Brazil: The Movie

If you searched in Google for movies on "Brazil" you are likely to stumble across Terry Gilliam’s cult movie of the same name. There would be an unpleasant surprise on switching on your DVD player, since Terry Gilliam’s bureaucratic nightmare apparently has nothing to do with the fifth largest country in the world whatsoever. The only reference is the repeated use of a 1930’s song, "Brazil" which lifts the protagonist out of his miserable life and into day dreams of soaring through the sky with angel’s wings. "Brazil" was a signifier for a world of escape, a country constructed from the mind.

It was a sharp choice. " Brazil" means the country which had stunned the first Portuguese explorers with its verdant lushness, and the pre-lapsarian nakedness of its Tupi inhabitants, to wonder if they had found the earth’s Eden. A country whose rainforest is enormous enough to determine the ecological fate of the earth, even as it is being cleared to grow soya and sugar cane , the latter to make bio-ethanol fuel, ironically because it produces less CO2 emissions. That same morass of wilderness hosts tribes whose rituals and social codes and language are every anthropologist’s wet dream, some of whom are sheltered enough

from the modern world to be wiped out by an outsider’s common cold. A river wide and long still revered by those tribes as the serpent which gave birth to the world, where death and fertility and all natural colour and shape have been bubbling along its shores like a living laboratory of evolution. A nation where the world’s racial genes have been mixed into its inhabitants like a giant bag of M & Ms. A society of 180 million which houses people who travel to work in helicopters and which doesn’t house a lot of people at all. This landmass which in the 19th century offered the promise of a new life to immigrants of all four continents is in the 21st century viewed by so many of their ancestors -the desperate, the struggling, those who lack airmiles- as a prison, one which they nonetheless love ferociously. A people whose touching warmth and generosity lies alongside histories of unbelievable desperation and murderous brutality, histories which refuse to remain in the past. Brazil is a country of the imagination, because in Brazil, every story seems possible, no permutation of being too absurd, cruel or hopeful within its borders. I could look up the Portuguese word for "exaggerate" but I know I have no need for it.  For this reason, everyone has their own "Brazil", just as Gilliam’s protagonist had his, and anyone who travels there carries a script of their movie with them, in the search for its reality. These are some clips from mine.

The Protagonist

The sun is out over Ipanema and burning through my aviator sunglasses, which are hiding me from the waking world. The girls from the aforesaid beach are gossiping on hot sand in designer bikinis, and muscled men in speedos are playing volleyball with their feet. There’s an icy taste of coconut milk in my head where a hangover used to be, and a day’s itinerary of baking our skin into something that will hopefully become Tropical sexiness. Like everyone else, gringo and Carioca, I am reviving myself from the ashes of Friday night, sucking on the pink sugar-bomb called Rio.

The previous night might have been typical. We hit the district of Lapa at 1:30 am with Lucio, a shop-window designer in monobrowed shades and chequered Vans. Later, he would drop us from his social network when he learned that we didn’t like boys. We kicked off with drinks at his plush 10th floor flat in Ipanema, where Lucio’s tattooed friends were crawling up the walls and ignoring us. The living room was eye level with a favela less than thirty metres away, glowing clay-red and in full Friday night swing, clattering with cheap snaredrum shots of baile funk. I looked out onto the view with a gangly Carioca girl in skinny jeans and a punk bob, who shrieked uncontrollably at my every word. I assumed this was the effect of my flirtatious banter, until she pointed out that she was actually in the grip of a cocaine craving. "It keeps me balanced", she explained, helpfully.

We stomped around Lapa’s sketchy and thrumming bars at break neck speed, spilling the beers and capirinhas we had bought off street vendors. Crowds of fizzy boys and girls screamed, smoked, kissed, chased each other, ran away from giant drag queens stumbling in their high heels. I had only enjoyed three hours sleep in the past thirty, and bars and human beings and speech and the sound of beer cans opening were beginning to blur into one static frequency. I remember at some point devouring an entire stick of grilled cheese with my eyes closed. Two more friends of Lucio turned up. They had disturbingly neutral faces and one of them wore the type of shirt favored by dog-murderers from the Midwest. We bundled into the backseat of their car for the ride home, the dog-killer driving drunk and his leopard-print girlfriend riding shotgun. The car slid side to side across the heavy 4 am traffic as the two of them gnawed on each other like tigers with his foot on the pedal. Manuel gripped the door handle and tried to think the happy thoughts. We made a stop-off in a dank neighborhood for his girlfriend, who was "going back to work." Apparently I mumbled something about Brazil being overrated and passed out. From the events of that evening only the last one shocked me.

It’s about a nice guy who get his heart broken

I crossed over into Brazil by car, via Argentinean Iguassu, having just seen its vertiginous falls that afternoon. There was a suffocating humidity to the Argentinean side which blew my hair up into a reckless afro-bouffon that gave me the air of a mildly unhinged video store clerk. This, along with Iguassu’s sticky and mind-bogglingly fertile red soil, its toucans in banana-rich trees, sluggish caimans in the rivers and giant ants tapping along the floors, carried intimations that the country of my imagination was around the corner. A sense of numbing unreality filled me in the taxi as road signs and licence plates switched from Spanish to Portuguese. After seven years of a nurtured passion, one which I had channeled perhaps more energy into than more urgent areas of my life, I was finally on terra Brasileira. And well, that was it. Losing my Brazilian cherry was, like everyone’s first time, a little icky and no big deal. There were more bugs (for some reason they didn’t care much for Argentina) and I became afraid of policemen. Cut and dry. Brazil was not the land of the fantastic, or as one Brazilian defensively put it, the country "where we eat snakes and dance like monkeys". It was a place of shopping malls, Levis billboards, cholesterol, Beyonce Knowles, weekly lotteries, divorce, prosthetic limbs, bad jokes on the back of cereal boxes, and a singer named Wando who hands out tinned peaches to female fans. I had told myself I knew this but somewhere I must had the same naïve expectation as every foreigner who, as Peter Robb describes it, "came to Brazil to get away."

But let’s press pause on the sight of my heart breaking in a 1975 Peugeot and assess the situation rationally. I was on a border town, doing nothing but driving. What right did I have to expect anything at all at this point? This feeling was just the banal after-taste that accompanies a childishly simple realisation: that the places and people we imagine are not the ones that exist, but the ones that we need. It was time for the country of my imagination to burn to the ground, and for the real Brazil to spring up. Perhaps it would be something else entirely, but it would still be amazing, right? Right? Press Play.


There’s a Cameo by a Rock Star Who Can’t Act

"Sea, sex, samba and football, this is what the people are encouraged to be immersed in now, because it blinds them from thinking about how they are being taken advantage of, every day, by someone in power."

Fernando was a Carioca born and bred, having lived during one of Rio’s golden ages in the 1970’s. Brazil was riding high on it’s economic boom, "the miracle" they called it. A broker in London had told me how back then he would take Brazilians shopping in Harrods. They spent money like Arabs. Fernando seemed more at home in his own skin when he remembered Rio’s best days. "Back then, you could walk through the streets day or night. The people would see a gringo and say ‘hey, bring that gringo over here, let’s have a drink with him’. It was wonderful. That’s why all those rock stars came to Rio."

As a former executive at Warner Music, Fernando had great stories about both Rio and rock stars. Stories of Robin Gibb from the Bee Gees screaming as Fernando drove in and out of Rio’s 4 km tunnel, since Gibb was both agoraphobic and claustrophobic; or of going to the police station at 4am to pick up Ronnie Biggs, who had crashed his car while racing a friend along Avenida Atlantica, driving on the English side of the road. My personal favourite however was Fernando being woken up at five in the morning by a phone call from Malcolm Mclaren, for an "emergency." Fernando came over to his Copacabana flat to find one of the most cunning publicists in pop history stark bollock naked in the living room, swollen red with sun burn and crying his eyes out from the pain. "Help me Fernando," sobbed Mclaren, "help Malcolm the poor English lobster."


