Itacaré - Brazil´s coolest surf town!

Ha ha, I'm so stuck in Itacaré that I wasn´t even thinking of reading my email or writing my blog for the last 8 days! This is a great place to hang out, it seems to be Brazil´s equivalent to Byron Bay in Australia: it is incredibly relaxed, there is great surf and loads of different, extremely beautiful beaches, a good young crowd around (even now in the off-season) and loads of parties.

From what I heard about Itacaré I already suspected this was going to be my longest stop in one place, it is so far and somehow I don't feel inclined to leave (next stop should be Trancoso, south of Porto Seguro, tentative departure: Saturday, or maybe Sunday - depending on how bad my muscles hurt from hours of surfing).

Everything was great from the moment I arrived: I chose the best hostel (Albergue O Pharol) - it is not only a traveller's home but also a home for cats and dogs, who are lazing around everywhere and make for a nice atmosphere. The rooms are comfortable with balconies and the common room is converted into a pre-party zone every evening.

The very friendly owner of the hostel immediately introduced me to Peter, a Norwegian guy, who is also here for surfing, so I was not lost for company. On my first evening I found the "Local Surf School" to be most helpful and have the best offer for renting boards. Besides, the guy from the place is really good looking :)

I tried my first surfing at the beginner beach, Ribeira, which was a bit scary on that day. My second day of surfing on Engenhoca was equally unsuccessful - due to a massive hangover from the Friday night party (for visitors of Itacaré: Friday night is the biggest party night, there is a club on La Concha that everybody goes to).

So the next 2 days I took it easy and went to see Prainha (a very beautiful beach 40 mins walk from Itacaré), took a canoe trip upriver with Nino (a friend from the surf school crowd) and went on an adventurous excursion to the beach Jeribucuacu with a Swiss couple that are also staying in the hostel (adventurous meaning us getting slightly lost in a magrove swamp on the way to the beach and caught by the dark in the jungle on the way back).

Today I was back for the surfing again and spent most of the day in the water. Now I am sporting a surfers tan (well, at the moment its rather a surfer´s sunburn - red from the knees to boardshorts and the lower arms). I also sport some blue and black bruises due to some disagreement with the 8 ft board I rented on the first 2 days (I´m down now to a 7'6", which corresponds much better to what I'm used to). These days the waves at Ribera are smooth but big enough for some semi-spectacular drops, so I´m having a great time and make real progress (and I´m getting rid of the fear that I built up from my week in Fuerteventura, which was brutal to say the least...)

The only thing that is a bit annoying are my difficulties with food/water. Or maybe the Brazilian alcohol does not agree with me, I don´t know. I am dieting on coconut water, crackers and bananas at the moment and hope for things to get better. There is so much amazing food here to try out, it´s a shame to miss a proper meal!

Yes, and the other thing that can also be annoying is the frequent thread of rain - it is the beginning of the raining season and at least once a day the sky clouds over within 20 min and rain starts pouring down. After 1 hour or 2 everything is over and the sky is clear again - or not, and it stays cloudy all day and actually a bit chilly. In the morning it is usually sunny, so getting up is essential (also for the surfing: waves are good in the morning these days).

Speaking of - I'm getting hungry now, I think I´ll get a nice sandwich, so: here's some pictures of this magical place:

Itacaré - April 2007

New photos!

Since I didn't follow my brother's advice and brought my card reader, I needed to get a CD done with my pictures and now I am finally able to upload them here for your pleasure :)
(besides, one always has to be afraid that the camera gets stolen, so a backup copy of the photos never does any harm).

Here we are: my birthday in Salvador, Caetano Veloso, leaving Salvador on the ferryboat and in Morro de São Paulo! (click on the picture to open the full album)

Brazil April - June 2007

Taking it easy in Morro de São Paulo

Hi again,

today we took all these really great pictures that I wanted to upload to the blog (thanks for all the enquiries for more pictures :) and now the computers in this internet café fail to recognize my camera. Well, some pictures are already on this computer, I'm just going to use them!

I arrived in Morro de São Paulo yesterday - I had to delay my departure from Salvador for, ahem, a very bad hangover after my birthday on Friday.



I don't know if it was the mix from caipirinha, beer and craviño (the latter is evil, some local fruit-schnapps-specialty from Bahia) or if part of it was "traveller's disease", anyhow, I had a lot of trips to the toilet for 2 days.

But my birthday was absolutely great! I brought some Linzer-Torte to school that I had made the day before, all the students from all classes and the teachers sang for me in our break, I got presents (CDs with Brazilian music) and we all ate cake together. In the evening I went to see some Flamenco in the Pelourinho (night-life quarter of Salvador) and went to a private party in a cultural center (it was more like a loft, a really amazing old building).

