I have this love-hate relationship with guidebooks. For instance, sitting on the plane from Brazil to Canada, I was having an animated conversation with the woman beside me. She was coming to Canada to learn English, which at that point was not much better than my Portugese. We pulled out our respective phrasebooks and had a chat. After we got through the first few pages of hello my name is where do you go what do you do, she hauled out the Lonely Planet, opened it to the Ontario chapter, and wanted to know what was good. I read the chapter, and it was a good reminder of just how lame so many of the things I do when I’m out of the country are. Guide books funnel you down the beaten path. You should always do things that are not in the book.
That’s a great idea, isn’t it? It’s also a load of nonsense, sometimes. Cause, you see, in Brazil, Gwen and I went to a town that the book completely ignored. Not just the town itself, the entire inland region of Pernambuco warranted little mention. Gwen and I – eternal optimists – figured that it was going to get much more interesting now that we were away from the cocnut and fried cheese vendors. We were going to Gravatá, and Gravatá would be just fascinating.
The drive there was, actually, just that. Our driver was not all that familiar with the area. Our Portugese might have been up to figuring that out even without the non-verbal clues of him stopping at three separate gas stations to ask for directions. In his defense, though, he abandoned the traffic-clogged big highways for single lane roads through endless hills of sugarcane and villages which contained as many pay-by-the-hour hotels as they did mud huts. The “one to two hour” drive turned into four-to-five. When we got to Gravatá, there was more of the direction-asking, and Gwen and I went through an uncharacteristic phase of reticence. We knew where the hotel was, it was indicated on the directions (in Portugese!) that we had given our driver. It was also marked by a big sign that we passed soon after more directions were procured on the street. The sign was still there when we cruised by the second time, and even though Gwen and I had been having a quiet “I think we go this way” – “that looks like it’s the place” – “that’s definitely it” – “wasn’t that our hotel?” – “if he drives by one more time, I’m going to say something!” discussion, it was still there when we were about to cruise by the third time. This time we energetically worked on saying “acqui!” from our comfortable backseat positions, and were delivered to reception. I paid the guy, and tipped him too, but he seemed unsure as to what to do next. We weren’t sure what his instructions were, but he did seem intent on making sure the non-Portugese-speakers got checked in at reception. I’m not quite sure, there was a language barrier preventing him from explaining that our lack of language Portugese at the Portugese-only reception meant that we needed the help of our Portugese-only driver. In any case, I did convince him it was ok to walk and then turn the steering wheel (at least that’s the sign language I managed” and then it was “ok?” “ok!” “ok!” “ok” and he left.
And we, we were still in Gravatá, the city that the guidebooks don’t even mention, in a “hotel fazenda” (phrasebook: hotel farm). The hotel farm felt… um… like an undergraduate dormitory. Well, that’s not really fair, the room *did* have its won bathroom, and the door of that shut for all but three inches. When I tired to close it further, the door handle came off in my hand. We decided we could live with it. We also reached the same conclusions about the lack of screen in our window, even though having both the light on and the window open meant piles of bugs. Not that this was an issue for long, since the light failed soon after that. And when we went to unfold our blankets, we discovered not blankets but a hammock – which Gwen promptly hung up in the room, until swinging in a chilly room in the dark with bugs all around got old. At that point, we grabbed the phrasebook and went down to reception, and in short order three men with a ladder were dispatched to the room to change one burnt out light bulb. The phrasebook did not provide a translation for “since there are three of them, do you think the two who aren’t changing the light bulb could take along some fly swatters”.