Then the oil crisis of the 70’s ended, and Rio, along with the rest of Brazil, spiraled into one of its darkest periods. Drug trafficking, mass unemployment and rocketing inflation transformed Rio, the dream, into one of the most dangerous cities in the world.

It seems that Rio has always been a city living in the past. To have saudades, or nostalgia (for want of a better word in English), is a requisite for Brazilian citizenship ; but it is Bossa Nova music which is built almost exclusively on laments for days gone by, of love lost, of good times gone, and it originates from Rio. Nowadays, Rio has a minor cultural presence compared to Sao Paulo and Bahia. Rio’s stock in trade is its history, and it still cashes in on the days of Frank Sinatra, Brigitte Bardot, Tom Jobim. If the tourist industry has anything to say about it, Rio remains the city of sunny decadence, is synonymous with Brazil itself, the devil with all the best tunes. To me, the art decos on Copacabana and the luxuries of Ipanema are a living museum, an old lady with too much makeup, repeating the same stories of the famous and dead men who courted her when she was younger and prettier. Much of Rio needs a lick of paint, and looks like a bad architectural dream of Miami in the 1980’s. There are still the Cartier shops and the Armani boutiques in Ipanema of course, but their red carpets outside are littered with muddy footprints and pigeon feathers. At the end of Rua Barrao da Torre in Ipanema is the gaping and ulcerous mouth of a favela, rife with garbage, street kids, and dangling wires from which the favelinhos jack their electricity. It must have all looked great twenty years ago I’m sure. Even so, nothing saves Rio from the fact that the city is shockingly boring, its nightlife conservative, probably because it’s dangerous to be out at night. Within my first week I had nothing more to do there, and spent longer than I expected killing time.

But make no mistake, at the right time, and the right place, Rio can be gorgeous, and so uniquely so that you can never quite write it off. Climb up Sugar Loaf Mountain and you will have a city view unlikely to be matched anywhere else. You are surrounded by oddly shaped, and oddly sensual blue mountains, gilded by Guanabara bay and speckled with dense covers of rain forest. In the distance are scattered dozens of tiny islets blurring in sea mist, sunlight, and circling birds. Even the favelas look enchanting as night falls and their lights form disjointed constellations in the dark. If I hadn’t already been down there, I would have thought I was looking at the most desirable city in the world. And I had other moments like this when I returned to Rio for Carnaval, when the city was much more electric, more willing to forget its burdensome self, much more Rio, in its element as one of the great Carnaval cities of Brazil. I watched the dawn on Copacabana beach which, as a nasal-voiced hooker over the road warned me, was a  dangerous thing to do. I left both hooker and caution behind, and clambered down to the shingle. The strange hills were sharpening out of the dark and into focus, while a spectrum of orange, pink, red and green pastel lights stacked themselves up into a Rothko-like spread across the sky, vivid enough to believe the outer atmosphere of the planet was a mere boat ride away. Those sky colours caught onto the face of huge Atlantic breakers, where they would shatter onto the sand in a million tiny sequins round my feet. Perhaps I had inherited a Carioca’s selective memory, but I couldn’t recall a better sunrise, and as the volcanic red glow in the distance bulbed into a hot and fast-rising sun, all I could think was: if only Rio were as innocent as it was beautiful. I now had saudades of my own for unremembered days when everything was all so simple then.

But that utopia, the Cidade Maravilhosa, is long gone. Not even Fernando, the proudest Carioca, would believe in its return.

This is getting depressing. Time for a Musical Interlude:

The Token Black Guy

I live in a Tropical Country
Blessed by God
And beautiful in Nature
In February
There is Carnaval
I have a volkswagen Beetle and a Guitar
And a black girlfriend called Tereza
Jorge Ben Jor- "Pais Tropical" (1969)

After my driver in Santa Catarina finished performing two-handed gestures to suggest activities I might try with Catarinese women, he returned both hands to the steering wheel and resumed to the task at hand. I took his appearance in: white, wiry, fifty, shrunk by the sun and in cheap shades, inexplicably dressed from head to toe in dirty tennis gear. He had a misogynistic and lonely air about him. I could just as easily imagine him throwing peanut shells at a stripper as I could watching telenovelas at home with mother.

What was my itinerary in Brazil? I ran off a list of places, he nodded his head along to them like the familiar song that it was: Florianopolis, Rio de Janeiro, Buzios, Manaus, Fortaleza. And Bahia. I had hit a bum note. He covered his orange nose in disgust. "No, no my friend you don’t want to go to Bahia", as though I had contemplated getting an enema for fun. He leaned over to me and cupped his mouth to whisper, though there was no one else to hear it. " Muito negros, e pauvres".

The incident was memorable for how atypical it was of Brazilian attitudes to race. But then I was not in a typical part of Brazil, whatever that may mean. Santa Catarina and its neighboring southern states, Porto Allegre and Rio Grande de Sul, were populated by descendants of Italian, Ukranian, Polish and most of all German immigrants. Unlike other parts of Brazil, it had skipped out on the mass migrations from the North, and as a result its people carry a genetic heritage much closer to a pure white than the rest of the country. A stroll through Florianopolis’ streets will show you men and women with those physical traits which Brazilians- for reasons beyond my comprehension- consider the height of physical attractiveness. Blonde hair, blue eyes, white skin. Not for nothing is Brazil’s most famous model- the sourly beautiful Giselle Bundchen- from Porto Allegre.

However impressed I was with Santa Catarina and its pristine beaches, I could not shake the feeling that its residents’ frigid sense of superiority was linked to their racial purity, to the fact that their rivers of blood ran back to Europe unsullied by Indian or African chromosomes. They were one of Brazil’s outsiders, and had grown fat with the admiration they received from the rest of the country (surveys show that most Brazilians would like to live in Santa Catarina). As far as I was concerned, the Southerners had lost out. One of the most heartening aspects of Brazil is that, the more mixed up your national heritage, the more Brazilian you are. The less you belong anywhere, the more you belong here. The boom of 19th century coffee markets funded a high point for the southern end of Brasil, particularly the cities along the Costa Verde- Sao Paulo and Rio. There was however a huge deficit of labour-power to keep up with demand for the black stuff. From there until the 1930's came waves of Portuguese, Japanese, Lebanese, Syrians, Italians, Eastern European Jews, Swiss all escaping the plight of their home countries or simply looking for opportunity in another. So far so New World. And yet more than it's North American neigbour a few blocks away, or the Argentineans next door, these immigrants did not hold fast to their old identities with quite the same defensiveness and hostility. Racial mixing was embraced without stigma, and Brasil remains the country with the highest intermarriage rates in the world. It is unclear what made Brasil exceptional, though some say the mixing of Portuguese colonists with Indian natives and African slaves began at the outset, so that an early precedent was set for its national identity.

This makes people-watching akin to peering down into a rippling gene pool, trying to spot the origins darting under the surface. A mixed couple walks past, a white man and a black woman. Take a second look. Their features have shifted like a hologram, the black woman showing white or indigenous features, the white guy suddenly a little darker. This was in fact the premise of John Updike's novel Brazil, a very bad novel, because who would believe such a ridiculous notion? It can hardly be said that racism doesn’t exist in Brazil, since something very close to it rides on the back of a national fixation with social strata and economic status. And yet the boundaries of race are certainly slippier, more tricksy. Your best friend might be black and neither of you knew it.

