On the plane to Salvador, Brasil, with Cindy. It takes us a full 24 hours of straight travel to reach this remote place that Mauro had recommended. An island at the mouth of a river a few hours' drive south of the Bay of All Saints. It’s worth the long travel day. There are no cars on this island — just two small fishing villages, the larger of which mainly caters to local tourists at this time of year. After a 4+ hour taxi and ferry trip we arrive at a tiny settlement at the end of a dirt road, and from there we head by speedboat with our bags to the smaller of the two island villages. The boat lurches over the waves and swells, heaving up, and then slamming down as it passes through a narrow gap in the reef. We arrive during high tide, and at this hour the boat can get relatively close to the shore. There is no dock, so the pilot gets as close as he can, and then we and the pilot’s assistant carry our bags and backpacks to the shore by hand, wading through the thigh-high water. I've been traveling from New York in long pants and shoes which I quickly remove and stuff in a bag, jumping into the water in my briefs and a shirt. The pilot watches and comments, "Preparado!" ("You were prepared!")
Manguebeat — from the mud to chaos (a translation of the title of the 1st Naçao Zumbi record)
From the water the mangroves look completely forbidding and impenetrable — their spidery legs make passage all but impossible. The ground that supports these trees, being flooded with every high tide, is almost completely composed of thick gooey mud that can suck hikers' shoes off. The mud swarms with crabs that also scamper and cling to the endless network of spidery mangrove legs. There are no visible openings in these thickets, at least none I could see from the boat. So, when Simona at our pousada suggests that Marco, a young man, might show us the way through the mangrove forest to an isolated beach on the southern tip of the island we said, “Yes, of course.”
We have to leave in the morning, when the tide is approaching its low point, as passage through the mangroves — and across a river that separates them from that faraway beach — is only possible at low tide. Return by the way we came will be impossible, so Simona has arranged that Antonio will bring his boat around to meet us at the beach in several hours.
After passing alongside some farms, ending with the one where Marco’s dad lives, we cross a kind of small desert that leads to the mangrove forest.
[Link to video]
A couple who had been walking 40 paces behind us now catches up, and the guy says, in English, “Do you mind if we join you?” He had recognized me but says he didn’t want to say anything because that would be “boring”. I invite them to join us and assure them that we will find room for them on the boat back to the village. He looks like a taller Sean Lennon — dark hair held up in a clasp and dark-rimmed glasses. She is pale and quite pretty. A somewhat unlikely couple, I think to myself, as he seems fairly nerdy. He says he’s a big Tom Zé fan (which is a nice surprise) and that he's seen Zé perform a few times, the latest in this guy’s home town — Acaju. The two of them traveled to the island mostly in a series of bus trips from that town in Bahia, which took them 15 hours. They are camping. We are grateful for the translator, as Marco doesn’t speak any English and my Portuguese is pathetic.
In the mangrove forest Marco finds the narrow winding track and hundreds of crabs scurry to hide ahead of us. The path begins to follow a muddy stream bed that I guess drains part of the mangrove at low tide. We have to take off our jellies and flip-flops (Marco doesn’t wear any footwear) as the mud is now deep enough that it will suck them off.
Needless to say, for some people this would be a vision of hell — the mud, the impenetrable forest and the scurrying crabs. Marco slices into the muddy stream bank with his machete and yanks out a clam (lambreta, it is called)…a minute later he produces a few more, and I happen to have a plastic deli bag in my backpack, so he tosses them in there and says we can eat them later.
He grabs a male crab (leo, or lion, it is appropriately called, as the male has yellow-golden markings on its upper shell) and that goes in another bag. A female crab, carrying eggs, gets tossed back. Later, we are told that the crabs here used to be much much larger. The local villages could live on them easily and sell some as well. Why the crabs have diminished in size is slightly hard to pinpoint — it’s not simply over-fishing. There are industries upriver and other changes in the water ecology that might be too subtle for us to notice at first, but the crabs, though still numerous as a nightmare, are getting smaller.
Likewise, the local fishermen are returning with smaller and fewer fish. Octopi used to be plentiful and large, and the smaller ones would always get thrown back. More recently they started keeping the small ones, as that was all there was, but that meant that there were no octopi around to grow into larger ones.
