The bus company had placed a plastic bag on every seat. Laboriously I translated the Portuguese that was written on it. It said, ‘Put your rubbish in this bag, please, instead of throwing it out the window.’ The next day I saw a well-dressed man and woman, who had diligently obeyed these instructions, get off the bus. They held a bulging plastic bag chock-a-block full of garbage. The man stepped down from the bus and immediately flung the bag into the grass at the side of the road. There are 160 million Brazilians. The litter will be up to their knees soon.
I slept, having imbibed a beer with my toasted cheese and ham sandwich at the last stop of the evening. I woke with a bright light flashing in my face and sat up wondering what it was. It was sheet lightning – we were passing through a terrific storm. Despite the pelting rain the driver was still throwing the bus at the bumpy road as fast as he could. Suddenly there was a tremendous bang and, whump, all the drink bottles crashed from the cooler behind me. We had plunged into a whacking great pothole. The driver crunched out of it and thereafter drove more cautiously.
At first light we stopped at a roadhouse and I tottered out for something to eat. At half past eleven we stopped again, this time for lunch, and while we ate the bus and the toilet were cleaned. Amazing. Our rubbish bags were removed and replaced with fresh ones so that we could throw them in the grass.
About half way to Rio the villages and towns became progressively smarter. The roadhouses we stopped at were large, impressive affairs surrounded by attractive gardens and incorporating gift shops and rows of clean showers and toilets. But the use of most toilets incurred a fee and a woman attendant would demand the outrageous sum of fifty cents for the privilege.
The other passengers on the bus were a cheerful and friendly lot. Two young lads occupied the seat in front of me and a charming, handsome man sat behind me. The passengers and I attempted conversations, but there was not a word of English on the whole bus and not many words of Portuguese came from me, so we were handicapped in our efforts.
In the morning the woman across the aisle put her hair up in fat orange curlers, covered the whole mess with a scarf and left it like that all day. The next morning she put it up again. Until then I had thought that all South Americans had minimal-care crowning glories. Their wonderful thick hair, which made me ill with jealousy, never looked as though they did anything at all to it. Another woman, an attractive middle-aged blonde, wore her long hair in a swathe wrapped tightly around her head and secured every few centimetres with a long bobby pin. It looked like her hair was nailed to her head.
One bloke got on the bus, took off almost all his clothes and lay down to sleep across four seats. You had to climb over his body to get to the back of the bus. When he finally woke up, he turned out to be a barrel of fun. He performed animal imitations – first a dog, then a cat, then a cat and a dog fighting. Then he crowed like a rooster. He was quite a good performer and all the middle-aged ladies had fits of giggling at each performance. Then he’d imitate their giggles and have them in hysterics.
On the third morning it was cold and raining. I found it hard to believe that I was shivering again. The air-conditioning on the bus had been arctic all along, but I had prepared for this by bringing my woolly socks and jumper. The driver, who had charge of the air-conditioning control knob, was locked in his little cocoon. The weather remained overcast as we climbed through rolling elevations that were rather like the pleasing Adelaide Hills. Down in the valleys we passed an occasional village, or a man walking on the road with a rifle in his hand. Then we were in the highlands, among beautiful towering mountains that were completely covered with thick woods. I read that the Brazilian highlands are some of the oldest geological formations on earth and produce quantities of gold, diamonds, aquamarines, amethysts and other gems. The road was now a good, well-built highway of several lanes. There were no ghastly precipitous drops over the side and we zipped around the mountains and through long tunnels. No worries.
After breakfast there were no more stops and we arrived in Rio in the early afternoon. Although Rio is called the most beautiful city in the world, it has its darker side. Coming into the sprawling metropolis, for a long time we passed through slums of matchbox houses, multi-storey tenements and dreadful makeshift shanties and tents that clung to the mountain-sides. One-sixth of Rio’s population live in slums where sometimes there is only one water-pump for hundreds of people.
Politically Brazil has had a chequered history. Since the military coup in 1889 that established it as a republic, it has been ruled – with varying degrees of success – by a steady stream of military and civilian presidents. Rebellion by the poor was brutally put down and poverty and corruption remain major problems.