The Inexplicable Plot Twist

I had come to dislike Brazil, and my wallet hated the place. My money got me precious little save an unbearably hot hostel dorm shared with sweaty Dutchmen and gangs of mosquitoes. It was also a frustrating country, with miles of bureaucratic red tape plastered on everything. And yet combined with this is Brazil’s sly culture of the jeitinho (the little way) in all dealings, so that no one’s word can be taken at face value. You will book a room somewhere, carry your bags over there half an hour later, and be told the room is now gone. What took you so long?- the truth being that someone else offered to pay more for the room. This meant I switched between being taken for a ride and living in paranoia about being taken for a ride, and never quite getting the rhythm right. It was exhausting. The supposed wonder-spots I visited were guarded on all sides by hungry tourist operators, while national culture was reduced to a kind of simian take on music and football which showed I lacked the populist streak needed to be at one with this country. Sleep was fitful, and I dreamt of Buenos Aires. Manuel, who was even keener to leave, suggested one last stop, in Rio state. When we arrived there, I learned a key tool of Brasilian survival which, to steal the words of a poet, is to wait without hope, because in Brasil that is always hope for the wrong thing.

Parati is one of Brazil’s oldest towns, a grid of cobbled streets which destroyed my luggage wheels, and a fine collection of colonial architecture. There is jungle everywhere, made hallucinatory by the heat, and cooled by tropical rains that slip you deeper into a state of languid, low-blood pressure calm. Though the town relies on tourism, it is still a happy fishing village, satisfied with its own tranquility, the old fishermen chatting on corners, crazy sea captains selling you a plastic cup of moonshine. Tourist operators drop the hard-sell after the first "no", and invite you for a smoke and a beer instead. I couldn’t even get into trouble if I had looked for it. My sister's Cosmo magazines were right, love is about timing, and right now I needed this Brazil- for I realized that there were so many Brazils within Brazil, and still more within those, worlds within its grains of sand. This was one of the famed Brazilian alegria, of prioritizing a good time over a fast buck, of crystal white beaches on empty islands and total disregard for the boundaries of day and night. " Damn dude," lamented Manolo, lifting up his shades and slurping from the capirinha ordered from the ship bar, "why didn’t we come here sooner?" We agreed on this, nodding our heads like a couple of bobbing sea corks, rocking to the slow beat of Parati. In Brazil, my fortune shifted from moment to moment instantly; frustration turned to content from a stranger helping me out, or sunlight slicing through the heavy clouds, sometimes something even simpler than this. Once I learned this- and with subsequent visits, I still learn it now- I had the necessary patience to stay on, in Fernando’s beautiful country, and I have given thanks to Parati ever since.

What the Hell is this scene for?

A few weeks before, Manuel and I sat in Sao Paulo's main bus station waiting for a connecting bus to Rio. It was 6am, and we had passed 12 hours or so on a bus from Floripa. We were sallow with bumpy sleep and splashed out on a pricey cappucino in the station's more upmarket cafe. Our time on the road had been punctuated with rests at service stops that served greasy coxinhas (fried potato with shredded chicken inside), oily kibbehs, or loveless por kilo buffets. I recalled the restroom of one station, whose floor was speckled with hundreds of dying cockroaches writhing from a freshly applied bugspray.

The cappucino was rich, frothy and good. The cafe was quiet enough at this hour that I could make out a Bach klavier recording piping through speakers at low level. Through thin slits of glass along the outer wall the soft dawn was clearing. The city was on a plateau and from here appeared to be a fan of tall steel blades glinting in the sky, around which were clouds of noiseless air.

"Sao Paulo looks good" Manuel said, " better than I imagined."

I nodded.

"I bet it's a pretty cool city actually."

"I heard that."

A man in white was mopping the cafe floor but said he would leave us alone to drink in peace and went away. We watched the city drift in the sky,

"This coffee is nice," said Manuel.

Showdown at the James Bond Exotic Location

When the archbishop of Portugal was sent by the Pope to quash the riotous decadence in the state of Bahia, he was mortified at what he saw. The situation was hopeless, nobody could keep their hands off each other, landowners and slaves, house masters and their servants, and no regard for race or gender whatsoever. Desire played a double agent, at one minute promising a power shift to the servants, at another bolstering the masters’ sense that they bended reality here to their will. The Archbishop sailed with his crew back toward Portugal, but the ship capsized very soon after setting off, still on the North coast. He was met by indigenous tribes who did not recognize his spiritual stature but thought he might taste good. Apparently he did, and so did the other hundred men in his crew. Bahia: "the black soul of Brazil".

I would go further and take out the reference to colour altogether. History runs deep in Bahia, with the huge importations of African slaves who came here and to Recife triggering much of what we recognize as Brazil now, for better and for worse. Vital elements of Brazilian music, dance, literature, and gastronomy were formed by Brazil’s slave culture, along with the influence of African religions. The berimbau, a bow-like instrument with a deep twangy sound, was used for Capoera, and is perhaps the archetypal Brazilian instrument, along with the cuica (the percussive instrument that makes a sound like a monkey, and which puts a smile on the face of whoever hears it). Look for a great Brazilian musician, or writer, and the smart money will have them from Bahia, the others largely coming from Rio. Add to that the introduction of manioca and farofa flour, both staples of any Brazilian kitchen, the birth of the first favela, and the first arrival of the Portuguese to Bahia, and you have the early roots of Brazilian identity almost covered.

Bahia atill remains a source of decadence, although the penchant for cannibalism has diminished a little.
Paulistanos and Cariocas escape here for summer vacations and the many, many national holidays dotted around the year’s weekends. Once in a while they crane their necks off the chaise longue, pull their Ray Bans up and tell you how even they get ripped off like foreigners up in these here parts. At a visitor's glance, it blocks out more troubling realities through its stunning natural beauty and relentless dedication to hedonism. However those other realities remain at the periphery of vision, and it is easy to imagine the good times turning sour. You arrive in the state capital Salvador to be greeted with diamond hard sunlight and a city sky line that feels curiously empty and muted. Whatever high rises exist are enormous white and blue edifices cut into totemic shapes, their eyes and mouth made of giant mirroring windows, an African Futurism. The executivo bus glides out of the airport and the sound of the air conditioner hums. Along the coastal roads the humble majority make their way towards crowded beaches, walking with their children or pushing a peanut stall. The poor in Salvador are always black; occasionally you see a half cast woman with red hair framing a face of African bone structure and freckled skin, a lingering trace of those power games the Portuguese archbishop was so concerned about. Over the sea walls kids were dive-bombing off giant rocks into the Atlantic. It looked like everyone was having a good time, and yet a pregnant stillness persisted, one which I never expected given the state's raucous reputation. On our second night in Pelourinho, an elegant colonial town and the tourist centre of Salvador, a bateria of drummers marched through the narrow streets below my window. The steel and skin drums lashed out rhythms so irresistible that even as I sweated out a food poisoning fever in my bunkbed I could feel my toes wiggle. I wrapped a bedsheet over my shoulders and scaled down to peer over the ledge. Those drummers were surrounded by crowds standing impassively with their arms folded; men squatted against the walls glancing into corners; barechested teenagers in nylon shorts zipped back and forth through the static crowds on mopeds, two per bike and making themselves visible without purpose. Nobody would give themselves over to abandon, perhaps sensing the invitation to be half hearted, or sensing another reality being pushed down to accomodate them. Pelourinho's Tourist Police, with their red berets and khaki outfits, kept that cause for misgiving pushed down below the street level.

However there is no shortage of tales of seediness and misdemeanour in Bahia. In between me and the Bishop of Portugal lies a whole army of loose lips, and I have not been helping matters. On the 31st of December we caught a series of boats and buses from Morro de Sao Paulo to another island, Barra Grande. On the last leg of our journey we - me and Steve- sat on a jet boat limply tied to the docks of a town, which served as a connecting hub for boats passing to other parts of the state. A group of 13 year old boys - rapazinhos- had surrounded us on the pier. They were barefoot yet the leader had an expensive looking pair of fly Oakleys, and I tried not to think about where or who he got them from. But I did anyway.