Larger fishing boats, some from the town of Valença, use drag nets, which scoop up everything on the bottom. Besides denuding that area of the sea of edible fish, that method scoops up all the babies and most of the rest of the food chain. An unsustainable way of fishing, they are now slowly coming to realize as the stocks have dwindled quickly.
The mangrove path gets progressively muddier and deeper. When the tide comes in the water level will rise to the tops of the mangrove “roots” — we’d be up to our necks at least.
Now there’s a little creek that we walk in, squish squish, and eventually, after a couple of hours of all of this, the path empties into a wider muddy area and then into a river — a river we will need to cross if we are to get to the beach and Antonio’s boat.
I’d been given the impression that the river (or estuary) would be lower at this time of day and that we might wade across — but that doesn’t seem possible now. Marco tries to holler to any boats or folks on the distant beach. No luck. He wades to the left and tries to signal with his yellow shirt — but no one sees him. I ask if it’s possible to swim across and he’s not sure...he tries it and soon disappears in the forest that leads to the beach on the other shore. Presumably he’ll return with a boat. C and I decide to try swimming it ourselves...we leave our bags and sandals with our new friends from Acaju. The first half is pretty muddy and it does get deep enough to require swimming — but the current isn’t strong as the tide has yet to really begin coming in earnest, so we make it across and follow in Marco’s footsteps.
A few minutes later he appears on a boat and we are all picked up and carried to a sandy area at the mouth of the river where there is a beach and a couple of makeshift shacks, one of which is floating and has a little kitchen where they offer fresh fish. It’s delicious. We share some with a family from Sao Paulo who soon arrive on Antonio’s boat. After a bit some Brazilian tourists arrive by boat and head for the other thatched hut, where they hang out and drink cervejas. There’s no town here — no electricity either, of course. It’s a pretty isolated and idyllic spot. The beach is quiet and some of the Brazilians stroll out to a sandy spit and lie in the shallow tepid water with their girlfriends.
That night the lights in our cabana flicker a few times and then go out. Electricity arrived at this village about 5 years ago, and it is never a sure thing — especially if a bunch of locals or pousada guests take showers at the same time (the on-demand water warmers use a lot of electricity).
It’s totally black out. The moon hasn’t risen yet. C improvises a wind guard for a candle out of a cut-in-half water bottle. The bottoms of other water bottles serve as glasses. We sit in front of our cabana and wait to see if the electricity will come back on.
The next day we are taken out to a “pool” where it’s possible to snorkel and see some fish. These “pools” — shallow areas protected by the reefs — are accessible at low tide. It’s so shallow around them that we can only get there by dugout canoe, the kind used by Indians and others around the world for thousands of years. The dugout navigates the swells and waves with less aggravation than the speedboat. This one has two tiny sails made of the fabric also used for bags all over the third world.
A lackadaisical breeze carries us out around the point and towards the reef at a relaxed Bahian pace. So relaxed that the owner of the dugout opts to paddle now and again.
Returning to the village in the dugout in the early afternoon we see there is now a floating bar anchored offshore in the shallow bay. It’s made of some oil drums strapped under boards with a rudimentary thatched hut on one side. There are some plastic tables and chairs on the tilting platform and a few burly guys hoist cervejas. We continue to drift towards shore past a steady stream of men and women either wading out to the bar or simply standing in the waist high water in bunches with friends, some with drinks in hand, chatting as if at a huge cocktail party. “Ciao, Alberto!” someone calls out to our fellow passenger on the dugout. We continue to drift shore-wards. It’s like a Fellini movie, a long dolly shot of partygoers scattered in a landscape. In this case they’re all waist-deep in warm water. We pass a group of ladies in wide-brimmed hats, a couple necking and a fat woman stretched out with some foam rod-shaped floats sticking up around her, their centers suppressed by her girth, the ends poking up on either side.
