#Brasil

Could Life’s True Calling Be Life Itself?

#adventure, #alternative lifestyle, #Brazil, adventure, Brazil, Latin America, Lifestyle, natural philosophy, South America

Fretting the whole weekend about this and that, I found myself facing down that age-old question: do each of us have a true life’s calling? If so, what is mine? And while I’m on the subject, is there an upper age bracket beyond which the only calling you’re ever going to get is from the archangel Gabriel to notify you the Big Man is tapping his sandalled feet impatiently at the pearly gates?

I’m 51. Does that place me in that liminal space between youthful optimism and senescent dread? And anyway, aren’t callings for the ocularly able, who tend to be young and sharp enough to hear their future purpose drop like a pin before their quivering feet? Not like we mid-lifers, lugs clogged with 50 years of bullshit curdled with earwax. Ask any self-respecting 60-something and they’ll tell you that by the seventh decade of life a man’s true calling is the bathroom, given that the old bladder is becoming compromised by the ever-expanding prostate tucked under it.

Callings schmallings! You’re never too old to grow bold. In Scotland, never too auld to grow bald. History is littered with stories of now-forgotten legends who reinvented themselves while their contemporaries were busy nursing their grandchildren while their sons were dying on a foreign field for some megalomaniacal noble, and their daughters had already bled out in a dead pool of childbirth.

I am unreliably informed that 50 is the new 40, 40 is the new 30, and anything under that age is not worth exalting because for that you’d need to qualify as either Gen-Zedder or New-Millennial, and we all know that their idea of a true calling will trend anytime soon on Instagram. Likes are callings in and of themselves. The sooner we tiresome analogues realise that callings happen online, the better.

My hippocampus doing backward spooling all the way to the source of my weekend existential nail-biting, i found myself back in 1990 lamenting my choice of first undergraduate degree. Back then, the 60’s still reverberated through our Liberal Arts and Social Sciences curriculum with a modicum of respectability long eclipsed by today’s neurotic climate of S.T.E.M.. Don’t knock a good acronym when it makes POTUS declare one SNAFU too many. If you ain’t on board with coding, computational mathematics and the suffocating empirics of big data, you’re not worth the paper you are written on (or not, as paper is so 20th century). Back then, you didn’t have to be a loser with a capital L emblazoned across your forehead. Aspiring to become rounded in one’s repository of knowledge – a generalist as opposed to a specialist – was seen as, if not quite a conduit to becoming an all-round more complete human being, and therefore of the highest utilitarian value, then more or less acceptable. The trouble was, for us generalists the whole notion of a singular calling in life was kind of postponed indefinitely. Some felt the epiphany of true calling a few years later, while the rest of us went into teaching.

But I digress. I entered the weekend gnawing fingernails and bemoaning the absence of a true calling. (Or perhaps bemoaning my lack of perseverance. Some years before, I did find my calling but couldn’t stick at it long enough to monetise it because I was so distracted with serial callings, usually taking off on a big adventure somewhere in the world.) But where there’s a foreground of sorrow and self-pity, there’s also a background of various hues. Some either 1) reassuringly familiar or 2) depressingly familiar; others either 3) shockingly unfamiliar or 4) spectacularly unfamiliar. Was this trip a 4 in the making? So, there we were, motoring out of Säo Paulo en route to the Costa Verde (Green Coast), on Säo Paulo’s Litoral Norte.

The voyage starts in the dense concrete undergrowth of inner-city Säo Paulo. Being the world’s 4th largest metropolis and spilling forth outward in a haphazard forest of 20-storey tower blocks, barred street frontages, impromptu favelas, and shacks for the destitute erected in the central reservations of multi-lane highways choked with cars, it’s impossible to know where the inner city ends and the outer suburbs begin. First the unwary foreigner must escape a road system designed by 1960s civil engineers who, judging by the asphalt layout, were tripping on wachuma and ayahuasca over their draughtsman boards.

South America’s biggest urban sprawl is indeed a nightmare from which to escape but, once free of its insane hold, the surrounding countryside is a joy to behold. And on that ribbonous Rio highway that meets with the road that runs up and over the Serra of the Atlantic rainforest and down to the green and sumptuous coast of Säo Paulo state, my life’s calling started to take a weird and wonderful form. The rolling hills and fat, old Capricorn sun going down. The termite hills erupting on steep, grassy knolls like molehills from another dimension. The music. The light. The prospect of new horizons. Old memories to rekindle from the last visit to Brazil; new memories to forge.

And on that road through that cloud forest – roadsigns of capybaras, sloths and vipers reminding reckless drivers that the world is still hiding mystery and magic – that opened onto panoramas of steaming paradise it struck me like a lightning bolt from one of Brazil’s epic summer electrical storms: maybe my life’s true calling is life itself. Real living has nothing to do with science. It’s art all that way.

end.