The other boys had various random objects of their own which they showed us- as though each boy's identity was inextricably tied to that thing. A water pistol, a large stick, a beach ball, an old spooling cassette tape. As is a common and tragic blight in developing countries, one of the boys wore a T-shirt promoting a long-outdated Microsoft Windows application. The leader grinned through his shades and followed us around the pier while firing inane questions about our stay, like a taxi driver shuttling a foreign businessman back to the airport. The gang scattered and talked amongst themsleves, but then rallied and reorganised into single formation when the leader asked what was in our suitcase, demanded money, stepping up inches away from our faces. The town was little short of evacuated. Steve indignantly pretended he didn't understand, and turned sideways from the leader to face out from the docks across the water, as though he had become immersed in the fine view across the pond. Him and a cognac tumbler having a private moment. The leader grinned to me. "I hope your friend is a good swimmer." And then their objects were brandished and waved up and down at us with teeth bared and heckles jeered. I couldn't tell if this was a real threat or a type of feedback loop between culture and fear. Films like Cidade de Deus and Cidade Baixa (the latter giving a particularly grim picture of Salvador) has conflated Brazil with gangs of young boys pointing semi-automatic guns at the screen and mouthing pop pop pop. The result is that in the minds of cinema-going tourists the threat of stepping into filmic reality (replete with English subtitles) is available at any moment on a trip to Brazil: walking down a dimly lit street, stopping at traffic lights, ordering a hamburger with the wrong accent. Brazilians are well aware of this, and I wondered if these boys were simply brandishing a cultural signifier, expecting this to be enough for us to hand something over in gibbering fear. The fly shades, the stylized threat, the impish attitude, that Windows T-shirt: was I being mugged or re-sitting a class in Post-Modern Theory? Of course, all this speculation took place later, much later. Right now I held onto my luggage with a sweaty palm and tried to look menacing. It was a long wait before the driver arrived, a boy of 17, and who it turned out was a friend of the gang. Perhaps they had arranged for a little quality time with us, put a couple of gringos through the juicer and see what comes out. Perhaps my paranoia was reaching new plateaux.

We bounced up and down the crowded, narrow river, where a pirate-themed boat party was taking place. A giant ship dressed in crossbone flags and galleys took up the bulk of the waterway, flanked by smaller hawsers. Our boy yanked his tourist company cap close to his skull and cranked the waterjet engine for maximum speed. We cut past the ship and skimmed a small boat, licking off a couple of large waves over her crew. Seconds later we shot a speedboat by inches, and the ripples threw a few of us onto the other side of the deck , just recovering in time as we opened out in a stretch of clear water. A Swiss lady clung to the shawl around her neck, her sunglasses too steaming wet to see through. The boy skivvied and sliced between larger boats, with only his own self-confidence as our seat belts. This was perversely, my first moment of tranquility in Bahia, skipping off the emerald water as the river's throat widened and the traffic petered out. Between the long stretches of mangrove forest blipped shimmers of milky islets, some only ten or twenty metres across, where green coconut trees leaned over into the water like a congregation of village elders, and crabs jigged along the coasts under their trunks. The salt spray on both sides cooled our skin from the sun. I would spend the next week in parts of Bahia like this. Islands and old colonial outposts which makes one reach for words like "lush", "verdant" and "paradisical", rattle them around like empty piggy banks, and toss them out for sheer inadequacy.

A few minutes later a siren blared over our shoulder and the boy got pulled over for speeding by a patrol boat. While writing out the penalty the police guard, who had been quietly murmuring, erupted: "What the hell's the matter with you? You want them to go home and tell everyone 'Bahia is crazy, Brazil is crazy, there's no rules and everyone does what the damn hell they like? You want to make us all ashamed?" His speech was cut short as the boy looked back to his passengers, who were wriggling around the boat snickering . Even the Swiss dame had wrapped her shawl over her mouth to suppress girlish snorts. The policeman was confused but the boy was not. He knew that a taste of danger is exactly the Brazil thrill that gringos want to take back home to their friends. Far from undermining it, the policeman had entered stage right on que, had given our dinner party story the zing of titallation it needed. Even as a traveller fears Brazil's social dangers and claims shock at their injustice, there is a suppressed, voyeuristic desire to witness it, harmlessly, and at a distance. Despite my experience minutes before on the pier, I recognised the buzz for what it was. The boy had paid for that wish dearly, but at heart he might have thought he had not performed his job with reckless negligence, but on the contrary with a value added service for which his customers would have been too ashamed to ask.

It's so-so but call us when you've done a re-draft ok?

The first principle of good screenwriting, I have been told, is to know your characters well. You will begin with cinematic stereotypes. The fat banker, the homeless drug addict, the uptight moralist, the faithless minx. Then you add character traits which you would not normally associate with those stereotypes. The fat banker works in a soup kitchen at weekends, the drug addict goes on regular morning jogs, the faithless minx is a tireless charity worker, the moralist lives in the grip of godless despair soothed only by the sounds of Sheena Easton. Pepper the raw flesh of your characters with contradictions and they will have the flavour of fully-fledged human beings. Leaping off the page, they make their own choices, speak in their own tongue, and guide your story. Or so the book says.

These paradoxes barely pass as a children's scribble when describing the Brazilian self, though I am not always convinced that term belongs here. The Brazilian is not exactly a rag-bag of contradictions, but more a collection of parallel selves, like a pack of cards, each persona pursuing its own choices, with it's own fortunes, seemingly oblivious to what the others are doing. The outsider who tries to make sense of Brazilians without this knowledge is doomed to confusion. All he will see at first is a non-confrontational, happy go lucky man of the southern hemisphere, the homem cordial as the historian Sergio Buarque described him. Then he will hear about and see things this man does which could not sit inside one central self, let alone pose as contradictions. It is unsurprising then that many would prefer to leave out understanding him altogether and settle for Brazil's tropical and sociological stereotypes, since these are ready at hand, and Brazilians are happy to play those roles, for your own sanity and perhaps for theirs.


Though I tried to understand Brazil as well as I could in my first three months, I had to concede that its people were elusive to me. The human math I knew just was not working here. I also had been moving around for some time, and the problem with backpacking is you only learn the same thing as every other backpacker, which is to say almost nothing. I had promised to transcend the initial stereotypes, but the truth was that my Brazilian characters were at best still inhabiting a first draft stage of being. Upbeat, lascivious, grab-ass with opportunism, hedonistic, and with shades of criminality, this gallery was no better than the episode of The Simpsons where Homer gets kidnapped in Rio, except I had the grace to not give the kidnappers Mexican accents. To understand Brazilians would need more time, more stasis, an apartment, more language, a little rent, and a little more madness.


Perhaps that was what drew me to a city which did not typify the old casting couch of actors I had met the first time round. When I came up and out from that city's subway stop and onto the street I recognised it for what it has always been known to be. It was strictly business: ugly, polluted, dangerous, far from cheap though cheerfulness could still be found, in forms not always good for one's health. It is not somewhere you would choose to travel across the world to; it is supremely difficult to survive in, and yet it would do it injustice to call it anything less than an adventure. Brazil, as my friend Karim sagely told me, is not for amateurs. By that yardstick, I had chosen the most Brazilian city of them all.

Postcards from the Edge, or somewhere very close to it

Running for the Horizon…

…Is an apt way to describe what your average backpacker lives for. And they will admit it as such, and not without some shame. They wait at countless bus stops, schlep around with their tents, walking boots, and gas cookers dangling off their backs; they endure the gurgling stomach bugs, swollen insect bites, and the crouching over medieval toilets- all to reach that Shangri La.