The next day - despite certain difficulties - I went to see Caetano Veloso. I really liked his show, he has quite some stage personality (photos to follow soon).

My "family" did not want to see me leaving all by myself to Morro de São Paulo so they attached me to a friend of theirs who happened to do the same trip on Sunday. He took perfect care of me with ferry ticket and bus connections, meanwhile my family called about 4 times during the 3 hour trip enquiring how we were. Dalton (the name of the friend) also put me up for 1 night with his friend Liz and I could sleep on her sofa (neither he nor she had met me before, people here are really really amazingly hospitable and easygoing!). They took me out for great dinner and an even more amazing breakfast (do not leave Brazil without having had "mingao de tapioca"!)

On Morro I checked into the HI hostel, which turned out to be a good choice, since a really nice German girl and me are almost the only ones staying there, and the German girl is friends with the Brazilian receptionist. Since my arrival we have been an inseparable trio and we all speak Portuguese (the German girl spent 5 months in Mato Grosso - somewhere in the center of Brazil where no tourist ever finds his way - doing charity work in a hospital, she has loads of very interesting stories about that time). Today we hiked to a beach where there is some special kind of clay that you can smear all over you as a treatment for the skin and hair. It was very nice (afterwards :)



So, now I digested my very large dinner and I can go and get one of the great cakes that the women sell on the street (food will be another chapter here I guess, especially cakes! They are sooooo yummy), and then walk down to Segunda Praia (second beach if you haven't guessed it) to get a huge, hand-made Piña Colada (with hand-made I mean they actually squeeze the coconut milk and pinapple juice in front of you) for 4 Reales (which is about 1 Euro). This is where it's at:

Salvador da Bahia, tía Rejane e na escola de Português

Wow - I´ve been in Brazil for almost a week and it seems so much longer, all these new impressions...! Salvador is a beautifully derelict town and rather relaxed for a metropolis of 3 million inhabitants. I am especially lucky because I am staying with a local family - aunt Rejane (the aunt of Neida, my former work-collegue, but now she is my aunt also :) and her 3 nephews. They welcomed me as if I was part of their family even though we never met before.

They picked me up from the airport and we went directly to their beach house (yay!), so this is where I got my first sunburn:



Monday I started my Portuguese course in the highly recommendable language school IDIOMA. We are 2 students in class and Rosângela, our teacher, is challenging us every minute of the class. It is great, I´m learning so fast I feel as if there must be smoke coming out of my head with all the new words (or maybe it is my imagination and I´m just speaking "Portuñhol" and people are too polite to tell me that half of my Portuguese is in fact Spanish :)

The weather is usually nice and warm but at the moment it is also raining season and we had 2 rather rainy days so far (as long as I´m in school I don´t mind, but this weekend I´m moving on to Morro de São Paulo, a beach paradise so I'm told).

Saturday is going to be a highlight: our language school invites us to see Caetano Veloso apparently the greatest singer from Brazil. I don't really know his music, but I heard that he has contributed music to films by Almodovar, so I guess he must be interesting. This is what I found online about him:

"...Music critics struggle to find an Anglo-American equivalent to Veloso. According to one, Gerard Marzorati, he has "the poetical and political allusiveness of Bob Dylan, the melodic seductiveness of Burt Bacharach, the good looks of a French New Wave actor, the hip thinkingness of Susan Sontag in her Partisan Review days, and the sheer pop weirdness of Captain Beefheart". He is adored by the artier end of pop from Beck to David Byrne, with whom he appeared last month at the Carnegie Hall in New York."

So, now I'm going to try the "Torta de Linz" that I just made with my new brasilian family because - pst - amanhã é meu aniversário :)

Here a few more pictures from Salvador:

Brazil April - June 2007

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Taking a break... Austria-Brazil

Since it is so fashionable to keep travel blogs (even my brother has one - read up on his adventures in Asia http://hartwiethomas.blogspot.com), I think I will follow the tradition and add some notes from my upcoming trip to Brazil.

Since leaving Ireland in February I spent 2 relaxing & also busy months in beautiful Austria getting back in shape, taking a tour around the country to visit friends and their new offspring, cooking, baking, shopping - everything that's fun and I didn't have the time for in the past 2 1/2 years.

Now I'm in a packing frenzy since on Saturday 6 a.m. in the morning I'll be on my way to Salvador de Bahia for 2 months of sun, beach, samba, surf, caipirinhas...

Let's do the before/after: this is me and my mum last week in Zagreb. The "after" version should show a few kilos more (especially in the area of the paddling-muscles) and a deep deep tan.


Boa noite for now!