Brazil carnivals

Leaving Kim snoozing in the hotel, I leave to chase a large masquerading crab swigging from a beer bottle.

I lost it down the side streets so hung around a crossroads while the town filled up with remnants of the coastal parade. Two girls grabbed me there and essentially didn´t let go for the next three hours.

It took a remarkable amount of time for them to realise that I wasn´t Brazilian and we didn´t have a common language between us. But with smatterings of English, Portuguese, French, German, Spanish and Italian we managed to dance and kiss our way round a variety of drummers, acoustic and electronic blocos and frevos before leading me to the samba dance hall.

This was the likely downfall as my dancing style quickly got a lot of negative attention but they persisted with teaching my samba steps encouraging me with more kisses. And that was in between adjusting an accompanying transvestite´s make-up.

(Sweetly, they would encircle me and push me against a wall whenever a fight broke out pointing out the scuffle with shouts of brigante(?).)

I guess this is everyone´s carnival fantasy; to be captured by a pair of pretty twenty-something Brazilians and be taken on whirlwind tour of the town. In the end it was getting a bit too amorous and I made my excuses… Explaining I had a friend at the pousada that I needed to meet didn´t work so I had to admit, with stress, that it was uma amica, and the centavo dropped.

The day before we left I was emailed by the Rio hotel concierge about a parade at the Sambadrome that I had forgotten about. Most of the big set piece parades take place over a few days over the carnival weekend. But the Saturday after is the Parade of Champions when the winning school re-run their performance.

It´s cheaper that the main carnival shows, but that´s relative. The cheapest seats the hotel was offering came to about GBP160 each and some were into the 1000s. It´s galling when the real price is closer to GBP20. But unless you´re in Rio at the right time you´re left to the secondary market of hotels, agencies and touts. We decided to leave it as the budget is already burst.

[… lack of internet connections, so I need to catch up…]

Brazil for carnival is one of those travel mandatories. Balls and sequins, sambadromes and street dancing; and Rio or Salvador are the obvious focus. But Carnival is everywhere, and the idea was to visit it in a couple of the old colonial – and UNESCO-listed – towns. Olinda was an obvious choice because TAP fly direct to Recife, the nearest Brazilian city to Europe. It’s also supposed to have a carnival that is active the week before the others; though I’ve yet to see a program on the official site.

Four years ago

Kim and I were in Brazil four years ago, in the two weeks after Carnival. Olinda then was bright, hot and recovering from its two-week festival. A week before hundreds of thousands of people had watched the blocos parade; the streets were now empty but for the streamers and bunting and the occasional papier mache grotesques hanging from street corners.

I don’t know whether it was a collective hangover or if the town had reverted to its normal pace. But it was fun; the kids were touting as guides round the tile-hung monasteries and the capoira dancers were performing for the remaining tourist dollars.