But here’s the thang: as soon as have they slung their backpacks down at the hostel and taken a look outside, they start guiltily dreaming about the next place on their itinerary, even further off in the distance. The horizon remains a constant tease to a traveler, and they keep running for it knowing full well they can never get there. It’s a game we’ll always lose, and we like it that way. But what happens if, for once, you seem dangerously close to winning?

You start running back in the other direction. That’s exactly what I did on a twisty coastal road in Puerto Piramides, Patagonia, on the 52nd parallel. I was running away from the perfect sunset, high over Peninsula Valdes, with a triangle of blue eagles circling over me and a road runner beep-beeping alongside me. We had walked miles to reach that sunset, waited for an hour in the bitter cold to see it, and sacrificed days and personal hygiene to travel to its closest town. We huddled on a sea cliff, holding down our hoodies from the sea wind which had blasted the surrounding trees down to dead trunks. No one was around. Sea lions dozed on the coastal flats below us, at a safe remove from the Southern Right whales hissing and steaming at the water’s edge. On either side were the jaws of the bay, huge white cathedrals of cliffs. In the distance we made out a school of dolphins leaping in sine waves across the peninsula, and then the air went cloudy and blood-red. It was stunning and unreal. Suddenly I wanted to go home. I needed to check my email. I wanted my MP3 player. I longed for my hostel with the Brazilian manager who played Rod Stewart records too loudly . How ungrateful a sod was I?


It’s the End of the World Jim, but…

Patagonia is touted by the Argentine tourist board as the end of world destination. By extension this also makes it the ultimate traveler’s brag. Next time some undergrad in a sari tells you they backpacked through Thailand or got diarrhea in a Goan Ashram, you can slay them with the magic word: Ushuaia. The southernmost city in the world, on the 54th parallel, off the Beagle Channel, tottering on the edge of Antarctica. Nothing lies beyond it except a harsh freezing continent, devoid of all human presence or intelligence; and after that, Australians. This is its appeal, and its also part of the problem. Neither heavy marketing nor the tourist development since the economic crash can hide the fact that Patagonia is a desperately cold and desolate place; an area the size of France and Spain combined populated by 3 million (population density: 1 person per square km), fit for human habitation by the skin of its teeth. It’s so lonely you might interpret it as romantic. If you want to touch the horizon, just be careful what you wish for- it takes forever to get back from there. I may as well have been running on the moon.



Road to Nowhere….

We boarded the bus in Buenos Aires gibbering about our itinerary. Our entourage was made up of two German doctors, a dry witted Mexican, and of course, one clever-pants lawyer. I nodded to myself, Buddha-like: we were practically bullet-proof. I sat back and projected my Arctic fantasies on the bus TV screens. I saw myself giggling at Magellan penguins tumbling over each other like dominoes. I cut a piece of ice from a glacier and dropped it into a whisky tumbler. I tossed a fish at a sea lion who gulped it instantly, before we hugged and laughed like idiots, man and beast, arm and flipper. I sat at the edge of nowhere and watched the sunset, and didn’t want to leave.

After a few hours of the bus conditions some of my penguins got sent to the guillotine. Argentina is a developing country, so dwelling on its inadequacies is a smug and pointless cultural exercise. So let me flip this on its head and say I wasn’t stoic enough to take the choking heat and mosquitoes nibbling at my ankles. Or the bus food, which played an obstinate traffic warden in my guts for the next week. Nor was I Taoist enough to sleep through the constant flow of water tapping my forehead from the broken air conditioner. I possessed inadequate Zen to become one with my seat recliner, which broke off at first attempt and sat impotently in my hand. And the Rutger Hauer movie just sucked. And still 18 hours to go.

Red Dragons at the End of the World

The Andina Plan was a theory espoused by some activists (who some call conspiracy theorists, others anti-Semites) that a Zionist movement planned to invade Patagonia in 1986. Even the most paranoid of visitors would have a hard time swallowing this. The area suffers from crippling disadvantages: its isolation and undeveloped roads makes it a poor trading spot, long-standing tensions between landowners makes it an unstable farming region, and there are only so many ways you could dine on baby seal in a manner both kosher and entertaining.

None of these factors were of much concern to the Welsh. In 1865 a hundred and fifty three

Welsh men, women and children set sail from Liverpool for Port Madryn. They were part of a failed independence movement from the English, who threatened their distinct form of Christianity, their language, and one might venture, their adorably troll-ish accents. A man named Lewis Jones waited to meet them on the docks. Jones had successfully negotiated with the Argentine government for an area where they could settle, and promised his countrymen a fertile and spacious land. They arrived, bitterly disappointed. The harsh conditions made farming impossible, leading to starvation and death. A few entrepreneurs set out to look for gold in Telehuche Indian territory and were returned with their genitals stuffed in their mouths. The government also surrounded the town with Argentine flags, in case anyone got any clever ideas about separatism. Gradually, they established something like life there, and the result was three towns- Trelew (literally, “Town of Lewis”) Rawson, and Gaiman.

Mind the Gap

I had passed many billable hours as a paralegal thinking and googling about Welsh Patagonia. The notion of a Welsh colony in the most far-flung area of Latin America was so improbable that I had to see it, more than any natural wonder of the region. At the bus station in Trelew I waited to walk into a green village, shout out “Hey Daffyd!” and hear a hundred men drop their leeks at the sound of their name. What I got was a wholly Latin American city, modeled on Warsaw circa 1983. It’s economy centered around mineral mining, with empty bars and shops that closed early. Kids lingered outside a gas station at 1 in the morning, waiting for something to happen. There was nothing to do but wait.

You Can Check Out Anytime You Like

Our hostel for the night was Residencio Argentino. It overlooked the town square, which functioned as a drop-out zone for drug addicts and dealers at night. It was pitch black when we got there, since there were no street lights. A pregnant girl with indigenous features kept the desk clerk company and watched Macguiver all day. When I asked her for directions to the bus station, which was around a minute’s walk away, she said she had never been there before. He showed us up to our room. The hostel interior was entirely of skull-grey concrete with giant penguins and sunsets nailed to the walls. A middle-aged blonde in tracksuit bottoms slipped into the room next door and left two hours later. Our room was around eight by ten feet in size. A fistful of ripped wires dangled off the shelf where a TV used to live. The reading lamps buzzed like locusts, and lit up tiny spots of blood on the wall. “Its en-suite” chirped the clerk. He wasn’t kidding. It was so en-suite the toilet practically functioned as my second pillow. Manuel laughed, I cried. Manuel laughed harder. I heard the clerk shut the door on his way out while I examined the shower. An ambiguously brown, semi-solid blob was spattered on the shower floor, forming a mild crust. I must have done something very bad in life to deserve this. I didn’t know whether to stomp around the room and flagellate myself for my sins or check myself into the nearest Howard Johnson. I stepped back into the room. Manuel was springing up and down on his mattress, which made a libidinous squeaking noise, laughing hysterically.

No Tea or Sympathy

The last vestiges of Wales are in Gaiman. It’s a sweet, dusty town with roses on the lawns and yellow and pink houses named Carlos Lewis and Paulo Davis. White churches book-end it and Welsh tea houses and a canal run through it. We shuffled for a few miles towards Ty te Cardydd, reputedly the best tea house in South America. On-route were large farms with horses snorting in the fields and hay stacks piled along the fences. 1940’s Dodges sat by the roadside with missing wheels. I gawked at the residents, like the red haired, green eyed man, who looked not unlike a Milwall supporter. Or a tall gangly girl with all the inoffensive features of a middle-class English blonde. They were Anglo-Saxons whose bodies had been invaded by Spanish-speaking aliens.

