Ilha Grande :: Brazil
"Sorry, I was kissing a clown"
- girl I failed to recognise through all the red make-up smeared all over her face.
Places: Rio de Janeiro & Ilha Grande.
Coolest thing I did: It's really hard to pick, but I'd right now say sitting on the grass between two guys dressed as Mario & Luigi (Fidel Castro was also there) in the middle of like 100,000 people while the band plays "I am the walrus" in a thick Portuguese accent.
Coolest thing I didn´t know: The samba parade was once on the streets of Rio, but it got so big they got Oscar Niemeyer to build them a kind of Samba arena (the Sambadromo). These people really like their samba.
To be honest, by Sunday night I was getting ready to believe that the Carnival at Rio was completely over-hyped. After days of following block parties that were really just a couple of trucks driving past and everyone milling around looking menacing, going to block parties that didn't exist and going out with a group that were involved in two camera thefts and an attempted mugging inside 30 mins (Lapa at night, eh?) I was ready to write off the whole thing. If anyone plans to follow in my footsteps, here is some advice I'd give:
- If you get given a list of blocos (block parties, gringos) by someone who actually lives in Brazil, actually pay attention to it.
- If you're on a subway full of Brazilians losing it, and they get off at a different subway stop than you were going, follow them. You almost certainly don't know of a better party than them.
- Don't stay out late, rather get up early and expect to drink all day instead. The best blocos were all during the day.
I started following the list on Monday, and that saved Carnival for me. I got out of Gloria subway station and just started following the crowd. By the time I crossed the lip of Av Infante Dom Henrique (which on any normal day would be suicide as it has like 16 lanes of traffic) to see what must have been over 100,000 people crammed into a natural bowl (and on the pedestrian bridges over the road) to see a truck basically made out of speakers and a crowd in front completely losing their shit. The reason for this, was mostly because they were in the middle of playing Lucy in the sky with diamonds and the crowd were all singing it too. I'd been advised not, under any circumstances to miss this bloco, called Bloco Sargento Pimenta and it didn't disappoint. Crowds dressed in costume, people singing and dancing together: this is what I'd envisioned the Carnival to be like.
In possibly the cutest moment of the Carnival, I lost a thong (flip-flop to those who were wondering why I was wearing more than one) moshing to Yellow Submarine played at triple the normal speed and was ready to write it off because I was having such a good time. Then a little girl who couldn't have been more than 7 (yep, that permissive South American parenting again) started pulling on my shorts leg and saying something to me in Portuguese that I had no hope of understanding. She looked at me like I was an idiot and came back two mins later with my thong. It's that kind of place.
Tuesday was probably on par, with another bloco following the same road from Flamengo to Gloria all afternoon which consisted of what must have been a 50 piece New Orleans big brass band, heavy on the drums and basslines. It seemed like everyone had come out in costume for the last day, with Amy Winehouse being a very popular choice. My favourite Amy had to be the one with a tampon up her nose; I could have quite easily believed she was on a metric crapload of drugs for real. The band played for 4 hours moving slowly up the road with people trying to get out in front of them to sing and dance as they went past. They were accompanied by many people on stilts, including several dressed as the Wilt Chamberlain era L.A. Lakers.
As this was the last night of Carnival, and no-one wanted to go home when the band broke up at 6pm many of them formed informal circles and started to play together. We'd been sitting on the grass to hear what happened next, and it slowly started to dawn on me they were playing Seven Nation Army by the White Stripes. That set us off to dance right near the band, however the border between band and crowd was very hazy. I was once hit on the head with a trombone. They kept mixing Brazilian and Western favourites until well into the early hours of Wednesday morning, and you simply haven't lived until you've heard Smells Like Teen Spirit played like that.
