Understanding Brazil – Farra do Boi

Crawling along the roads of Santa Catarina at Easter time, there were a couple of roadside signs that caught my attention. The first one said ‘Atençao – Comunidade Indigena´. Now your guess is as good as mine why Brazilian motorists might need a sign warning them of native people in the area. Perhaps old tribal hunting routes are still used that cross the BR101, or it has taken centuries for these groups to adapt to the ways of the Europeans and their metal horses. Absolute rubbish, I know, but I really can´t think of a good reason.

The second sign very prevalent at this time of year says ´Farra do Boi nao é tradiçao. É crime.´ I asked what Farra do Boi involved and the answer took me a little by surprise. Knowing a little about Brazil´s two main Boi-based folkloric festivals, Bumba Meu Boi and Boi Bumbá, I couldn´t understand why another of those might be a crime.

Bumba Meu Boi takes place in Sao Luis, capital of Maranhao, as well as throughout the North East. The parades are re-enactments of a story that involved a man killing the best bull because his pregnant wife had a vontade to eat the tongue. This was a crime and the man responsible was in big trouble until the bull was resuscitated by magic and he was pardoned. Lucky him and so far so good.

Boi Bumbá is the craziest festival in Brazil bar none, more so than Carnaval in Rio. I´ve only seen it on the film of someone who provides the costume material but that was enough to leave me with a feeling that this is one party I need to see. The setting is the island of Parintins, a few hours downstream from Manaus. With a similar idea to Carnaval, two sides of the island, the reds and the blues, compete with costumes and dances to tell the story of the kidnap, death and resurrection of the ox. I haven´t enough room here to describe the craziness of 40,000 people sitting in a purpose-built stadium that is only used once a year to watch enormous dancing bulls on an isolated island sitting in the middle of the Amazon River. You really need to see it with your own eyes and so do I.

These festivals may be competitive but are generally a fun celebration for everybody, which even the losers can enjoy.

Farra do Boi on the other hand is something that you probably don´t want to see. It takes place around Easter time in various villages around the south. The poor boi is confined and starved, sometimes with food and water left tantalisingly within reach. After a few days, the celebration begins with the bull chased from his pen and basically beaten up by the villagers. There isn´t any point dressing it up. This isn´t the running of the bulls at Pamplona, or even bullfighting. No matter your opinions on those, at least you can sometimes enjoy watching the bull do some damage.

Farra do Boi appears to have the same pain but with none of the artistic merit, and is plain old-fashioned cruelty from the stories I heard. After a little run around, the frightened boi gets tired quickly, which is when the fun starts. A group of people walk alongside the weakened beast, kicking and punching it, beating it with sticks and whatever else comes to hand. It seems to be mostly a male past-time so I guess some proving of masculinity is the basic reasoning behind it.

Or perhaps it does relate to Easter in ways too tangential for me to understand. When the children ask why their daddies spent their day tortured a fairly dumb, totally defenceless animal, the men reply ´That´s the story of Jesus´

Around Brazil – Garopaba

Easter is traditionally a time of chocolate and crucifixion, a strange mix of pagan fertility festival and religious fervour. For me, Easter in Brazil seems to be the time that I head to the dunes and I’d like to make it an annual event after the way the previous two have been. Jericoacoara, a crucifixion, a full moon and sunrise last time, Garopaba this.

The area is possibly Brazil’s surf capital, and Easter weekend is full of surfers, girls who surf, girls looking for surfers, and guys who don’t surf trying to catch the girls looking for surfers instead of catching waves. I stayed out of all that nonsense, avoiding the busy waves by pretending that I can do it any time at home. I will though, one day.

The dunes at Garopaba (strictly behind Praia Siriú but who´s counting) are more fun and could well be one of the best bargains in the whole of Brazil. R5 to hire a board for as long as you want to play in the dunes, or you could even turn up for free entertainment. Even then, the slog up the tallest dune is worth it for the view along the coast to the southern end of Florianopolis, never mind the people crawling up and falling down it all day. Unlike the seriousness of surfing individuals, the comedy of sandboarding can be enjoyed by everyone. Laughter rings around the sand hills, with people of all ages bursting out as their friends set off down the slopes, spray up sand and then roll through it like a salsicha in farofa. Sometimes the body stops but the board slides gently to the bottom for extra comedy value. The laughter makes you turn to look every time to see at least the end of falls like this. Refreshing too to see parents giggling inanely as their children cartwheel down slopes using their little heads as points of balance for brief periods.