The hotel was what it was, and we were determined to enjoy it. We even wandered around the grounds at goat milking time, and again at donkey feeding time. However, there were only so many animals, and the list of things they do is not that long – and I’ve seen enough cow patty production to last me a lifetime. Consequently, we asked reception to call us a taxi on one dull evening (they were all dull, so you know, but some of them had receptions, so they were dull evenings with manioc and cheese balls). The taxi driver wasn’t quite sure what we would do once we got para centro, and so he offered to be back at the same spot in two hours (even without a phrasebook, we figured that one out. We also figured we’d find some fun bar and have some fun drinks and delay going back to the not-fun hotel-fazenda-boring for as long as we wanted). Twenty minutes later, after we had seen what there was to see (twice!), we hailed a different taxi and went back to our fazenda jail.
There’s a reason places like Gravatá are not on in the guidebooks. And you can make fun of them all you want, if the choices are going to Niagara Falls or giving yourself a tour of Brampton, maybe Niagara Falls is actually the better option. (I said maybe!) Besides, the guide book provided our chief entertainment in the long evenings in fazendaland: we read every single line of description of Recife and environs, because we were NOT spending our last day swatting bugs in a hotel room (even if it did have a hammock). We were *so* going back to the coast. And drinking more caipirinias, even if that’s another totally touristy thing to do. Cause it’s also a fun thing to do, and when the high point of your stay in Gravatá has been watching three men change a light bulb, well…
And no, there are no pictures of Gravatá. I didn’t feel like taking pictures of former fountains with cracked tiles (now the repository of many plastic bags and whatever green slimy growth flourishes with many applications of urea).
From what I can tell, much of north-east Brazil is beach after beach. And yet, with all of these beaches, there are some that are more fashionable than others. In particular, Porto de Galinhas is lately considered an attractive destinations. The Brazilian tourist information is fond of pointing out that Porto de Galinhas beach has been voted the "#1 beach in Brazil". They don't tell you how voting occurs, or how regional the voting is, but it is nevertheless a major domestic tourism destination, and Europeans are not uncommon here either. Now, in my normal life, the "it" 
beach would not be the one I'm drawn to when there are other, deserted, less developed beaches around. In my normal life, though, I speak the language, do not have to consider personal safety, and don't require tourism infrastructure. 
This was Brazil, though, and there was no way we were going to go to Brazil and not experience the beaches (it would be like going to Germany and not drinking a beer, or goign to Beijing and not seeing the Great Wall. You can only make fun of the stereotypes associated with a particular place if first you experience the stereotypes. You must *earn* the right to be blase. I have not yet earned this, either - I still get excited like a little kid on Christmas eve if I get to go to some place, no matter how beaten the path I will be walking down), 
and the easiest way to do that was to go to the well developed beach town and ... well... go to the beach. We reasoned that it was still the low/shoulder season, and besides, we were traveling independently.
What we didn't figure out was that the weekend we were going to Porto de Galinhas was the weekend of the Brazilian national holiday, and that the town would be hopping. Or that it would take hours to travel the 70km from Recife airport to our beach town because of beginning of long weekend traffic jams. 
We really did time it perfectly: the bank holiday fell on a Friday. We arrived in the after work on Thursday timeslot. But, really, we had nothing to worry about - our hotel had arranged transfer from the airport using a local tour company. And those extra few hours in transit meant that we managed to round out our total start to finish travel time to an even 24 hours. 
After 24 hours, you have every right to simply dump your bags in your room and shuffle off to the bar and get the bar boy to help you with your pronunciation of dois caipirinias por favor. By the time he was satisfied with our pronunciation, it 
was time to learn how to say dois caiprinian mais, por favor. We were challenged with the obrigado/a our phrasebook gave - does the gender go on the thanker or thankee, or is it a matter of plural? we guessed, and tried obrigadOH? on our server, who beamed approvingly, but then we tried obrigadAH, and he still beamed, so obviously it was the tipping that was triggering the smile, not the fact that we were either implying he as female, or that we were male, depending on how the language worked. Regardless, the dois caipirinias mais kept coming.
