Chasing Bohemia Read Free

he would look into the rear-vision mirror and attempt to penetrate me with a gaze of almost comical intensity. I had heard about Brazilian men here and there. A Brazilian woman at a dress shop I used to frequent in Sydney told me that they were ‘very machista’ . She was posted to Sydney with her husband, but left him after three months because, as she put it, ‘he went mad on the English women’. She was a beautiful woman, too.
    I gave him a distant smile and looked out my window. Down at eye level, the urban landscape that had looked so gorgeously uneven and rust-coloured from the air revealed itself to be a miserable slum. Those first images are burnt into my memory: a mother cooking on a Bunsen burner with a rag-dressed child on one hip; the hardened swagger of a girl no more than twelve, dressed in a bikini top and a red Lycra miniskirt, walking along the highway; and the dirty faces of a family living in cardboard shelters under a bridge, their children playing happily in the steaming sewers. Homes made of unfinished red bricks teetered two- and three-storeys high, with cement spewing out between the gaps and round blue-water tanks on every roof. Rows of brightly coloured washing were strung between corners, the lines cut by the cords of young kite-flyers who darted back and forth across the rooftops in the grainy half light of dusk . As the road rose into a flyover, I could see the softly undulating hills of north Rio from an elevation, her layers upon layers of red bricks stretching out endlessly before me. Up ahead, I glimpsed the iconic statue of Christ I had seen from my porthole; but, from the angle of the airport highway, he had his back turned. We turned off at an intersection guarded by slouching military police, their carelessly parked cars flashing blue lights and their machine guns resting on window sills in a threatening manner, and I wondered which way it was to Copacabana.
    The taxi plunged into the city below. We raced along crumbling backstreets, dodging the potholes at the edge of the road and narrowly skimming the blue buses that thundered along beside us. A heavy Beijing-style haze of pollution hung in the air. We passed through grand open squares, vaguely Parisian, that were lined with baroque and art-nouveau palaces consumed by tropical decay. Rows of colonial terraces sagged together, their friezes sprouting weeds and their walls bruised by pollution. Heavy entanglements of vines spilled over walls, palm trees sprouted stubbornly from broken pavements, and handcarts piled high with cardboard and junk lined the disused turning circles of abandoned buildings. It must have been an elegant area once upon a time, but now it was spent, swallowed by the tropics and poverty.
    The taxi turned up a steep cobbled lane marked by a sign to Santa Teresa, and slowed to a crawl. Rua Moratori. Elegant terraces leaned up against each other, their doors far from the street above endless zigzagging staircases. People collected water in buckets from a natural spring flowing out of a dark sheath of granite rock. Three nuns in brown habits entered a side door in a high stone wall, beyond which the tops of a banana plantation could be seen. I caught a glimpse of sweeping city views between mansions fringed by tropical gardens and ivy-covered walls. My taxi driver stopped to ask a passer-by where my hostel was, but he simply shrugged. We drove on. In the end, he left me at a small square at the top of the hill, and told me to find it myself. I handed over my seventy reals and retrieved the UB without protest. I was grateful to be out of transport and finally in South America.
    The Santa Teresa connection was a work one. Back at STA Travel in London, where I’d worked alongside another ten once-were-travel-warriors contracting hostels and one-star hotels for the diamond-tight-arsed market of student travellers, my colleague Ruth had given me the contact for a Brazilian hostel-owner. ‘She’s