Reading my guide book in the Rio bus depot I was assured by its author that if I approached the tourist information centre the staff there would obtain for me a big discount at a hotel. What they offered me was not my idea of a bargain. ‘No way, Jose,’ I said, and looking up a hotel in my book, asked the tourist person if it was acceptable. ‘Yes, yes,’ he said, and tried to phone. The phone was not working so he wrote a note to the manager instead. He also told me that I must use a radio taxi to get there, as other taxis were not safe. The radio taxi was safe but it was also a lot dearer. The hotel manager, a charming young woman who smiled all the time, even while I was telling her I didn’t want to pay her first price, accommodated me even if she did think that I was as mean as cat’s poo.
My new home, the Hotel Turistico, was a big old building halfway up a steep hill. It sat opposite the subway, main road and bus route in the Gloria district. The Turistico had the usual faults, but the bathroom had been modernised – badly – and supplied lovely hot water all the time. The toilet-roll holder had been positioned, obviously by someone with a warped sense of humour, directly under the shower.
By six in the evening I was settled into my small room and listening to the homely sounds of church bells and someone in the throes of a music lesson singing lustily across the way. My room had a TV fixed on a stand high up near the ceiling. It didn’t matter that I couldn’t understand it because it had no remote control – if I had wanted to turn it on, I would have had to climb up to the top of the wardrobe to do so. There was also an air-conditioner that I didn’t use, a fridge and a comfy bed that was also good for ironing my jeans, as it had a good flat board under the mattress. Not recommended if your memory is failing – there’s a pair of my jeans still under a mattress in Penang.
I breakfasted in the first-floor dining room where the open windows looked down the hill and into the trees of the park in the middle of the highway. The clanging of the church bell wafted across from a hill that rose on the other side of the road. Gazing at this pleasant scene and drinking excellent coffee was a great way to start the day. A light breeze came through the open window, and I noticed that it was glazed. I had rarely seen glass in windows in the north.
I shared my table with a young German girl who was a bit of a know-all. But at least she saved me from a fruitless trip downtown to the airline office. She told me that, this being Independence Day, everything would be shut.
I decided to take the subway to Copacabana Beach instead. The subway was fast, efficient and not too crowded, but to get out of its clutches you had to walk a very long way, then ride up an escalator, walk more and ride up more – and again and again. At first I went through a big cavern designed to look like a cave, then I was in a series of semi-circular, long tunnels with walls that were lined with lighted panels of all the graduating shades of the rainbow.
Rio is famous for its long stretches of soft, sandy beaches fringed by rows of tall palm trees and Copacabana was very beautiful. But I had enjoyed Surre’s beach much more. There was no shade here. You had to take your own umbrella or sit baking on the hot sand. Still, today was a heavenly spring day and a wonderful day for a walk. I knew the temperature because every so often I came across a big clock and a temperature gauge in the street.
I ambled along the edge of the long white beach where grass-green coconut palms waved against a glorious stretch of blue sea and sky. Small, thatched stalls that sold drinks and snacks were dotted along the sand, while the other side of the road was lined with outdoor cafes and restaurants. As this was a public holiday there were people everywhere and the atmosphere was festive. In Copacabana you would never know that there were any poor people in Brazil. They were not visible here. Copacabana seemed to be for the rich and tourists. In the residential streets people walked expensive-looking dogs under big shady trees on the black-and-white-mosaic-tiled footpaths.
Coming into Rio I had seen the poverty of the slums, but I saw poverty close up around Gloria, where a number of people lived on the streets. Yet I was glad that I had chosen to stay in Gloria – it was close to the city centre and easy to get around from once I got my bearings. To return there from Copacabana I caught a bus marked Central to downtown Rio, thinking that I could get back to my hotel via the subway from there. But that subway had shut for the holiday. Empty streets fronted the masses of huge buildings, as though the human population had fled some cataclysmic event. Then, in a small square, I came upon a crowd of street people who were having a party. I guess the city was theirs when everyone else disappeared. I backed up and went around another way. But I was not generally afraid of street people. Most that I saw around Gloria would smile at me and say ‘Bom dia’, and not all of them begged.
