World Brazil Rio Grande do Norte Pipa

Channelling the Cane Spirits in South America

Watery Depths Jul 26, 2007

Monday 23.07.07 Amazingly, i got up for my second free breakfast in a row! For all you people back home, that means getting up before.....yawn.....the ungodly hour of 10am. With some hours to kill before getting our evening bus to Natal, we took a walk to the historical centre of Salvador. The city's historical centre is divided into Cidades Alta e Baixa (upper and lower towns), joined by a beautiful art deco elevator 72m high. Mercardo Modelo occupies a building in the centre of Cidade Baixa, once the customs house of the port serving the city. The market's bright, busy energy gives no indication of its musty, humid basement, and the terrible atrocities that must have gone on down there many years ago. In this dark, flooded place, African slaves fresh off the boat were stored here awaiting auction. These days, a concrete causeway keeps visitors feet out of the shallow water, and similarly, light brightens the place up, but it is doubtful the slaves would have enjoyed either luxury. It may come as no surprise that there have been reports of unexplainable phenomena during closing hours by the night guards. A 20-hour bus ride was in store for us come evening, past cities built not so much on Rock and Roll, but of unfinished bricks and mortar. The landscape varied little, just a blur of tropical trees and tended fields, of multitudes of greens and browns. As night fell, along the unknown miles and miles of highway, outside the one-street towns and their few flickering lights, was nothing but silhouette against sky, a vast expanse of black on black, a nothing yet everything at once. I awoke in daylight, as we pulled into yet another diner. Every two hours for the entire trip we stopped at either a diner or a bus station, in places too numerous and nondescript to mention. We disembarked a little before Natal to visit one of the area's most popular beaches, Pipa. On both Wednesday and Thursday, we walked north to Baia dos Golfinhos along the beach, picking our way around and over iron-rich volcanic rocks. They lie haphazardly in piles at the foot of huge sandstone cliffs, which are hued in creams, pinks, reds and purples, topped by overhanging greenery. As the name suggests in Portuguese, the bay is frequented by groups of dolphins, and over these two days we swum around, while circled and observed by the curious creatures. At one stage i saw one aggressively pursue a fish, snapping around in tight circles while the fish desperately attempted escape. The dolphin soon was winning the bout, flipping the fish skyward in the final moments into its mouth, and moments later it paraded it triumphantly through the water, much like a dog that had just fetched a stick. We left late afternoon for the city of Natal, about 90km north, to stay in the bairro Ponta Negra for the next few days.

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