The hostel itself was incredible…although we were staying in dorms for virtually the first time (6 to a room), the hostel had 3 different levels all of which had an incredible view of the centre of Rio. Even the bedroom had a double door opening out onto this view, which compensated for the fact that you’re sharing with 4 other strangers.
Hostel view by day...
... and by night.What also made the hostel so good was that we met up with a couple of the guys (Mick and Ben) whom we’d met in the Pantanal, who along with 2 friends of theirs from Ireland (Tom and Colm), Vanessa (from London who was waiting to join a yacht on a round the world sailing trip), and Clara and Sofie (think young blond girls from Sweden and you’ve pretty much got the picture) made for a fun group of people to hang out with for the week.
We did most of the usual tourist stuff (Copacabana and Ipanema beaches, the statue of Christ the Redeemer on Corcovada), but the best part was the nightlife. The area at the bottom of the hill from the hostel is called Lapa, and is where the Cariocas (name for the inhabitants of Rio) head for their nights out. Even the steps down there were interesting, a guy has been decorating them with painted tiles for years now so they’re an attraction in themselves.
We went there on a normal rainy Friday night, and it still felt like a big street party, with women selling huge Caiprinhas on the street for 2 pounds a go - not recommended if you want to remember anything about your journey back home.I also managed to get myself a couple of Pandeiro lessons – the Pandeiro is a Brazilian instrument like a tambourine, but with a drum skin over one side. It’s used in most informal forms of samba like you’d get in bars or restaurants, or playing on the street. I thought I knew how to play a little bit, but needless to say the teacher took my technique apart (“that’s an old fashioned style”) and started again from scratch. Will take a bit of time to put back together again.
On the Saturday night, we went to one of the samba schools. A bit of history here… Samba started in Rio at the start of the last century, with the arrival of the black Brazilians from Bahia (Salvador in the north east of Brazil), and was originally looked down upon by the white middle classes as ‘ghetto’ music and as such confined to the favelas. Over time, and with various recordings that were released it became accepted amongst ‘polite’ society, and became the core Brazilian music. For example, Bossa Nova at the end of the 50s (e.g. ‘The Girl from Ipanema’) was an offshoot of samba developed by the white middle class Brazilians who lived around the beach areas, with more accent on the melody and a jazzy style. Anyway, for these reasons, what are now called ‘samba schools’ would be more accurately described as samba groups, or blocks, and are located mainly in the favelas and other poorer areas of town. Each ‘school’ represents its own area in Carnival each February, and as you can imagine it’s a hotly contested business. During the months leading up to Carnival, each school rehearses weekly, and it’s possible to go along to some of them to watch, and naturally to dance. We went to one of the main schools in one of the safer areas, called Salgueira (think of the Arsenal of samba schools, a bit more middle class than the others ones, a bit less likely to get shot on your way home). We joined up with an organised group as we thought it would be more fun with some other people, and eventually arrived just before midnight. The rehearsal location was like a big school hall: a dancefloor in the middle with a stage on one side, and a balcony for the bateria (the percussionists) on the other side. At first, it was low key with 5 guys playing some samba ‘pagode’ (an informal melodic type of samba), but then eventually the dancing girls came on to give a demo, followed by the percussion bateria itself. The bateria at the rehearsal was fairly small, perhaps 30 people, but in the carnival itself there are 100s of them, playing a mixture of the big bass drums (called surdos), snare drums (caixas), shakers (ganzas), etc. On the stage, you had guys singing the carnival song, for which they hand you a flyer with the lyrics so you can sing along. After the 200th rendition you start to remember the words, even if they are in Portuguese. While it’s called a rehearsal, essentially it’s really a performance, there’s no stopping or starting or discussion or arguments around who’s playing the wrong song or anything like that, so you start dancing around half past 12, and carry on all night. We had to leave around 3 am (the group conga-lined its way out of there) and the rehearsal carried on for another hour at least. Excellent fun.
The next morning, we woke up to read that the drug gangs that control the nearby favelas had shot down a police helicopter close to where the samba school was… though frankly they could have detonated a small scale nuclear device and you’d have struggled to hear it over the noise of the drums.
After a quiet day to recover, we set off to fly up to Recife in the north east of Brazil. This turned out to be a bit of a mistake, Recife has the reputation of being one of the best places to see music local to the area, however on a Monday and Tuesday it just looked like a big unattractive city with a hostel in a soulless beach resort area. So after an afternoon looking round Olinda (a lovely old colonial town nearby) we cut our losses and headed overnight to Salvador.
Salvador has to be the nearest thing I’ve found to my perfect location. It’s the 5th biggest city in Brazil, but the old colonial centre where we’re staying (Pelourinho) is small, has no motorised traffic allowed, and is packed with music. It’s like being in a festival, you don’t have to go searching for the music, you just walk out of your hotel room and it finds you. I never thought I’d find a place more filled with music than Cuba was when we went there a few years ago, but this is on a different level.
In the early days of Brazil, Salvador was the capital and most important city in the Americas, and the main Portuguese slave trading port. To this day, it’s still the main ‘black’ area of Brazil, and has a much stronger African influence than Rio or São Paulo for example. You see women on the street dressed in traditional African costume, the local religion (Candomble) is directly linked to the original west African religion (exactly like you get in Cuba) and naturally this plays through to the music as well. The equivalent of the samba schools here are called ‘blocos’, it’s a looser form of playing with less accent on the singing than Rio samba - it’s basically just how the same music has developed separately over the last 100 years (Salvador and Rio are about 1,000 miles apart). Each night it’s possible to see the different blocos rehearse, or give performances on the street, you don’t have to look hard just follow your ears. In the first weekend we were there, we saw Olodum (twice), Didá, Swing do Pelo as well a couple of excellent groups on the street and in bars. Incidentally Olodum appeared in a Michael Jackson video a few years back, the video’s set in the streets where we’re staying (incongruously mixed in with a view overlooking Rio).
We also went to see a demonstration of Capoeira (this was the form of martial arts that was developed by the Brazilian slaves to look like dancing, so they were allowed to practice it, that’s become popular in Britain in recent years). Whenever I’ve seen people doing this in London, it’s always seemed a bit lame, guys with nothing better to do mucking around on the south bank etc. What we saw here was something else – 20 or so people in a small room, with the music accompanying them, the intensity was incredible. Not to mention the fact that most of these guys looked had the sort of physique that you normally associate with Olympic sprinters or boxing champions.
Just like in Rio, I also picked up some percussion lessons here, 2 hours a day with a guy called Kinho. The lessons are carried out in a strange hybrid language, a mix of Spanish, English, Portuguese and the language common to all percussionists (“gick gick gong gong gong bat bat” etc etc). We get by ok in the end and it’s nice to be sat behind a drum again.
We enjoyed Salvador so much that we decided to spend another week end there. So we spent Monday to Thursday on a break within a break, going to a place 2 hours away from Salvador by boat called Morro de São Paulo, a very nice little island with some nice beaches and lovely restaurants and shops and stuff.
We came back to Salvador this afternoon for another weekend partying. Next the plan is to hop on a flight down to Iguassu falls (on Tuesday 2/11), from where we’ll head into Argentina and Chile (flying to Santiago on Friday 6/11). I’ll be sad to leave the music of Brazil behind, but it’ll be nice to head back into the Spanish speaking world again and be able to communicate with people.
Gary