A driver at the bus station told me which bus to take to Gloria. As the bus passed a grandiose building decorated by life-sized, bronze sculptures of horses and chariots, I saw a man in rags sitting on the stone seat in front of it. He crouched with his head on his knees, asleep in the sun.
The ride back to Gloria revealed to me that Rio bus drivers drove with just as much wild abandon as those of the north. Even Rio’s dense traffic did not slow them down. It was as though they considered the journey some kind of a contest. You had to hang on to the back of the seat in front of you for grim death and you could still be thrown from one side of the bus to the other. And the long distances between bus stops gave drivers the chance to go like the clappers and get up steam.
I never saw any old people on buses. Just as well – they’d all have broken legs or arms. Anyway, an age-challenged person could never get onto a bus – the turnstile that had to be negotiated after you had paid your money could get you in a killer grip and do a death roll. But at least the buses came every couple of minutes, and even though they were dearer in Rio than in the north, tickets still cost just ninety cents. You didn’t get much of a chance to see the sights from a bus as you flew past at a thousand kilometres an hour, but I did glimpse the famous Sugar Loaf, a high, skinny, bare-rock-topped mountain that sticks up on the edge of the bay like a pointing finger and has a cable car that swings up to its peak on wires strung across the sky. From where I was the cable car looked as big as an ant and horribly scary. I’ll need some valium in order to ride that, I thought.
When I returned from Copacabana, I found a weekend market in the back streets around my hotel. The market sold mainly fruit and veggies and some trash and treasure. I saw no treasure, mostly trash, but I pounced on a book in English,
The Life of Winston Churchill
– I’ll read anything – and collected some bananas, pawpaws, mandarins and bread rolls. I was about to reform and eat healthy, having scoffed so much junk food lately that I couldn’t do up my pants. In the gutters half a dozen children and several street people were picking through the vegetables that had been discarded by the stalls. Later I saw children fossicking in rubbish bins and I was reminded that Rio and Sao Paulo are reputed to have vigilante groups who round up street kids and shoot them like rats.
That night I couldn’t sleep for thinking about those poor people in the streets and the wretched dog that had followed me back to the hotel. I wondered if dogs pick up vibes from susceptible people. This dog followed me from the vegetable market all the way across two busy highways, up the hill and right to the hotel door. It was a big dog, part Alsatian, but it was so thin that its hip bones and collar bones protruded like knobs. It looked so pathetic I gave it a couple of my bread rolls. Then I thought that it seemed wrong to feed a dog when there were people in worse condition.
Rio was just as littered as the other parts of Brazil that I had seen. Rubbish lay thick in the streets and often my nostrils were assaulted by the unmistakable smell of urine, especially near walls or telephone stands. In fact, almost all public spaces ponged of ammonia. I wondered why, if women are able to wait until they reach home or a loo, men can’t do the same. I reckon it is a macho show-off thing. Look at me, I’ve got a doodle! Thank goodness telephones were not enclosed in booths. They would have become public toilets. Instead phones, called big ears, were perched on posts and were partly shaded by a perspex hood, some of which in Belem had been shaped like giant parrots. It felt curious ducking under one.
I had been surprised when I first saw ‘Bom Jesus’ scrawled on a wall. I wondered if a terrorist who couldn’t spell had passed that way, but later I discovered that Bom means good in Portuguese and you see it written everywhere. I noticed also that among the many buildings that had their names written on them, the name Ed featured often. There was Ed Franco, Ed da Silva etc. I thought that this Ed fellow was a very popular bloke, until I got to Rio and there were so many Eds that it finally clicked that Ed meant edifico, building.
One day I saw an unusually squeaky-clean beggar. At five o’clock in the evening she was settling herself down on the pavement in the city. With beautiful, clear skin and a sweet face, she was neatly dressed in a bright, freshly washed woollie and, only a child herself, she held a wee baby, not nine months old, who was also immaculately dressed in a white jumpsuit and a white knitted beanie with a pompom on top. The girl wasn’t soliciting for money. She merely sat on a blanket with a few coins in her hand, looking so sad. I gave her all my change and grieved for the fact that someone of her age had come to this.