Socorro Answers a Cry for Help.

#Brazil, Brazil, Säo Paulo, Socorro, South America, Travel, travelogue

Made ancient by granitic bedrock jutting through in megalithic outcrops, while at the same time made new by the accelerated growth rate of vegetation rampaging over every sod of this Capricorn earth, the topography takes a sideways glance at normality. It’s a split personality of rural France and equatorial South America: piebald cows grazing upland pastures that border dense strips of Atlantic rainforest. Nobbled hilltops, a punk mohican of Atlantic rainforest on one flank, scalped green on the other. If ever Gondwana had an affair with Occitanie, the hills around Socorro is where the child was raised.

There’s nothing quite like a great view to soothe frayed nerves. We left the madhouse of Säo Paulo later than expected on Friday. Wanting to escape the quantum chaos of Friday rush hour traffic, instead the invisible threads that bind millions to the city’s ailing physiology – with its high cholesterol and hypertension – took us into its sickly hold. A passing thunderstorm brought rain not in drops but in globules. Five minutes of deluge had the streets funnelling a torrent of water. As the afternoon wore on, I feared being held hostage to fortune in what would be a million-man race out of the city before dark. And so it went. Swerving hither and thither, we dodged four-wheel bullet after four-wheel bullet in our haste to pull off a spectacular jailbreak. And we almost made it the 25-odd miles to the city limits without incident. That is, until some inconsiderate arsehole (cuzaö in Portuguese – my new favourite, adopted insult) decided to cut us up by swerving violently off the middle lane to reach the exit (saída) and clipping the flank of our car which was motoring along on the inside lane.

Bang! Time stopped momentarily while fate decided whether to flip the car onto its roof and under the 18 wheels of a trundling road train, or to spare us with a mere metallic slap. Fate chose the latter. Stopped in the central reservation of a 6-lane highway from hell, cars flew past us as we remonstrated with the intransigent old fool, who blamed us for being in the slow lane, and therefore causing considerable inconvenience to his plans to make a sudden and spectacularly boneheaded exit off the expressway. ‘Sua culpa’ I said, which maddened him all the more. Meanwhile, I could see the red mist come down on my girlfriend. The offending driver refused to exchange insurance details, stating he didn’t bother buying any for his €15,000 car. Having given up trying to make him see reason, he fled. Karine snapped at the injustice, and an emotional catharsis ensued. Despairing, she insisted on going home. I said no way, so took the wheel and tried to make a dignified escape into the thickly-forested mountains at the natural delimitation of this red giant of a town.

Catharses often end in a profound sense of inner peace. And so it was with Karine. I placed a reassuring hand on hers, and reminded her that we were uninjured and the car, while pranged, was driving well enough. And best of all, we had escaped Säo Paulo’s potent clutches and were now under a tranquil blanket of night in rural Brazil.

We made Socorro by 9pm. The surrounding hills were just about discernible as an inky staircase climbing into the unsullied night. The town, now just a cluster of lamplight in the saddle of a distant valley, looked inviting in a way that only a boy from the provinces could understand. Our little love shack was waiting for us along the Rio de Peixe (Fish River) tourist valley, off the asphalt and down a red oxide dirt track. Old derelict outhouses that once served the Fazenda Fartura loomed in the shadow. Other than weak porch light from the few farm dwellings dotted around the meadows and beside lone arboreal survivors from a disappearing world of giants, we arrived to nought but bliss, and the sound of Earth spinning soundlessly through the void.

For You Beach Bums, Here’s the World’s Worst-Kept Secret

#adventure, #Brazil, #coast, A Costa Trindade, adventure, Brazil, Rio de Janeiro, South America, Travel, Travel Photography, travelogue

There are coastlines. Then there are coastlines. They vary vastly from pole to equator. Some are drowned mountain chains, others hilly escarpments ending in sea stacks, but most I can think of are fairly flat and innocuous. To quote American comic great, Bill Hicks, the place where dirt meets water. These level coastlines are where continental plains slope gracefully, but unspectacularly, into seas and oceans before falling off the edge of the continental shelf and into the inky abyss.

Just once in a while, though, you come upon a coastline which, for all intents and purposes, looks like it was designed by nature to strike undying awe into all humans. Occasionally, that awe extends to – now here i’m thinking bubbly bottlenose dolphins, leisurely leatherback turtles, and even that daft dog you always see barking at the crashing waves – creatures hitherto considered incapable of feeling awed by something abstract like beauty. Its every contour is divinely formed. Its lush, green, & pinnacled backdrop exists to try and upstage the coastline itself, although all it tends to end up doing is to add gloss to the whole picture. Both its outcrops of tide-smoothed megaliths and its oddly-placed vegetation could have been put there by a mythic giant who fancied himself as a bit of a stage designer-cum-cinematographer. Its intertidal waters are so transparent you wonder what the hell’s coming out of the tap.

