24-hour party peopleWe all know Brazilians like a party, but the city of São Luís is raucous even by their standards. Chris Moss joins the action before escaping to an otherworldly lagoon Chris Moss The Guardian, Saturday 27 December 2008 Article history
All night long . . . ‘Festival city’ São Luís. Photograph: Rex Features
It was late evening when I arrived in São Luís but the cobbled streets were still clacking to the footsteps of Brazilian tourists mooching around stalls selling fruit juices, handicrafts and textiles. Chairs spilled out of every hole in the wall - bar, restaurant, private house, brothel. Lines of coloured paper flags hung overhead, barely twitching in the gentle sea breeze.
I checked into Pousada Portas da Amazônia, a beautiful Italian-run hotel spread over two tall, connecting timber-framed 1839 townhouses, reinvented with modern but discreet, decorative touches using stones and cipó (a woody creeper), wicker and bamboo. After four sticky, humid weeks travelling up the Amazon, this was my idea of holiday nirvana.
But there was no time to rest. The streets were so alive that I dumped my bag and went straight back out. While I was nursing my first just-off-freezing bottle of Brahma beer, a barman told me I was in a "cidade festiva" (festival city). He didn't have time to explain, rushing off with a grin to serve other drinkers and diners. Later on I met my guide, João Manuel, for another beer. He explained the party-loving spirit: "It's hard to pin it down. São Luís is lively but safe, crazy but good for families. Every day, all year, there are celebrations." He ran through every month of the year to make his point (see panel opposite.) "And the whole city is involved."
He suggested I get into the party spirit by going to a convent. "At the Convento das Mercês, you can see a full show, starting about 11pm. There have been June parties for a while now." But it's late July. "Yes, the June parties now go on into July."
I walked down the dark narrow streets and, sure enough, came to a grand 17th-century nunnery, surrounded by makeshift bars and restaurants. Kids were drinking pop, adults were drinking cocktails. There was no entrance fee, and the party in the inner quad was in full swing. The stage was packed with dancers - both sexes, of all ages, all with more rhythm in their big toenail than Bruce Forsyth and Michael Flatley could muster between them. Some of the men sported huge feather headdresses in vivid crimson and gold. When they shook their heads, bells and rattles sounded, and the other dancers - mainly teenage girls and boys - responded with faces that managed to combine mock shock and cuteness. A singer slalomed in between the heaving group, guffawing ostentatiously and belting out a number about how fantastic São Luís is, how great it is to live there, and how lovely Jesus is, too. The latter message, while highly believable, wasn't fully conveyed by the gyrating bodies and African tribal rhythms on display, nor by the miniskirts (women) and naked torsos (men).
I'd done my research. What I was watching was a performance of bumba-meu-boi (literally "swing those horns, my bull"). The story of the death and resurrection of an ox - symbolising an act of forgiveness to a slave who had killed a beast to give his sick wife the tongue as food - it is very much an indigenous music-and-dance phenomenon, and is a source of great pride among the citizens of São Luís. But it is also inclusive and infectious. Deciding not to go back to my boutique garret to reflect on Amazonian themes, instead I stuck around, drinking, dancing, chatting. Outside the quad it was still a full-on family night out, noisy with chatter, and you could see in all the faces - from toddlers to octogenarians - that the night was extremely young.
The next morning I trotted round the museums. The Museu de Artes Visuais was full of old tiles - the folk of São Luís love their azulejos (traditional Portuguese tiles) so much they even cover their traffic lights with tile-patterned plastic lamina. The architecture of the city is a mixed bag of rundown facades (lots of broken tiles), abandoned or priest-less churches, and some spruced-up buildings that could have graced the former colonial capital of Salvador.
I ate lunch and dinner at Antigamente, a gorgeous, fairly old place that has been done up - or down - to look very old. The walls were covered in sepia photos and shelves heaving with dusty cachaça bottles and busts of black Brazilian women known as Baianas.
I chose a fish dish - pescado amarelo, yellow fish - and it was delectable. To put this in context, consider that I'd just spent a month on the Amazon river eating anything and everything with gills. But this white, tuna-like steak was tender and tasty, and came in a bowl of coconut, herbs, spices, egg, onion potato and shrimp, served with a side-plate of the fish's own stock, pureed into a rich sauce. It was followed by a bowl of bittersweet, buttery bacuri ice-cream, decorated with a spoonful of açai, the energy-giving palm berry.
That evening I went to another loud, lively, pan-community musical show in a square across the road from the main promenade. The dances here were as camp as a Rio cross-dresser at carnival, with local guys and gals dressed up in red and white satin cowboy gear doing the local equivalent of line dancing.
I went for another beer at Antigamente - I know, not much variation, but the place was lovely - and while I was sitting outside, a mini carnival descended. There were two lines of perhaps 50 dancers each, all high on the sheer joy of parading in public (and Jesus, and São Luís, no doubt), as well as a small orchestra of horn players and drummers, with dozens of people following them. It was raucous, entertaining - and ear-splittingly loud. It also kicked off a street party that went on until the cock crowed.