Our room had no window. Well, it did, but the window had neither glass nor a screen, and faced out onto a lit corridor at eye level, so we kept the shutter closed. There was a small ventilation window in the bathroom, and when I looked up in the morning, I concluded, cloudy (harumph) and went back to bed. But by the time we wandered through the gardens to the breakfast room, the rain had finished and the mercury was climbing. By the time we got to the beach, which was all of 150m away, we were sweating. And since our hotel was near Cupe beach, and Cupe is not safe for swimming, we wandered along the surf for several km until we got to 
Porto de Galinhas proper. The closer we got to the village, the crazier the beach got with vendors and beach chairs and people in impossibly tiny bathing suits (note that the size of the people generally did not match the size of the bathing suit). Gwen started lusting after coconut water, but first on our agenda was swimming. This we did just south of the village, on a stretch of beach still protected by the reefs.
That's one of the things the place is known for, the reefs. Less than 100m from the beach are massive reefs, with pools in them. At low tide, you can hire a jangada, a flat bottomoed boat with a sail, complete with a jangadeiro, to take you out to the reefs so you can swim in the "natural pools" - also known as tide pools - or just go look at the tropical fish that get stranded in said pools. And sure, you could easily swim out to the reefs, but taking the boat was the thing to do, I guess. At least, we did it the next day.
First, though, the swim. Then, the sitting in the sun with a thick layer of sunscreen on. Then, a bit of a walk around the village. It was everything you'd expect a beach town to be: overpriced souvenirs, skimpy and tacky beach clothing, and lots of bars and restaurants. It was the latter that appealed to us at this stage, and we sat on one overlooking the beach - now at high tide - and Gwen learned that half of dois caipirinias is uma caipirinia, because I was going for cerveja (which I had to learn to pronounce). Also, we got peckish, so we bought a bag of cooked shrimp
(camarão - why is it that the first words I pick up in any other language always relate to food? oh, right, because I like to eat) from a vendor passing beneath our oceanfront patio. We followed this up with an order of macaxeira frita - yucca fries - and then some teethstickingly sweet coconut squares that we never did learn the name of, we just heard coco and saw sugary concoction and pulled out some money.
And so we killed most of our day. At about three in the afternoon, the sun's angle was already evening-like. Pernambuco is in totally the wrong time zone - it gets light long before you want to get up, and by five thirty it's completely dark. Thus, Gwen and I concluded that it was time to walk back along the beach to the hotel and tell our local barkeep about the dois caipirinias we wanted (and to change out of our swimsuits before going back to the village for dinner). And this we did.
Really, it was pretty tough, our time in Porto de Galinhas. We had to do all this learning, because we couldn't just drink caiprinias, we had to learn the names of other drinks. Also, we learned about the chickens (hens, really), that it was a euphemism for slaves because Porto was where the slave ships docked after it was no longer acceptable to have an open slave trade, so the rumour was that new hens had arrived. In recent years, the town has rebranded the chicken stereotype from slave trade to tourist icon, and thus the village is full of chickens carved out of coconut stumps. Seriously. Both Gwen and I purchased t-shirts featuring chickens. Because, really, who doesn't want to talk around with a cartoon chicken emblazoned on your chest?
Our second day, we hired a dune buggy and driver for the full day, and did a beach highlights tour. First up was the natural pools. Then we clung to the buggy for dear life while it went further north, to Muro Alto beach. This took us past some massive luxury hotels, designed for all inclusive but totally exclusive experiences. However, the beach itself cannot be owned, so we walked on the exclusive beaches in front of the all inclusives despite 
staying in a nice, reasonably priced hotel ourselves (though we didn't get wristbands like all the people in their gated complexes did!). After that, we brem-brem-bremmed our way to Maracaipe Beach, which our book said was quiet and known for surfing. You could have fooled us - it looked more like it was known for loud music and traffic jams along the beach. The traffic jams were so well established that there were roadside bars set up - you could buy a beer to enjoy while stuck in traffic. I am so not kidding.
