BRAZILIAN

FREE-STYLE

Strange, isn’t it, how peering through rose-tinted holiday-goggles can make some real horrors - like slavery - seem oddly endearing?  Perhaps Brazilian slavery had been somehow different but a fortnight in Bahia left me with the uneasy impression that everybody had rather enjoyed themselves.

Salvador was a city built by seventeenth-century slaves and it ought to have been unhappy but it wasn’t.  It was flushed with colour and rolled around over several hills in a state of perpetual festivity.  This was baroque with a drumbeat.  Here - three weeks deathly sailing from Africa - was the greatest African city on earth.  “We were”, said our guide Lenauro, “the wealthiest city in the Southern hemisphere,”

Not that that meant much to the slaves.  In a city centred on Pelourinho, The Pillory, personal enrichment was a low priority.  The flogging posts have gone now and Pelourinho whips up nothing more gruesome than a cappuccino.  It was all agonisingly pretty - cobbles, pastels, belfries and the Baianas, trying hard to walk when you knew they’d rather be dancing.  Some of the vendors even wore magnificent gowns of whalebone and lace and were wafted around the square like snow-clouds, carried along on gusts of roasted spice.  In one corner, a bare-fisted fighter was artfully beating up the air in front of his opponent, never touching.  My wife, Jayne, asked them who they were.  “We’re The Already Dead”, they said cheerfully and resumed their airy punch-up.

Capoeira fighting was not all that had survived the voyage from Africa.  The slaves brought wild recipes that have translated into prawn patties and moquecas - succulent fish and coconut curries.   There was so much Nigerian music that Salvador University had to create a professorial chair to make sense of it all.  But most intriguing of all was the religion.  Discovering that the Portuguese were already gripped by Catholicism, animism simply grafted itself on, wherever there was space.   Lenauro took us to a little chapel on the quay where we were surprised to find that the Virgin Mary had sprouted a fish-tail.

“This”, he said “is where the fishermen come to pray for fish and more babies.”

 

It may have been unwise of the Franciscans to allow the slaves to decorate their Ordem Terceira De Sao Francisco in 1703.  For me, the result is the most exotic church in the world.  What the slaves lacked in liberty, they made up for in free-style.   The pulpit is supported by naked, pink ladies - each exorbitantly pregnant.  The Grim Reaper is portrayed in azulejos, exquisite blue tiles, over the caption “Uncertain is the rule of wealth”.  Christ, meanwhile, is shown dangling from the cross by one arm, chatting with his free hand.

I think I fell in love with Salvador within four minutes but not everybody has been able to stomach its exuberance and heresy.  Bishop Sardine set off back to Europe to file a complaint but was ship-wrecked and eaten by Indians.  All that remains of him is his statue in Pelourinho, a monument to the folly of severity.  Salvador was obviously meant to be the way it is.

 

One day - too soon - Lenauro bundled us into his car and away, out into the sugar estates of the Reconcavo.  He was a delightful companion, witty and generous, whose only fault was his confusion of Rs and Hs. “In Bahia,” he might say “we have pink hooves and wild habits”.  The locals had no such problems disentangling his pronunciation and everywhere he went he was patted and kissed.  The gypsies at Sao Amaro market pumped his hand and a chocolate-maker at the Marxist Co-operative briefly engulfed him in her great sticky hug.  In Cachoira, the little lacy serving-girls at the Convent clucked around him and then produced a miracle of grilled fish and crunchy vegetables.

 

After lunch, we crossed the Paraguassu River and left the livid greenery of the coast.  Suddenly, all the moisture seemed to have been leached from the landscape and the trees became stunted and brittle.  This was the sertao, the drylands.  Gone were the jolly slaves; the sertanejos were parched Indo-Portuguese cowboys who rode the thorny salt-flats in thick rawhides.  When the drought really bit, they came to the cities to be called flagelados, The Scourged.  Even their music sounded as if it had been scraped out of its instruments.  Once, we came across a three-piece band, playing to a dog.  “It’s a miserable song” said Lenauro with admirable economy “because they’re miserable”.

