Festa!
July is winter in Brazil, and with winter comes winter vacation. In a boon for wealthy, bored, or undersexed Carioca (Rio de Janeiro inhabitants) or Paulista (Sao Paulo inhabitants) teenagers, Forma Tourismo — a yellow-clad, party-oriented tourist agency — has created huge package tours to the coast of Bahia. In particular, these tours stop in Porto Seguro (PS) – much our surprise when we arrived in PS a couple weeks ago to find thousands of underage, scantily-clad, caiparinha-sucking, baby faces looking for a beach, some music, and some of that good old-fashioned Bahian Axé.
Deb and I came to PS from Ilheus, where we had run to from the gray, rainy skies of Salvador. Ilheus was nice enough, with a couple decent beaches and the former home of Brazilian writer Jorge Amado. But PS was much more to our liking, despite (or perhaps because of?) the squeaking of thousands of teens.
Picture if you will: At 11pm we get in line. The line is at least a kilometer long, and it loads us on to a ferry. The ferry is filled with already drunken teens, and it slowly dawns on us that we are the only ones around to have broken the two decade mark besides the ´chaperones´, which are really just older men (someone´s dad, no doubt) who have a kind eye for young flesh. The ferry unloads us onto Ilha dos Aquarios, an island purpose-built to be a multi-stage party venue complete with dozens of huge aquariums littered around the island, filled with a paltry display of fish and a couple cool-looking and oft-harassed sharks. The tapping on the glass and the bass from the music alone must be slowly killing this lot of fish, or at least driving them nuts.
Teens rule!
As we scope this island party scene, we take note of at least five stages playing different kinds of music, at least that many bars sporting signs saying ´no drinks for those under 18´ while doling out a sea of drinks to exactly that demographic, and no less than 5,000 attendees. The main stage, where we spent much of our time, was at first graced by dancers, both male and female, both wearing nothing but spandex strips leaving nothing to the imagination, and both girating on stage in choreographed dances to the latest hip hop or axé music that the DJ produced. The crowd somehow knew most of these dances as well, and the whole scene often took the appearance of one large line-dancing party, except replace the cowboy hats with clear bra-straps and the boots with high heels.
The dancers were soon replaced by this awesome singer with a throaty voice who sang hits like ´Bebir Cair Levantar´ (Drink, Fall Down, and Get Up Again for our Portuguese-challenged), which basically became our theme song for our time in Porto Seguro. When the sun rose, however, the fun ended, and the music stopped, and Deb and I — more slowly than normal — realized that we ought to catch one of those ferries back to the mainland before we got caught in an ongoing teenybopper party without end.
Ilha dos Aquarios
As it turned out, we stayed four days or so in Porto Seguro, and besides it´s younster flair, it was actually quite a pleasant beach paradise. We rented a motorbike and cruised north and south along the coast, in search of the perfect sand, the clearest water, the finest curved cove, and found many to our liking. We watched the moon (not to mention the sun) rise over the ocean, not a frequent sight for two west-coasters like ourselves. We ate acarajé and bobo de camarao and moqueca until we were sick of amazing tasting Bahian food (which actually never happened). When we didn´t know what to do next, we swam, then tanned, then swam again, then ate, then tanned, then read, then drank, fell down, and got up again…and did the same thing all over again.
Oh, and Deb also got bitten by a rabid dog.
Just kidding. It wasn´t a dog.
Evan,
Are you home yet? Did you see Marco and Angela? May I meet Debbie?