Once we made it through the traffic jam, we hopped onto another jangada, and went looking for sea horses. Now, I thought that we would get to look for the sea horses, but the jangadeiros jumped into the murky water and went poking around the mangrove roots. It took a while, but our guy was the one who 
ended up catching a seahorse first, and put it in a jar to pass around (he changed the water a couple of times - I imagine it's in their best interests to keep the sea horse population healthy, since they have to catch one several times a day to satisfy all the 
tourists sitting in the boats who want to see a sea horse!) After that, we sat in the traffic some more, and then in a noisy bar that would have had an ok view of the beach if it weren't for the traffic jam in front and it was time for more macaxeira and cerveja and also some needlefish. Due to all the time we lost in traffic jams, the visit to the 5th beach, Serrambi, was scrapped, and we went back to the hotel. To round out our day of beaches, we went... to the beach some more (stopping on the way there to buy some cans of cerveja. We were thirsty.)
And that was our entirely conventional beach weekend. It was fun, even if we did feel somewhat Amish in our swimsuits which covered more than 10% of relevant parts. Now it was time to make our way inland, to a place not included in the guidebook, for the work portion of the trip.
Right, so, where did I leave off? With the passport that wasn’t in my hot little hands?
Yeah, about that. Turns out the Consulate in Toronto simply couldn’t print a temporary passport. They told me it was a catastrophe for them. I wasn’t exactly smiling when I pointed out that I was the one without a passport but with a non-refundable plane ticket to South America. They came back with, there was one possibility… if I went to Ottawa in person, right away, the embassy there could print me a passport. They’d even fax my forms for me… So to Ottawa I went, and the saga of the stupid passport finally came to an end.
And right after that, the trip to Brazil began!
The conference Gwen and I were going to began on a Sunday, which meant we’d have to leave Toronto on a Friday night at the latest in order to get to Recife on Saturday night so we’d be there in time for the opening speeches (the keynote sounded interesting) on Sunday. Now, if you must leave on a Friday night at the latest, there’s nothing to say you can’t leave on a Wednesday night, now, is there? Our work travel policy quite sensibly requires that extra days are at our own cost, but allows flexibility in dates of travel as long as the cost is equal or less than if we went for work alone. In our case, it was less.
It was less because we went to the beach, and stayed there until Sunday morning. If you’re already *in* the state of Pernambuco, you can make it to the conference site in time for a midafternoon conference beginning! And if you don’t have to be there til midafternoon, there’s nothing to say you can’t stay at the beach until Sunday morning, and since the beach was “fun” not “work”, we paid for the beach hotel even for Saturday night though *technically* we would have *had* to be in Brazil by this time already. Gimme my gold star for morality already, and then let’s get back to that beach. (Really, it *was* all moral-like. We get screwed out of lose weekends due to travel all the time - so, for a change, we *took* a weekend. It wasn’t even playing hooky!)
So, yeah. I went to a beach in Brazil. Some of the things they say about Brazilian beaches – totally true. Others – not so much. True, for instance, that Brazilian swimsuits always come in two pieces, and that the pieces are teeny tiny little bits of string and postage stamps. Not so true, however, the stereotype of the Brazilian beach body. While there were a few size tiny but impossibly endowed beach beauties strutting around in little bits of string, there were far more women with more realistic body types but wearing size tiny bits of string. Gwen and I, who had prepared ourselves for hiding under our sarongs in fear of getting green coconuts tossed at us for not meeting the Brazilian beach body standards – well, we weren’t so self conscious within about a minute of landing on the beach. Though we perhaps felt Amish… or at the very least, like we should be calling our swimsuits “bathing costumes.” Just saying…
And I’ll say more tomorrow, and upload some pictures and all that. Cause if I don’t do it soon, it will be like a whole bunch of adventures in the spring that I just never got around to, and if I’m gonna drag my camera everywhere, *somebody* needs to look at my pictures. Besides, after Brazil there was the Badlands, and there were the Rockies and standing in blowing snow, and starting next week there is Norway again, and I gotta catch up!