joaquinia, Mole & Mocambique) & Sao Paulo.
Coolest thing I did: Went to the best night club. In The World.
Coolest thing I didn´t know: Brazil’s racial mix comes from the fact they were the last country to officially abolish slavery and then panicked because they couldn’t’ get their coffee planted and had to import Italians, Japanese and Lebanese people.
After the gritty mix of Porto Alegre it was interesting to cross the bridge that separates Ilha de Santa Catarina from mainland Brazil, which divides reality from what rich people live like in Brazil. Besides the pockets of backpacker slums that exist in a few choice parts of the island you are seeing a part of the country that I suspect very many Brazilians never will get the chance to. After thinking the beaches in Uruguay turned out all right, I was quite amazed by just how much beautiful coastline this place had. It took a couple of buses to get from the stupidly big bus terminal to Barra de Lagoa on the far side of the island, and along the way you’re treated to sweeping vistas of lakes and jungle as the suburban bus struggles to not lose it on hills.
Barra sits on the end of Mocambique beach, which starts off heaving under the weight of umbrellas and food vendors but pretty quickly turns into 14km of deserted sand, most of if too far for people who want to just lie there on beach chairs and be brought cervejas and Caprihinas. This leaves it for those crazy people in inexplicably like to jog along the beach on holiday, and if the swell makes it that far up the beach the hard core of proper surfers. There is a constant beach break at the populated end of the beach which looked simple enough, so due to the fact the first hostel I stayed in had fairly stable looking mini-malibu’s to borrow for free I decided to get on a surfboard myself.
Sometime at the tail end of my teenage years I could actually manage to stand up on a surf board pretty much every time, and I did so without ever having being taught to. So about once a year I decide to try and get back on it, and about once a year I totally overestimate my ability, tire myself out and get frustrated with the whole thing. I think it’s so much easier to learn something new than to try and relearn something you’re muscle memory has totally forgot, simply because you’re more open minded. I did manage to finally catch a few waves right into shore and stand up, but due to the fact Brazilians believe in total chaos on the waves and just swimming in front of surfers I managed to wipe out and smash my 8 foot board into someone’s kid. I thought that time to exit stage left, but just to show the difference in child rearing, the kid’s dad came out into the waves and started yelling at him and apologising to me. It’s like backwards world here sometimes.
My other board sport adventure for the week was totally new, and again, totally unsupervised. Somewhere in the past someone saw these giant sand dunes and decided to ride a snowboard down them. Then they probably modified it and ended up with a shorter, narrower board you ride barefoot with velco bindings and thus sandboarding was born. It takes a snowboarder a little while to realise turning is useless, and that the candle stub they give you when you rent the board needs to be applied every time you go down the dune to gain any momentum at all, but after that you simply point the nose south and let gravity do the rest. They rent the boards by the hour, which is good because by the time you’ve climbed up a sand dune for an hour you’re sick of it. I reckon you’d also want a dune buggy, so you didn’t have a 20 second ride followed by a 3 minute climb in soft sand. I also liked the ride back on the bus, covered in sand and saying “pah!” and basically seeing a cloud rise out of my mouth.
So besides getting a tan and riding boards, what do you do in Florianopolis? Well mostly get drunk it seems. Most nights I went to the standard backpacker beach bars, which are unsurprisingly mostly full of dudes and a bit rubbish, but it breaks up the monotony of having no TV at night. I’ll spare the details.
Instead I’ll talk about P12.
I don’t know how this place came into existence, but it’s hands down the best “night” club I’ve ever been to. It starts and 4pm and runs until 10, and everyone basically shows up in a swimsuit. There’s a DJ booth right in front of the massive pool and people tend to start by lounging on one of the many lounges or beds, sitting in a spa bath or taking a dip in the beach that the club backs right on to. For some reason I can’t quite fathom the water the rich people swim in at the beach is like 25 degrees and the water we’d been swimming in for the rest of the week was about 18. The mind boggles.
So by 6pm the crowd is thoroughly ready to lost it’s mind and dances in front of the DJ, or in the pool, or on the lounges or wherever really. It’s a mix of western backpackers, Argies and rich Brazilians, and it’s fairly easy to tell the first two from the last. The non-Brazilian men strictly wear boardshorts, which the Brazilian men seem to think is far too unrevealing, and instead go for tight trunks. The non-Brazilian women are the ones with bikinis that cover their arse. There’s a ratio of arse:bikini that seems to match how much Brazilian blood you have, so 3rd generation immigrants have less coverage than 2nd generation. Or so it works in my mind. There’s also something in the water in Brazil contributing to the improbable breasts on the women, but I suspect that something is plastic surgery.
As a side notes, the Brazilians are nuts about tattoos. Not only did every bloke have a full sleave minimum but for the girls full back tattoos were quite common. I thought this might just be the idle rich, but since getting to Sao Paulo I’ve seen office girls walking back from lunch with the head of a tiger or Buddha poking out the top of their dresses.
So after hours of drinking, dancing and losing my sunglasses (the count is now 3 towels, one head torch and one pair of sunglasses) we decided it would be a top idea to get dressed and go to the local Pacha franchise and take the 5.30am transfer instead of the 10pm one. As we had two hours to kill we got dropped off at a hotdog stand on the highway outside the club and proceeded to amuse the hell out of the hotdog guys with out drunken antics and eat hotdogs the size of Subway footlong sandwiches squashed flat, that for some reason had corn on them. There was also a bloke with a van and a whole bunch of liquor bottles selling drinks at totally unreasonable prices, which of course we paid. By the time we actually got into the club I didn’t really care who Sean Kingston was (apparently he sang Beautiful Girl…God knows he played it enough times) and did struggle a bit to make it through to home and bed at 6am. Perhaps I’m no longer built for starting the night out at midday and ending at 6am.
So I’m a very big fan of Florianopolis, and I’d seriously come back if I’m ever in Brazil again. It might be nice to see it from the other side though – apparently Ronaldinho has become a big fan of P12 since he came back from Europe to play club football for Corinthians, but he shows up in his helicopter. I’ll have to get a helicopter I guess.
So after a much better night bus ride that cost me a fortune (the one from Porto Alegre involved me mostly avoiding my crotch or arse touching the belly of the fat man that was spilling out of the seat next to me) I find myself in Sao Paulo, mostly on Gerry’s recommendation. People who had spent about 24 hours here told me to avoid it. I’ll speak next time about why those people are all idiots.