 

Three hours later, the car began to climb into the mountains, the Chapada Diamantina.  All was green again.  Then, tucked among great, orange-grey parabolas of rock, we came upon tiny Lencois.  “You could once find diamonds just lying in the street,” said Lenauro.

It was careless remarks like that which, in 1844, sparked a stampede.  Thousands of people rushed up to Lencois with shovels.  The rich ones built miniature palaces in the style of Venetians and Manuelines and the French even set up a consulate.  Slaves were marched in from the coast and the mountainside was literally scrubbed of soil.  Some diamonds were found (“The London Underground was drilled out with Lencois diamonds”)  but, by 1870, it was - for most - all over.

Others, I noticed, had decided to stick it out a bit longer.  Someone, after all, was maintaining the palaces in jaunty pinks and limes.  Lencois was determinedly, splendidly raffish.  The boomtown boys still washed their ponies at the village pump and our hotel  waitresses had stuck with the slave-girls bonnets.  There were even a few garimpeiros still scratching around on the mountain for a gem.  Most were descended from slaves who hadn’t stopped digging since 1888, when - at last - Brazil abolished slavery.

We met one of them on a beautiful mountain walk.  Chica worshipped four hundred Jare gods and lived in a cave below a fantastic escalator of water called Cachoeira do Sossego.  Her home was in a sort of cathedral of pink rocks, 1.7 billion years old.  We found her washing her coat in a stream.  She looked about ninety but our guide read my thoughts; “She’s a very good miner and on the week-ends she’s a professional drinker.”

 

Other ex-slaves had been less impressed by abolition and had preferred to remain in the colonies of runaways, the quilombos.  Although some were still shut to outsiders, a local lad called Shue agreed to take us to Remanso.  There, we met his father, who was the quilombo chief and had 4 wives, 26 children, a Tweetie-Pie pendant and a print of the Mona Lisa.

The quilombo stood on a lagoon of lilies and Shue took us out in his punt.  As we bobbed around looking for catfish and admiring the fruit-bats, Shue began the family history “My great grandfather, King Oba, came from Africa in 1860 …”

 

Before we left the mountains, Lenauro took us down the Lapa Doce caves. It was a strange, gothic world of stalagmites, petrified calcium fountains and sightless grass-hoppers that ate only bat droppings.  We found the bones of an ancient tapir who had become lost in the dark and, in the entrance, there was a list of kills, painted 4,000 years ago in blood. That day, the people of this cave ate eight armadillos and an extinct thing. 

 

We spent the last few days of our Brazilian adventures at Praia do Forte.  Every year, 22,000 hatchlings begin their own little turtle adventures from this beach.  Our eco-hotel had tip-toed in between this gorgeous swoop of sand and an Atlantic forest inhabited by sloths and marmosets.  Somehow the hotel seemed small and intimate but this was a clever illusion.  I kept finding more swimming pools and only got a handle on the true size of the place at breakfast when I stumbled upon an open-caste cornflake mine.  They put out 26 puddings at dinner - each, I have to confess, worth trying.

Nature and The Nurtured seemed to rub along well.  There was only one lot of trouble-makers - the anacondas - who, every now and then, slithered out of the swamp and ate the eco-guide’s ducklings.  She, like generations of Brazilians before her, regarded such outrages with surprising equanimity.

 

John Gimlette travelled as guest of Journey Latin America (0208 747 8315; www.journeylatinamerica.co.uk).  Return flights to Salvador with TAP from  [£409].  Based on shared rooms, a five-night stay in Salvador  costs from around [£194].  Three nights in Lencois can be added for [£289] (by bus) or [£439] (by private transfer) per person. Bolting on four nights at the Praia do Forte Ecological Reserve and Beach Resort costs from £323 per person. For more information visit www.brazil.org.uk and www.svn.com.br/bahiatursa