We were greeted at the tea room by Princess Diana, who smiled at us in the foyer. The Princess of Wales had come here in 1995 to visit her most far-off flock, and a national day of mourning was held each year in Gaiman on the anniversary of her death. We were exhausted by the heat and crammed into a corner. A fountain trickling in the courtyard reminded me how thirsty I was. There was no menu. You could only order a full set, with tea and a butterload of 25 cakes and trimmed sandwiches, for a whopping 35 pesos a person. My mouth and skin were scorched by the sun and all I wanted was a cup of tea. I stood up to perform a classic routine of English indignation, which proved to be my downfall. We walked all the way through the village I said firmly, rode from another town to come here, and we really don’t want any cakes. The old lady smiled and shook her sad turtle’s head, caked in white make-up and burrowed deep into the shoulders. Her eyes never moved when she smiled. Carrot and stick Omar, carrot and stick. We came all the way here because it was the best tea house in Gaiman, would it not be at all possible to just have a pot of tea? This was Elena Sanchez Jones. Her mother arrived here at the beginning of the last century from Bangor, to find that Wales which was free of the English. Now here was one groveling for a cup of tea in her mother’s house. Was there any wonder that this Englishman left with his mouth no wetter than before?


Why did the Cloud Cross the Road?

Ed was a chubby English photographer at the internet café on our way out of town. He had come to Gaiman six months ago to take pictures of Welsh life in Patagonia. “Its so in the middle-of- bloody nowhere” he giggled, “who would ever find you here?” Gaiman was an incredulously bad joke to him, and he couldn’t help repeating the punch line to himself. He was staying for good now. He had a vegetable garden and a girlfriend. “This place is like the 19th century. You can’t slaughter livestock except in your own home.” He had photos of his girlfriend’s father and uncle slaughtering a pig in their back yard. Would I like to go see them at the exhibition round the corner. “And could you sign your name in the comments book while you’re there?”

On the road out of town I ran looking for a dust-cloud. You found bus stops here when you saw a dying dust cloud where one had just left.

Half-Empty or Half Full?

In Bruce Chatwin’s travel classic In Patagonia, he describes his time in Rio Gallegos as follows:

“I passed through three boring towns, San Julian, Santa Cruz and Rio Gallegos”

I won’t bother adding to a master. The reason we had traveled 18 hours there was for a bus connection to Ushuaia. But now there were no buses available till Monday. Today was Friday. We just had to spend four days here. I focused on a nightclub nearby, a dusty black building with no windows, and lined with giant Egyptian statues in fake gold. It was ignored and looked like an unwanted gift from an alien planet.

We caught the next bus twenty minutes later to El Calafate, on the Chilean border, and I left Patagonia with only half a brag, since I would never make it to Ushuaia.

The Beauty of Being Numb

Perito Moreno is the most fascinating city in Patagonia. It’s sixty metres high, five kilometres long, and stands in the crystal-blue Lake Argentina, surrounded by fresh pine forests and moutains. Unfortunately its also uninhabitable, since it’s constructed wholly from ice, and is the largest drifting glacier in South America. We rented a little Fiat for the day and drove there from El Calafate to Parque Nacional dos Glaciares, listening to Arctic Monkeys (no irony intended). Back in El Calafate it had been a hot bright day, but the light got dimmer as we drove up, and we rolled up the windows and turned on the heater. Eventually we were driving through the clouds, which tore their bellies on the tips of the mountains and brought heavy precipitation on the windshield. We turned on the wipers, and stopped talking. By the time we parked and I was scrambling down a hillside in the rain I could already hear it.

A howling wind pours off it and blasts your eyes and lungs, until you have to turn away. It’s deep green and ultramarine body groans and crackles, like it had drifted into the lake through a wrong turn and was scrambling to get back to the Antarctic. Its ferocity perhaps explained why the masses of Chilean and Israeli tourists cheered every time another of its limbs cracked and thundered into the lake. Maybe it made it a little less, you know, scary. Three cheers for global warming. I stared at it overwhelming the whole landscape for two hours, until I was numb with cold and didn’t care. It’s rare for your expectations to be matched, rarer still for them to be surpassed. I was speechless, and I was going to make this moment last as long as I could.

Raindrops ain’t falling on my head

More than the world’s end, Patagonia is also a place of beginnings. Alongside Welsh colonists and English photographers whose mothers should probably be a little worried about them, the history of the region is filled with starts, both fresh and false. Some of the earliest fossil records and dinosaur bones were found in Patagonia. They roamed the land prior to its severance from Australia, where very similar dinosaur remnants are also found. A couple of evolutionary minutes later, Butch Cassidy arrived with the Sundance Kid, their guns still warm from robbing the First National Bank in the U.S. Cassidy came to the land of nowhere for a new life, and built an estancia (a farm house) where he could raise sheep and eke out his days in happy oblivion. But the silence clearly got to Butch like everyone else, and he reputedly robbed a bank in Rio Gallegos. One new beginning wasn’t enough for Cassidy. Instead, he led a number of lives and went on the run through Patagonia under three names. Accounts of his exploits diverge, some suggesting that he was caught in several different places, and killed on three separate occasions. Contrary to the movie, his sister said he never died in Bolivia in 1907, but passed away quietly in Spokane in 1937. But Patagonia is a land of conflicting stories and endless conspiracy theories, and there is sky and space enough for them all to drift aimlessly without resolution. Who else began here, for the first or second time? Nazis, Big Foot, Shakespeare’s Caliban (suggested to have been based on a Telehuche Indian), male witches, amongst others. The land is a blank canvas on which any psyche can be projected.


Our upstairs room has a great view of your childhood

I got to Bariloche swearing to never set foot in a bus ever again. Unfortunately this was a lie, and I knew it. But I did meet someone who stood behind their vow. Anna came from Sweden to visit Patagonia on her gap year after high school, and never left. There were gaps in her account about what she had left behind in Sweden, which she never missed. But the hostel at which she worked was telling enough. Without a doubt one of the most perfect places in the world to rest your head, La Morada is in the mountains, seven hundred metres above sea level, and accessible only with a 4 X 4 vehicle. It gives a 180 degree view of Bariloche’s lake, log cabins and green islets, and is surrounded by sugar frosted Andes on all sides. She lived and worked here with the bushy-bearded owner of the hostel, Eduardo, and his svelte Italian wife, Cecilia. They got up early in the morning to chop wood, work on the hostel, and prune the morass of trees and bush crowding it. In the evenings they ignored the large cable TV and listened to each other talk animatedly about their day, as though they hadn’t been together the whole time. When it turned chilly, Anna and Cecilia threw logs into the fireplace while Eduardo sat and sipped the red wine which they had opened for him. Eduardo, who possessed the quiet charisma of a cult leader, taught his women (for that is what they were) chess. He was an expert player, and I watched him defeat several upstarts in four or five swift moves, with the two women always watching, learning at his side. Anna insisted she would stay forever in this disquietingly perfect family life, perhaps over compensating for the past by remaining in a permanent Heidi-like childhood. Whether it proves to be a more successful story of new beginnings than Butch Cassidy I couldn’t say; but having stayed in La Morada, I would say we could all do with another childhood, even if just for ten days. Maybe there wasn’t much to do here either, but I enjoyed not doing it very much.

…and I feel fine.

The horse I rode up through the Andes was called Reina, meaning “queen”. She was an anxious day-dreamer who hated to get left behind. She moved at a slow, haughty pace, ignoring vicious dogs that chased and barked at her. But once she realized the other horses were way ahead of her, she would break out into a jaunty, bouncing canter which made sitting down hellish for the next two days. We were led through our six hour ride by a lively and pocket-sized gaucho, who made no attempt to hide his amusement at watching gringos struggle wide-eyed with their horses as we crossed hair-splitting mountain peaks, slushed through deep rivers and galloped fast along snowy pine forests whose tree branches slapped me continually in the face. But I can forgive him, and Reina. During my ride, the place had cast a spell on me, as it did on my 25 km cycle through its national parks.

