from
Return to the Sea
by Webb Chiles
Chapter 16: Paradise with CyberSerpent
Sometimes you get what you expect. Everyone knows that
Brazilians are a sexy, musical people. Samba music blared out
from the shore as we entered Baia de Todos os Santos and closed
with the breakwater at Bahia Marina. Tropical flowers cascaded
down lush, green hillsides. People sang and danced in the
streets. It was a Hollywood musical, and it was also a few days
before Christmas.
To the extent that any cultural generalization is valid, Brazilians
are musical. Everywhere in the country, we found people
singing, playing drums and guitars, in the streets, on ferry
boats, at a table on a beach restaurant in the early evening darkness,
usually not for money but simply to entertain themselves
and their friends.
Salvador is a city of more than two million people. From seaward
it looks like Miami Beach with hills. Near the harbor the old part of the city dates from the 1500s and includes what is reputed
to be the world’s largest collection of Baroque buildings.
Someone in Salvador wants the place to do business with
yachts. The port actively solicits visitors. Several world races
and rallies stop there. A French fleet made this our third successive
port—the others being Dakar and Gibraltar—that we
shared with rallies, and the fourth in less than six months. Visiting
sailors have two choices. Most go to Centro Nautico in the
heart of the city; we stayed at the newer, quieter, beautifully
landscaped Bahia Marina, a half-mile away.
Salvador is built on two levels. The central business district
and government offices are on a narrow coastal strip, while the
old Baroque buildings and most of the shopping is on hilltops
more than a hundred feet higher, reached by a public elevator
that carries tens of thousands of people a day, or very steep
streets.
Along that coastal strip I had my first really bad day since
leaving Boston. While we were trying to locate four different
Brazilian government offices to clear into the country in 95°F
heat, something I had eaten ate back. It took two days and a lot
of misdirected footsteps to find all the officials in all the offices
in the required sequence. The officials, when found, were pleasant,
and the only unusual aspect of the clearance was the particular
attention the health inspector paid to our water supply.
How much did we have aboard? Where had we taken it on?
How did we purify? Cholera has been endemic along the Amazon
for years and Brazilians do not want it to travel south.
Having overcome Brazilian bureaucracy and my internal bug
and having located the necessities of life, including a shopping
mall with a supermarket and an Internet connection, we settled
in to renew an acquaintance with caipirinhas—a Brazilian
mixed drink made with cane alcohol and lime juice; await postal
mail for the first time in several months; and enjoy the tropical,
holiday atmosphere.
Although a third of the country, roughly 60,000,000 people,
lives on less than $40 a month, there are still enough shoppers to
make the malls as crowded as in the U.S. Santa Claus wears the
same red suit with white trim and has the same long white
beard in Brazil as he does in the U.S., but in Brazil in December
he sweats more.
Christmas Day was hot and quiet. We stayed on the boat
until midafternoon when I suggested we take a walk to see if
any restaurants were open. The lower part of the city was deserted,
but when we rode the elevator to the upper level, we
stepped into one of those serendipitous experiences that are an
unpredictable pleasure of wandering the world.
On an earlier visit to the upper city, we had turned right
when we left the elevator, walked around, saw a few buildings
of minor interest, and wondered what the fuss was about. This
time we turned left, and that, as Robert Frost has observed,
made all the difference. Down a couple of blocks and around a
corner, we found the true old heart of the city, with narrow cobblestoned
walkways, what would be called sidewalk cafes except
that they are in the middle of the streets, incredibly ornate
Baroque churches, Christmas decorations, and Salvadorians.
Having spent the day at home, families were now emerging to
celebrate the holiday publicly. Over caipirinhas at a sidewalk
table and later dinner in a nearby restaurant, we watched the
promenade, and on our way back to the boat just after dark,
stopped to listen to a choir of middle aged women dressed in
nurses’ uniforms sing Christmas carols in Portuguese. This was
a Christmas to remember.
Into this paradise, the serpent came, appropriately for a new
millennium, by e-mail. Cyberserpent. In the form of an offer for
Carol to rejoin her former firm as a principal. This required discussion,
which required setting up a conference call. Call completed;
our mail arrived; Carol’s decision unmade; we left the
marina to spend a few days at the north end of the bay.
Baia de Todos os Santos is twenty miles deep and ten miles
wide. Part of the bay is shallow, but a dozen islands and two
rivers offer more anchorages than we had time for. In fact we
never got beyond the first that had been recommended to us by
a local sailor, an isolated cove between Ilha dos Frades, Ilha do
Bom Jesus, and the mainland.
Moving a half-mile past a small village on Bom Jesus, we anchored
near the head of the cove, surrounded by hillsides covered
with unbroken jungle and silence broken only by birdcalls.
During the four days we stayed there, a few other boats came
in and out, mostly French ralliers, but they anchored closer to
the village, and we swam in the warm water, read, watched a
few local fishermen working near the shore in dug out canoes,
and considered ships and sealing wax and architectural careers
and kings.
Twice we rowed to the village, where the advantages of oars,
in addition to exercise, were once again proven, when we picked
up our Avon Redstart and carried it across the shallow flats,
while the French struggled with their outboard laden dinghies.
We even had the satisfaction of giving a Frenchman a ride out to
his dinghy, which he had left tied to a pole in what the incoming
tide turned into chest deep water.
While the fishermen of Bom Jesus are poor, the village is not
because most of the men work at an oil refinery on the nearby
mainland. There is not much in the way of provisions in the few
small dark shops; water is drawn from a community well; but
most of the houses are neat and well kept, and brilliant red flamboyant
trees frame a small white church near a short jetty.
When we went ashore on December 30 the village was busy.
Muddy young men were joyously playing soccer on the flats exposed
by the outgoing tide; stalls were selling drinks in the
church square; and we watched a man pole a dug out canoe up
to the jetty, conveying a huge, live pig to a waiting launch which
would take it to another village to be consumed in a New Year’s
feast.
