I'm just back from two weeks in Brazil and my head is buzzing. As on my previous trip, it was too good and too hard to get on the plane to come home. The namorada and I now seem to have established a rhythm of quarterly visits alternating between Austin and Brazil, a feast-or-famine plan which is as good and as bad as you might imagine.
Once again I spent most of my time in Rio, which I'm as smitten with as before. It's winter there, which means cool nights and warm days, short-sleeve and jacket weather. But like last December, when Austin was unseasonably warm and Rio unseasonably cool so they shared the same high the day I flew down, I seem to have brought some Texas weather with me: it was the wettest June on record in Austin and the wettest July in ten years in Rio. It rained for the first few days but fortunately cleared up before we ran out of movies and museums. The turning point happened while we were at Corcovado, the mountaintop overlooking Rio with the famous art deco statue of Christ. Clouds kept engulfing us with drizzle and the namorada was freezing, then it cleared and Rio spread out below us, complete with a rainbow, picture-postcard stuff.
I've still got a stars-in-my-eyes idealist's view of Rio, I'm sure. We stayed largely in the "Zona Sul" of affluent beach-and-highrise neighborhoods, walking in the Jardim Botânico, gorging on books and music at Travessa and Modern Sound, and eating ourselves silly. Some realism is creeping in, though. I have yet to set foot in a favela but we did make a couple of long trips through the working-class outer suburbs which are more like the Mexico-style urban landscape I anticipated before my first trip, complete with dirty air. It seems odd that Rio has clear skies and Santa Cruz doesn't although I guess that industrial pollution and more old cars are an obvious explanation. On the plus side, I'm feeling more comfortable about security, probably because the namorada has gotten over her own reverse culture shock and has stopped telling me scary stories; I found myself relaxing to my usual big-city level of alertness on the street, condition yellow rather than red.
Our big excursion was to Parati, a colonial port town about four hours southwest of Rio. It's a time capsule of perfectly preserved stone streets and 18th-century architecture, of course renovated into inns and boutiques -- a tourist playground, but I'm not complaining. The streets are closed to cars and in the evenings you can stroll around and take your pick of open-air restaurants with live bossa nova and jazz, a welcome alternative to the traffic jams and parking hassles of looking for music in the city. We picked an excursion boat at random and enjoyed a day-long trip out among the islands. The snorkeling wasn't much by Caribbean or Hawaiian standards but the beaches were great and the scenery spectacular. (Note to self: next time buy the fish dinner cooked on the boat, it's not a rip-off.)
On our way back from Parati we swung by the even tinier beach town of Trindade, a hippie-and-surfer paradise of beachfront shacks and campsites. There I got my first taste of the rough Atlantic surf -- a scary moment or two when I thought the undertow had gotten me for good, but I made it back. The locals seemed more worried about the temperature than drowning, so there and back in Rio the surfers and I pretty much had the water to ourselves. It was cold but warmer than Barton Springs.
So now I'm home, already counting the days to the next trip. Maybe Bahia in January. We'll see.