The next day, João Manuel, unaware that I had been to a fair number of fiestas already, took me to a sound system party. "São Luís is Brazil's reggae capital," he explained. "In the 1970s, there was a dictatorship and lots of musicians were banned. People used shortwave radios to get music from outside Brazil, and then started importing the vinyls using the exile network."
On a bar crawl that took us to every corner of the old town, I met just about every dreadlocked, Bob Marley-loving, weed-puffing member of the community. As with all sound systems, the volume was 10 and the bass 11 - and, this being Brazil, there was often an undercurrent of samba or some other faster beat just so you didn't think for a minute you could use the Jamaican rhythm to chill out.
I'd overdosed on fiestas. But the next day I was driving three hours south to one of the most peaceful places in the world: the Lençóis Maranhenses. The name means "bed sheets of Maranhão", in reference to the state. But the reality is rather more exciting: 300 sq km of blinding white dunes that stretch along the Atlantic coast, broken only by deep aquamarine lagoons. I guess they do look a bit like sheets with their smooth slopes and pristine appearance, but if the name captures what I was in need of after my stay in "San Insomnia", it doesn't capture their beauty.
"The Lençóis are a bit of the Sahara in South America," João Manuel explained, as we bumped along the final stretch of dirt road.
The only source of water is the rain, which falls between December and May, and which is prevented from being fully absorbed by a phreatic layer beneath the dunes (though the water level is very low by October). I was fortunate enough to be here just after the rainy season (the best time is July-August), and the lagoons were fresh and blue. According to João Manuel, they are clean enough to drink.
My first sight of them came after we'd parked and climbed a steep hill at the edge of an area of restinga or low broadleaf forest. On reaching the top, a vista of white sand opened for mile upon mile. I left João Manuel and the other passengers who'd shared the ride and strolled off towards a lagoon in the first big dip between dunes. I dived straight in. It was cool and gorgeous and silent.
There were only about 70 or 80 people spread over three or four of the longer lagoons but I immediately realised I could have one all to myself. I walked less than a kilometre further into the park and found one, 600m long and 50m wide. It was a pristine, cool, translucent oasis, ideally suited for a lazy breaststroke or practising the front crawl with no one watching, and without lane floats, divers or splashers.
The cliche is that the Lençóis are "like another planet". But they're not. The park is actually a warm, welcoming and earthy - or sandy - experience. Coastal winds sculpt their sensuous forms, and while the contrast of dune and lagoon is arresting, it has none of the surrealism of Arizona or Kamchatka.
For my second day in the area, I went for the lazy option: an all-day motorboat tour up the Rio Preguiças, which winds between Barreirinhas - the sleepy town which is the bed-and-board hub for the Lençóis - and the Atlantic coast, to see the Pequenos Lençóis. These dunes are smaller, and the lagoons are diminutive and less than translucent.
Afterwards I took a dip in the rip-tidal ocean before lunch: just for a change, grilled pescado amarelo, served with rice and beans - the Brazilian version of chips-with-everything - and the usual ice-cold beer. I sat with a group of fellow tourists from Rio. We talked Scolari, Robinho, Pelé and then Beckham, McClaren, Gazza, and they also broached the story of Jean Charles de Menezes, without the merest hint of jingoism. We had many, many beers.
Afterwards I could just about summon the energy to kick off my flip-flops and nestle down in one of the string hammocks the restaurant had thoughtfully provided. I took a deep breath and prepared to succumb to a siesta. As ever, there was music playing, but this time it was the gentle voice of Caetano Veloso intoning a sibilant ballad, and the volume was barely louder than the rustling palms.
Party time in São Luís: what's on when
January Pre-carnival rehearsals
February Carnival (21-24 Feb 2009, 13-16 Feb 2010)
March-April Rehearsals for festas Juninas
May Festa do Divino, Espiritu Santo (2 weeks)
June-July Festas Juninas
August Festa de San Benedicto de Alcántara (reggae and afrobeat)
September Festa de San Jose de Ribamar (2 weeks)
October Festa de Açai, Marafolia (alternative, Salvador-style carnival)
November Sleep
December Christmas and Kings festivals
Way to go
Getting there
Last Frontiers (01296 653000, lastfrontiers.com) offers an overland trip from São Luís across the Parnaiba Delta to Jericoacoara, with three nights in São Luís, four in simple pousadas while crossing the Lençois Maranhenses and five in Jericoacoara. Includes breakfast, one lunch and dune excursions. From £3,421pp inc international and domestic flights.
Where to eat
Restaurante Antigamente, Rua da Estrela 220, Praia Grande (0055 98 3232 3964).
Further information
Brazil Tourist Office (020-7399 9000, brazil.org.uk/tourism/).
Country code: 00 55.
Flight time to São Luís (via Lisbon and Brasilia): 14hrs 30mins.
Time difference: -3hrs.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/travel/200...party?page=all
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