Its mesmeric surf, unrolling waves onto the shore with all the panache of the footman unrolling the red carpet for his regal passenger, is so impeccably timed as to be the work of some unseen metronome: let’s call him The Earth Philharmonic Conductor. Its sand has been sifted so many times by the daily rhythms that it could pass for castor sugar if it didn’t taste so unlike sugar and so much like, er, minuscule grains of pulverised mollusc. Another defining characteristic of this perfect coastline is that it doesn’t simply disappear into the vanishing point. Rather, it is framed by virtue of being indented in the shape of a half-moon. Its farthest point, as visible by the human eye, is bookended by a mountain of Atlantic Rainforest that slips magnificently into the big blue.

Finally, the whole scene is capped off by a tropical sky, mercifully obscured by a succession of passing clouds that rest briefly in front of a blazing Capricorn sun in order to take the edge off the heat. But failing the presence of a shifting cloudscape, you – the lucky beachgoer – can always cool off racing into the rolling surf, whose temperature is an optimal 22ºC.

The stretch of coast I’m thinking of is one I’ve just returned from. Lying across both an ocean and an equator from the British Isles, tis true it’s far from here. In fact, it follows the Tropic of Capricorn about 43º longitude west of Greenwich, so that places it firmly both in the Western and the Southern Hemisphere. Yes, the sand exudes more heat than the average sole can handle, but there are shady spots, and tables and chairs under leafy fronds, and pretty girls serving chilled caipirinhas and fried morsels of freshly-caught fish. And away in the distance there are old, leathery hippies with beards too long for the sultry air, and joints smouldering away in their mouths. Music drifts in from who knows where. The singer’s language is exotic yet reassuring. Bodies come in all shapes and sizes, but unlike our overdeveloped world obesity is not really a problem. People who come here look after themselves. Elderly whippersnappers bob in the surf, forming a defensive palisade of golden skin and bone against the might of the ocean. I venture that this is pointless, but admire nevertheless their bravery before such a formidable opponent as the Atlantic.

The post meridian on the world’s most perfect length of sandy coast passes in a pleasant reverie. This is the sure sign of a great beach. An even surer sign of skin damage to fair types like yours truly, seeing as the Capricorn sun is now at its apex. The to-ing and fro-ing of the tide complementing the to-ing and fro-ing of my regular forays, from the spot where our parasoled table stands in the granite shadow of a wall of dripping vegetation, down to the world’s clearest water. I sip the dregs of my lime cocktail and watch a boy and a girl on the beach volleying a football between them without it barely touching the ground. She heads, he chests, she volleys it back with the side of her foot. This is impressive stuff. Never let it be said that girls canna kick a ball for toffee.

The day passes both without incident and with plenty of it. In a kind of Schrödinger’s feline paradox, I experience one memorable incident after another without there being the manner of incidents one usually associates with beaches on a hot day: pissed up louts and boors, stealthy gangs of thieves, drowning in the surf, that kind of thing. The first such incidence in my incident-free day starts with an uncanny feeling that i’ve died without a coroner’s report and then gone to heaven without really believing in either God or his long-haired son. It’s a cheat, and can only be got visiting the world’s most breathtaking bit of coastline. It then continues by dipping under the crest of a pulsing sea with my girlfriend’s son, who is beyond delighted to have discovered that such a place as this can really be in this world. The incidents continue with my girlfriend – no swimmer by her own admission – being upended by a wave, screaming in pure terror she hates me, before proceeding to slap me in the face for having brought her not only to a wild coast, but also almost to her untimely demise. I love her even more after that tiff.

What to say other than that was the noblest, most gratifying slap I’ve ever had. And why? Because i found the best bit of coastline anywhere. You could have stripped me of all my worldly belongings, subjected me to summary humiliation, and even proclaimed me dead from cancer within six months, and so long as these awful things were performed there where that sand met that sea, I would forgive practically anyone their everything.

You know you’ve arrived when all along you thought beaches and coasts came a poor second to the mountains inland. Having witnessed this Shangri-La, I’m not so convinced anymore of the inherent superiority of mountains over coasts. It was the best-kept secret outside of Brazil until I shouted my mouth off about it. It’s now the worst-kept. So, here goes….

You’re looking, but are you listening? See that little bite out of the green land due south of Paraty? Right on the South Atlantic ocean. The beach is Trindade, just inside of Rio de Janeiro state. Follow Highway 101 from Santos to Rio, and at every twist and turn of what is actually a 4,000km squiggle of bitumen running from Brazil’s south to its north, you’ll be picking your jaw up off the ground. This coastline is the stuff of your wildest dreams. See it before you see your end.