I was not prepared for the luxurious box of Swiss chocolates that is Bariloche. Argentina is a country made of countries, and here was Switzerland, Germany and Austria crammed into one fine set of pralines. German migrants had come here and designed the central square of town, which was a quadrangle of pine trees and log cabins. They were drawn to the area’s resemblance to their Heimat, and certainly the benign forests, red cable cars and relaxing mountains tuck the words “South” and “America” far into the corner of your mind. To complete the picture, Bariloche also produces the best chocolate in Argentina, which I can confirm has a texture like butter and the giddy dopamine buzz of something close to crack. After leaving for Patagonia in such an adventurous spirit, I am ashamed that it was my favourite place in the region. Because Bariloche is not some wild frontier at the end of the world, but a primary tourist town for Argentineans, who come here for school graduation parties, to stuff their faces in its reputable restaurants, and to ski. No rich Porteno is complete without a summer lodge here.

But be damned if I was no Antarctic Scott. It has all the beauty I needed from Patagonia concentrated in one place. It has real supermarkets (i.e. they sold vegetables which hadn’t been rotting in their boxes for days), shops and cinemas, and offers more cycling, rafting, and hand-gliding than I could have hoped for. I also had the unnerving but on the whole pleasant surprise of bumping into Jake, a friend from London, at La Morada, that remotest of hostels. There, the four of us cooked excellent steaks, played chess, and sipped full-blooded red wine from Mendoza till the wee small hours. I had to get to the edge of human civilization to realize that I was no adventurer, that I didn’t want silence or endless empty plains dotted with lonely white catholic crosses, or open roads that never knew how to close. All I wanted was a great view and a chat by the fire, and I had found that Patagonia finally, here in Bariloche. Sure, it’s nice to get away from it all at the end of the world, but hell, you could still use some good company along the way.

How to Disappear Completely

Rio de Janeiro is called the Ciduade Marvilhosa, and why not? Without even having been there, I can recommend a dozen things to do for any enquiring traveler. Christ the Redeemer, Sugar Loaf Mountain, trekking in the jungle, beautiful miles of beach along Ipanema and Leblon, Oscar Nemieyer’s gorgeous silver spaceship design of the Museum of Modern Art. Marvilhosa indeed.

Some German travelers new in town asked me what the essential sights were in Buenos Aires. At first I thought it was a trick question. The little hamster in my brain woke up with a jolt. Um, well there’s the obelisk on Avenida 9 Julio , and Recoleta cemetery. So…. that’s a village populated by dead people and a large rock. Silence. The hamster was starting to wheeze. Oh and there’s the president’s house, which is half pink and half white, which is quite funny really isn’t it? I cleared my throat, I heard water dripping from the upstairs tap. I had no tangible idea at all for why this city was so special.

I get this feeling in Buenos Aires again and again. As I was walking through Recoleta on a bright spring day with my class, I became overwhelmed by the gorgeousness of what was around me. I must take a picture of this, I thought. My camera switched on in my hand, I scanned the scene for the focus of this feeling: a barefoot tramp looting through garbage; some inane graffiti on a public building; a couple blithely making out against a palm tree. Where the hell did Buenos Aires go? I cannot work out whether the beauty of this place is an illusion, or is just elusive. Maybe its charm is greater than the sum of its parts, but what sort of parts do you call these?

And yet my most frequent social activity here barring none is witnessing foreigners drool en masse about the place. Nobody stays in Buenos Aires for as little as they intended. Travelers stop by on their way to Chile and forget the latter ever existed. Youth hostels are moved out of and apartments rented. Americans come here for a two week vacation and end up staying for a lifetime. I hope I can find work here, even if it means waiting tables. The life you knew gets left behind. How am I going to tell my mom that I wont be spending Christmas in Delaware this year? And so on. And I too am a member of the drooling choir, because Buenos Aires is not the marvelous city, it’s the seductive one. A good seducer always keeps you guessing between their lies and their promises. And this city promises you so much.

Buenos Aires charms you with the concept of what Buenos Aires means: culture, fine dining, fashion and beautiful parks. The city feeds you these ideas piece by piece, until you start seeing it the way that its citizens do, even though many of these myths strike you as the pampered delusions of a cocky middle class. But you believe it when it counts.

A case in point is the first and most popular myth: Buenos Aires is a European city. Call any Porteno a South American and you’ll get a wrinkled brow and an exhaustive lecture on their Italian, German, Spanish genealogy. Sure, Buenos Aires is not South America. This is a promise which Argentina has made to itself, and some of its citizens have already deemed it fulfilled. But try sticking your thumb out like a goof at a bus stop all morning as bus after bus drives past in the rain for no apparent reason. Walk past dirty streets strewn with garbage as chains of old cars rattle past you, some of which actually have conical shaped exhaust pipes so they can emit even more pollution. See suspiciously indigenous looking citizens carting rubbish around for recycling money. Wait for an hour at an empty restaurant to find out that the waiter didn’t forget your order, it’s just that he cant really be arsed. Or try watching a man with face and bare feet blackened with dirt, sit down at the table next to you so he can finish off the abandoned leftovers, take an empty champagne bottle out of the ice bucket, and pour its freezing water down his gullet. So where are we now?

But none of that matters, because all this happens while I’m on my way to meet my friends at Congo bar, which has one of the loveliest gardens I have ever seen. I’ll take a seat under the trees in the Japanese patio and order a Bossa Nova, which is made with brandy, rum, honey and passion fruit. Everyone here is as graceful as a silhouette, and I’ll get elegantly numb to the swaying shadows of the plants around me. Then we’ll walk home through Palermo Soho at four in the morning, past the boutique shops which are designed like works of art, where it’s so quiet that I can only hear the leaves rustling. I’ll see red and white flowers blossoming on the spring trees, a parrot will flutter out across the road, and I wont even be able to remember the city where I was born. Maybe it rhymed with Argentina. Yes, Buenos Aires is just like Europe. Another myth survives un-shattered.

Then there’s myth number two: Argentinean women are the most beautiful in the world. In fairness, I suppose a statement like that must have raised my expectations somewhat. After a couple of weeks someone asked me what I thought of the women here. Well, they’re very short aren’t they? I put it down to internet myths created by seconded business execs and frat boys, who are more or less the same person anyway. But the city conspires to change your thinking. Portenos (who are unbelievably aggressive men) constantly shake you down to confess your undying love for their women folk. Well, with a mullet like that mate, I would take what I could get as well. But after another week a couple of droplets of this idea are fed to you, insidiously. A cute girl at the bus stop; a gamely waitress at a restaurant, a dusky bohemian leafing through your favourite novel at the bookstore. Big deal. This is a capital, and if a capital doesn’t at least have a few lookers, then that means it’s not a very good looking country.