Tractor to Town
We take the only means of land transport — a tractor that pulls a cart outfitted with benches — to the larger town on the north end of the island for dinner. The tractor lurches and heaves over the sandy track, following the higher land in the center of the island. Occasionally at this hour one can sense a valley to the left or a swamp to the right, but mostly we struggle on through the forest/jungle. Some of the steeper hills on the track are strewn with coconut husks, as these give a little more traction. A car, even a 4x4, obviously wouldn’t make it through this “road”.
We arrive in the dark and walk through this tiny town’s favela. It's a part of town consisting of tiny unpainted brick houses or others made of sticks and thatch, though sometimes even these had strands of random hanging Christmas lights — completely incongruous and out of place.
When we visited during the day this town seemed fairly quiet and sleepy...
(albeit with some pousadas on the beaches that were filled with Brazilian tourists nursing drinks). However at night it was, as C said, like the vision of Bedford Falls gone bad in “It’s A Wonderful Life.” Stalls had appeared selling cheap jewelry, T-shirts and snack foods, and bars were cranking up the music or had a TV blasting with a music program on, or both.
We pass by a small house, two rooms by the look of it, and Simona points to three large bones lying by the door — “balena” (whale) a man says. They look like hefty biomorphic boulders, hardly recognizable as bones.
She says we have to see inside, do we want to? Some don’t want to disturb the owner, but she persists and knocks at his door and shouts through the crack in the door. I hear the lock turning and the door opens and Simona says a warm familiar "boa noite" to a man with a crazy lopsided Afro. Behind him his front room is filled, floor to ceiling, with fish bones of all types — some even dangle on fishing wire from the roof. All of it found on the beaches. There are giant whale ribs, a dolphin skull (oddly human-shaped except for the jutting “beak”), necklaces of fish vertebra and a giant dried blowfish.
The room behind, also filled to the roof (but not with bones) is obviously where he lives.
Flesh and Peter Pan
Further down the road we pass another tiny 2-room house, this one, like many of the others at this hour, with lights on and windows and doors wide open to the street. In many houses there is a chair of some sort and a television blaring, a picture of Jesus adorns the wall of many and sometimes the inhabitants sit on the doorstep facing the street, saying “Oi” or “boa noite” as people pass by.
One house — a two-room shack really — has a painted mural that completely fills one wall — a naked reclining women, with fairly light skin and protruding breasts, floating against a blue background. Below her a live naked dark-skinned body lies asleep, turned to the wall, on a small mattress on the floor, shiny smooth flesh only partially covered by a sheet. In the other room I first catch a glimpse of a fragment of a large painted boot that turns out, as we pass the window, to belong to Captain Hook. Another wall-sized mural fills the second room of the house, this one depicting Peter Pan and Captain Hook sword-fighting. It’s the sort of thing one might expect to see in a crèche or on the wall of a day care center, but juxtaposed with the Playboy Goddess in the other room it makes for a surreal combination. That’s one of the things I like about Brazil.
The ride back to our village is in a sort of truck with a wooden exterior — wooden radiator grill and wooden engine housing. One of our party says this is not quite legal, as cars are not allowed on the island, and this is not a tractor — there is some kind of pickup truck chassis underneath the wood.
We head back in the dark, more lurching and gear grinding. This vehicle doesn’t have the power or massive grooved wheels that the tractors do, so the driver has trouble with some of the steeper hills. At one point the vehicle stops with a loud nasty sounding clank, and we’re off again. The driver's assistant rides shotgun and holds what looks like a vacuum cleaner pipe which he points out the right side of the vehicle — it’s the exhaust, which explains that smell.
The man who rescued Tom Zé
Last night C and I were sitting on the little patio of our cabana and out of the darkness, somewhere nearer the beach, we could hear the bass line of "Psycho Killer" booming. I guess they know I’m here. Earlier at dinner a young man approached me and asked if I was DB — he then thanked me for “resurrecting” Tom Zé. Others have said the same thing here; I seem to be known as the man who revived Tom Zé’s career as much as for my own work. That’s fine — Tom Zé certainly deserves to be recognized and one young guy (Zé’s new fans tend to be younger than I) said that Tom Zé always mentions me as the guy who brought him back out of obscurity at all of his live shows. It’s a good thing to be known for.