My particular favourite was one guy that I should have followed for the whole day. The skills required for snowboarding and sandboarding are a little different to surfing. The balance should be on the front foot, with the back foot for direction control. The surfers tend to crouch as low as possible towards the back, raising the board at the front and leaving them with no control. My friend seemed to have no fear at all and set off down the slopes before veering, sticking the edge of his board in the sand and tumbling down in a cloud of arms, legs, hair and board. Undeterred, he was up and off for another 10 metres before I´d even wiped the tears away. He somehow managed the feat of knocking himself over with his board, one foot coming out of the strap and the board smacking him on the back as he tried to stop running down the hill.

I wasn´t much better though, truth be told. The girls seemed to pay their R5 to have something to sit on at the top of the dunes, watching as I paddled my way down the hill on a plank that didn´t turn, trying to crack a dune that did. My ribs came closer to cracking and the sun was setting so I collected my board from the bottom and climbed back up. I couldn´t understand what the girls found so funny, my falls didn´t seem that spectacular, but I probably will when I´m still finding sand deep in my ears next Easter. See you in Joaquina for more of the same then.

Understanding Brazil – Funerals

The title is a little misleading, being based on the only one that I’ve been to, but my experience may help those thrown in at the cultural deep end of a Brazilian funeral, as I was recently.

The first noticeable difference with a Brazilian funeral is that you had better be prepared to drop everything as soon as you hear of a death. Probably as a consequence of the heat, if somebody dies one day, the funeral legally has to be the following day. Unless the family wants to pay expensive refrigeration fees. No time to spend hunting around for a black suit and a black tie, which may be why nobody wears them. Shorts, havaianas, anything’s good.

Having received notice of the death, we hastily got our things together and headed off to the nearest relative’s house. The funeral was due to start at 2pm, an hour’s drive away. We set off at 8.30am. The first, and possibly last, time that I’ve ever known Brazilians to arrive somewhere early. More than 4 hours early. We weren’t alone, even then, with most of the close family having been sat up all night in the cemetery chapel with the deceased himself. One of the sons preferred to spend the night waiting outside. Never having met any of them before, the introductions were a little red-eyed, and it didn’t seem like the right time for gringo smalltalk. There were some comedy moments though, such as the daughters introducing me to the man himself for the first time, lying in his coffin. He didn’t have much to say to me. I stood around for a while, chatting to other family members who hadn’t been seen for years, trying to resist the urge to use one elbow to lean casually on the coffin. It was at the perfect height.

By midday, the place had filled up, with the whispers of the mourners punctuated by the resounding boom of Brazilian men beating each other. Brazilians aren’t the most macho of Latinos but they still have their moments. Not wanting to be seen as anything but masculine, instead of greeting each other with a big hug, they put one arm around the shoulder and beat the other shoulder or the chest of their friend four times. Not three, not five, always four, and hard enough to not be seen as too affectionate. The poor sons had this all day. Sympathetic noises and a beating from scores of men, when all they really wanted was a proper cuddle which was obvious when the women did just that. Not many people spent much time actually speaking to them though.

The time on the sign outside the room had the family name with a time of 5pm. There was nobody else but our group, no queue to worry about. Surely some mistake? Apparently not. A hole eight hours of sitting in a room with a dead body and no booze felt a little too much. Being a Brazilian funeral, lunch had to be involved somewhere, so we disappeared into town for a couple of hours. When we returned, the atmosphere had brightened a little. None of the brothers were particularly upset, one being punished for telling jokes, another telling stories and making laughter ring out louder than the chest beating. By 4pm, somebody else was running around the coffin as a joke. I blamed it on the free cachaça I´d had at lunch and nobody complained.

The service finally started, the casket was closed and we trooped up the hill to the neat, deep grave. The gravediggers started to empty the soil from the wheelbarrow and I hoped that we weren´t going to stay until the very end. It would take hours to fill and after a long day´s funeralling, I needed a beer. Perhaps a vol-au-vent or two at the after-party. But no. Everybody went straight home. This is definitely not how we do it in my family.

Bernie the Berne

Warning: - this is a disgusting story and not for the squeamish.

One Brazilian creature that I’d never heard of before is the Berne. They aren’t very common but many people have come across them, possibly because everybody remembers their Berne encounter. Mine came courtesy of Blondie’s sister, Go, whose apartment we were cave-sitting while she was away in Bolivia and Peru. After a month seeing the sights of the Andean Plateau from the inside of a bus, Go came back with eyes wide open and tales of travelling that wouldn’t surprise anyone who had been through those two countries. They are entertaining stories but they are hers and I’m not going to steal them. Travelling from Sao Paulo to Cusco by bus is quite an undertaking, and a Brazilian girl can be far away from her favourite waxing salon. As no self-respecting Brasileira would submit to being waxed in a country whose depilisaçao is inferior to her own (and they all are, we´ve heard it many times), one of the first things she needed to do was pay a visit to the salon. As she turned over to have the back of her calves waxed, her friend doing it started to scream.