But then you go to a club with a two hundred strong junta of these fairly cute girls and you start to feel a little light-headed. You catch yourself sliding off your chair. Did somebody spike my drink? Push away your glass. I look around, pat down my pockets to see if anything is missing. Drip drop. As patiently as osmosis, a pool of thought has been seeping into your brain for weeks. You fumble around for your previous ideas but they’ve disappeared. Your eyes glaze over and you say robotically to the person next to you: they are the most beautiful in the world. He’s not your friend and has no idea what on god’s earth you are talking about. Waking up with an unusually groggy head the next day, I get an email from someone back in the UK, asking me the same question. Portenas? Yeah they’re not bad I guess. Until we meet the army of two hundred again…

The same magic tricks are performed by Portenos themselves. You will never know when they are telling the truth or lying. Sometimes it seems like they can blur the truth even to themselves (though the large number of psychiatrists working here suggests that this comes at a cost). Dating them is one way of finding this out. A party was held at my TEFL school recently. A member of staff brought his cousin, who was hitting on one of the girls on my course, a blonde from Vermont. Don’t you have a girlfriend, she asked? Yes, but it’s not serious, it’s sad but actually we’re kind of breaking up right now. Later on she found out that he had just got engaged. A lie or an Argentinean truth? Another friend has been seeing an affable porteno student. While hanging out at his house with his friends, the porteno popped out of the room. Immediately his best friend turned round to her and said he’d like to kiss her. He wont mind, he’s easy going about things like that. He was so convincing that, even though she refused, she actually believed him. Women can be no different. They won’t tell you if they have a boyfriend or not, because if no one can see him right now, he never existed. Its not cheating, in the same way that if in a parallel universe you are married to someone else, its not cheating. But then Argentina is used to vanishing acts, much more horrific ones. Even with the boyfriend there with his arm around her, you find yourself at the end of smouldering come-hither looks. I look over to the boyfriend for a reaction, nada. Have I too become invisible? A raft of “love-motels” dotted around the city suggests that this kind of unspoken agreement is something of a norm here between couples. Or maybe she just wants to see her boyfriend attack me for a lark.

Still, for all the weird tastes these experiences leave in your mouth, the appeal of this city is not to be underestimated. The key is to work these qualities to your advantage. After a miserable day last weekend when good friends had returned home and the place was beginning to feel drab and tired to me, I went out to an Electroclash night at the Hotel Bauen. A mixture of house and punk mixed with a Germanic love of robot culture, Electroclash is as European as underground music gets. The Hotel Bauen is a fading, ugly hotel stuck in the year 1975 (so are its staff). The “disco” room the party was held in had broken glitterballs, a seedy bar, and black walls covered in tiny square mirrors. It was horrible. This was the perfect place to have an Electroclash night. The music was perfect too, right down to records with Argentinean girls impersonating German robots (“Let us celebrate ze destruccion”). So maybe everything I’d been grumbling about is exactly what makes Buenos Aires so darned cool. European culture with a Latin American mindset. Mimesis combined with an exotic setting. At some point, someone overheard my plum English accent. Is this music still cool in London? Why yes, yes it is. We are always five years behind London, he sighed. I got some points from everyone for hearing about the night, and a few more for the unintended Hugh Grant impersonation. I’m the promoter of these events. Do you make music? Sure. And do you DJ? Why not. (It’s not lying, its Argentina). So my details were taken down and a promise given to get in touch with me to play for a future event. Will I really hear from them again? Like I said, the guessing is the fun part. So the next day I woke up glad to be here again, just when I was ready to hop on the next bus to Brazil. My friend Manuel and I are looking at apartments to rent, but first we have a football match to go to. And so it goes, you wake up and Buenos Aires leaves a note on your pillow. Last night was fun, I’ll call you soon. I raise my Bossa Nova: here’s to promises never fulfilled, and never broken.

A Potted History of Carlos Gardel


Having only been in Buenos Aires for 10 days, I have been a little perturbed at how much the Paris of South America feels like, well, Barcelona actually. And London. And Paris of course (particularly the generous attitude to pavement dog poo). Name your European city and you'll find it here. This was comforting but a little disappointing as well. I seemed to have flown on a 20 hour flight with two stop overs, only to find myself on the red-eye in Madrid.

A bruising Saturday night out in the barrio of Palermo Viejo only reinforced this impression. We sipped bloody marys and cosmopolitans in bars that shot from the hip, where our drinks were accompanied by an album of Nirvana songs covered by an Elvis impersonator. Too cool daddio, too cool. The crowd was straight out of a fashion shoot in I-D magazine. Not a poncho in sight. Only the 4am empanada (like a cornish pasty but with cheese, and much better) on the way home felt Argentinian. But so what, its just a drunken kebab for Spanish people right?

So last Sunday I set out for some other barrios, and am happy to say that I found a little Argentina. It took a fifty minute bus ride to find it (this is a really huge city) out in the barrio of Mataderos for the Sunday markets. The handy-craft stalls had crocodiles made from bulls horns, skirts and waistcoats made of leather with a funky odor, a guitar constructed from scrap metals. Things you don't need but feel a little guilty about not buying, after all the painstaking hours invested into weaving a chicken made of straw, or a spoon shaped like the head of the president etc. Old gauchos (Argentinian cowboys from the south) came in with llamas and got the locals dancing to traditional music in the streets. We were the only westerners there, everyone else was indigenous Argentinian (i.e. not looking European), or folk from Peru and Uruguay. But the modern world still lurks beneath the surface. Working at the food stall selling uruguaian corn cakes was an indigenous girl from Salta, wearing a head scarf like her mother but accompanied by combat trousers and a hip hop belt of fake bling diamonds. Like everyone else in Argentina, she wore Converse trainers. I was foolish enough to think my collection of European clothes would be the toast of the town. Alas, people here dress even hipper than Europeans. Thankfully, they are at least much friendlier, so they don't look down on you too much......


We also headed down to La Boca, home of the famous Boca Juniors football team, and their even more infamous fans. Ex-pats here huddle together in hushed whispers talking about going to see a Boca vs River Plate game, torn between the desire to see the most heated football rivalry in the country, and the fear of getting their heads cut open on flying glass bottles while being soaked in a perhaps unfriendly shower of spit. I suggested that with a couple of crash helmets and a nice anorak, we can have a great time, but then my brand of lateral thinking is not for everyone.

La Boca itself is beautiful, colourful and rather poor. Like everywhere in Buenos Aires, there is graffiti everywhere, but here it is rather nicely done and has pretty pictures. Vaudevillian characters abound in the place. While taking a picture of my friend Jenni Dykeman (yes, she of the Main Squeeze Orchestra fame), two women dressed like Liza Minelli in Cabaret snuck into the frame, cocked their hats, and asked if she would like a picture with them, while wrapping their fishnet legs around her. For some reason they approached her despite the fact there were two clueless looking men present (i.e. myself and another). We decided they must have been gay. Must have been....

More approachable was the old man selling tango CD's. After chatting away and nearly charming me into buying a few albums, I made the grave error of confessing I had no idea who Carlos Gardel was. At this point a young man browsing the stall turned to me. "You DON'T know who Carlos Gardel is?" What followed was a concise but impressively thorough history of the man. In five minutes it was established that:

- Carlos Gardel was a tango singer.-

-He was born in Paris and is originally French, but is regarded as an Argentinian son.-

-He wrote a variety of compositions but also covered songs by Tango legend Astor Piazolla.

- He appeared in a number of Hollywood films, once with Bing Crosby.

- He is the heart and soul of tango.

-I will love him.

- He died in an airplane crash in Colombia in the fifties.

- Everyone was devasted, some women killed themselves.

- He will change my life.

- It was a pleasure to meet me, thank you.

He doffed his cap and walked off. Like a sentient being hypnotised into an automaton, I handed my money over to the old man. I had been promised a new life, and only a fool wouldn't take that for ten pesos. As he handed over my change I asked the stall seller if the young man worked for him. The old man laughed. "I have no idea who he is. He just -a-love-a- de-tango." When Argentinians get passionate, they can share it with you very easily.

The first question you find yourself asking with Portenos (residents of Buenos Aires) is: how do they do it? How is is that people in a struggling economy can still go out for dinner in natty dress and party every night? And how do they manage to go out for dinner at midnight, hit a club at 4am, and still make it to work the next day? How do they live exclusively on fatty steaks, sweet pastries, and cheesy empanadas and stay so slim? And most puzzling of all, how can people with such cutting-edge dress sense have the worst haircuts I have ever seen? When I find out, I'll let you know.