One thing that I thought would have gone horribly right, but in the end went horribly wrong was finding a broken megaphone on the street on the first big night out and spending the next afternoon fixing it with gaffa tape and new batteries. At first I was a bit overawed by the power I was entrusted with, but pretty soon I was having a good time yelling stuff like "has anyone got change for a 50?" and "all the condoms made in November have holes in them. Please check yours now", inbetween singing big rounds of "I know a song that will get on your nerves". That last one caused me a fair few problems, with one particularly drunk Brazilian trying to take a swing at me and his girlfriend having to drag him away. At that point I thought Brazil might not be ready for me at 10x volume. I did get some random applause for my spoken word versions of songs I wouldn't have dared sing at that volume. AC/DC sounds almost like poetry when it's read rather than sung.
The random events were nice little touches, the kind of things you expect from Carnival. I was on the subway back when I could make out the sound of the entire next car singing and pounding on the roof in sync, at which point my car started singing the same song and banging away. The songs would then move up and down the train. There's also things you'd normally only see on the Internet, like that group of 25 hot teenaged lesbians playing Spin the Bottle for a cheering crowd. Or that guy painted orange who came up to us and after confirming we spoke english started singing Nirvana's Jesus don't want me for a sunbeam. That's the stuff that will stick with me.
One night of the week it's a must to pay a stupid amount of money to go to the Sambadromo, Rio's purpose built samba arena and watch probably the most impressively organised thing you're ever going to see in Brazil. Every hour from 9pm until basically dawn a samba school comes out with thousands of dancers, floats that blow the mind in their complexity and a single song on loop for about 80 mins that the crowd all know. The crowd wear their samba school's uniform and fly flags like it was soccer, which I totally didn't expect. I assume there must be samba hooligans out there somewhere looking to fight people who bandmouth the footwork of their school, or call their floats substandard. I admit to liking samba about as much as any hetro white Anglo Saxon male, but even I lasted for 4 schools, which took like 6 or 7 hours. If you were really keen you could pay to buy a costume and be in the parade, which quite a few tourists do. There was a girl in the hostel who was wondering what she was now going to do with the giant icecream cone hat she's going to have to carry with her for the next 9 months. I suggested it would become her default bus wear. You'd never be lonely showing up to Bolivia dressed as a giant ice cream.
So despite my best efforts I did manage to see some touristy stuff in Rio. My first afternoon I took the cable car up to the top of the Sugarloaf and watch the sunset. As predicted the Christ the Redeemer statue was covered by cloud, but in a very nice moment you could see it clear slowly - first his head sticks out, then an arm and if you're quick you can get your tourist happy snap with him in the background before the clouds roll back in.
The other big one was by accident. I was on my way back from getting my Sambadromo tickets when I noticed a big concrete cone sticking out from behind the station. This turned out to be the metropolitan cathedral, and standing inside there with the four rows of skylights meeting at a cross in the roof totally changed my opinion of what is possible for exposed concrete as a building material forever. It's probably the most beautiful building I've seen where they've made no attempt to hide the fact it's totally grey.
So after 7 straight days of parties (8 if you could my unfortunate lapse on the last night of Paraty) I got to Ilha Grande a wounded man. I couldn't speak, I was irritated by absolutely everything and I managed 14 hours sleep on the first night. This is a staggeringly beautiful island, and I spent yesterday walking 2 hours a direction through the jungle to white sand beaches and avoiding beer, which I suspect right now would actually cause me physical scars. I feel like I've taken on the Carnival spirit, which seems to be to sin as much as possible so you'll have something to give up for Lent. I suspect if I was Catholic at this point I'd be going into Chapter 11 to seek protection from my creditors - there would simply be enough time to do repenting and remain viable as an enterprise.
So it's a few more days of sweating out the booze in like 180% humidity before I go back to Rio to catch a plane north to Salvador. It's getting to the point where I'm going to have to make a choice as to how much more Brazil I have the time and money on this trip to afford, and then use that to decide when to fly over to Colombia and go down the cheaper side. The mining boom here has done nothing to bring down the price of Caipirinhas, that's for sure.