Now, some time before she left for Bolivia, Go had been bitten by some unknown creature. This bite hadn´t disappeared, and in fact had grown and caused her pain throughout the journey, sometimes feeling like it was scratching the itch itself. Living in an area of many dogs, much grass and many insects, a little hole from a bite had been invaded by the Berne fly, which likes to lay its larvae under the skin of cattle, dogs and occasionally humans. The larvae stay under the skin for 4-6 weeks, growing fatter on the flesh that they eat. They can grow to around the size of a little finger eventually, and have a fairly sickening design. The larva has a rounded back end, with three small rings covered in spikes towards the front. The idea is to make them difficult to remove or scratch out. They also have a pair of pincers at the front end, perhaps similar to an ant. After a gestation period, the larva will use the pincers to work their way out from under the skin, and soon make their way into the big wide world as a fully fledged Berne.

As Go was lying face down chatting to her friend, Bernie the Berne decided to see what all the gossip was about. He opened the skin and popped his little dark head out for a breather. This was when the depiladora screamed – “Aiiiii! Go! There´s a bichinho in your leg! I can see his little black head moving!”

Go left the salon still half-hairy and headed to the pharmacist. He applied a substance to encourage Bernie to come to the surface and told her to come back the next day. Go went. The pharmacist squeezed Bernie out from her leg, carefully, gently, making sure not to upset him too much. Half a Berne will cause more problems than a full one. After so long together, Go couldn´t stand the idea of being separated from Bernie. They´d been through the Pantanal, the Chaco, the Altiplano, Salar de Uyuni, La Paz, Titicaca, Cusco and the Sacred Valley to get to Machu Picchu, and came back all the way too. Hardy creature that he was and about the size of the nail of my little finger, he was still wriggling when she brought him home to show off possibly the best travelled Berne in history. Prazer, Bernie the Berne.

She toasted him a few minutes later though. Possibly because he hadn´t paid his half for the trip.

If you don’t know what a Berne looks like and for some reason want to see one being removed:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kPi2bHhTPn4

Around Brazil – Journey to the Jungle

What a time, what a place, what an experience. With no ayahuasca hangover at all, we stopped for supplies and headed for the dock. The twice weekly big boat to Manaus took an age to load. Uncle Mad had to follow us with his own little rib boat to fool the river police, big boats towing little boats being illegal in Crazy Town. He roared out of the darkness, circled Big Boat like a sheepdog with its flock, threw his rope to the crew, ran up Little Boat and climbed up Big Boat like a monkey to join us at the back. What an entrance.

Not finished with climbing, he decided we should go up to the roof. What a move. A crate of beer, the roof of the boat, a clear night, the jungle going darkly past, what more do you need? How about a full moon? One was rising over the trees, huge and round and yellow. We drank, we talked, we laughed, with journeys down to the toilet becoming more and more precarious. One slip, one stumble meant disappearing with a splash to alert the caimans and piranhas. We´d wanted to bring one of the 5 litre jugs of ayahuasca from the ceremony. Probably a good job we didn´t. Well...

As the moon died, we stopped at the Village of Mud and unloaded, loaded up Little Boat, climbed in, and headed down Wood River spotting caimans on the muddy banks with the spotlight. Turning up a tributary, we headed through the half-submerged trees into areas where the river widened into a lake or narrowed so we had to thread our way between the trunks.

All this as the sky brightened softly in front. The dawn chorus was starting, with huge groups of macaws screeching, flocks of parakeets panicking, and toucans gliding effortlessly into the tree-tops, wings closed. A million more birds, unidentified or unseen, added to the racket, and they do this every dawn of every day in the Amazon. Huge fishing birds fly down the tunnel of trees ahead of the boat, swallows dart, dive and skim the surface as they catch the morning insects. Neon-blue butterflies bigger than your hand dazzle in the first rays of dawn, others crackle like electricity as they dance together, spiralling like smoke towards the sky, and still more covered the floor and our skin, licking salt off the morning sweat. We could enjoy all this in silence.

The silence had started when the engine of Little Boat was turned off as we turned on to the sand of a tiny river beach four hours from Wood River and the Village of Mud, six hours further to Crazy Town but possibly four days, we were a long way from civilisation as we strung our hammocks up between the trees.

This was it. We´d made it. We were deep in the Amazon Jungle.