Chasing Bohemia Read Free Page A

very laid back,’ Ruth had said back in our cramped Covent Garden office. ‘And the hostel is on this weird little bohemian hill. There is a tram that runs up and down it. Away from all the Copacabana hustle, you know?’ That was enough to sell me. The mere mention of the word ‘Copacabana’ had set off big, clanging, red warning-bells in my head. No matter how hard the tour companies and American films tried to glamorise it, Copacabana just made me think of Chinese-manufactured trinkets, overpriced restaurants with English menus, homeless kids, and whores.
    I bought a packet of cigarettes called Hollywood Turkish Blend from a small kiosk and sat down on the kerb to smoke one. Across the street, a name plaque affixed to the wall of a crumbling yellow building read: LARGO DAS GUIMARÃES . Yellow street lamps cast a strange glow over the buildings. The square was oblong-shaped, crowded in by faded terraces and formed, from the look of the iron tracks on the ground, by the crossing of several different tramlines. The four tributary streets arrived, spun around and then led off again at odd crooked angles, some descending and others diverging into paths that either led up off to hills crammed with Portuguese-style colonial houses or down to slum-like habitations. The buildings on the square were clearly of the nineteenth century, complete with flourishes and fluting on their friezes. One was stamped 1887. It had a feeling of the old world about it, like the Gothic quarter of Barcelona or the Latin quarter of Paris might have had before the tourists came and stuck all their hostels and Irish bars there.
    If it was a tourist destination of any sort, it was certainly not betraying itself. The place was more or less empty. A withered old woman leaned on the blue-and-white-tiled entrance of a shop seemingly empty of any saleable goods. An enormous black woman sat by a roadside food stall among the bunches and folds of her even more enormous dress. A handsome young couple were kissing furiously in front of her. There were no bed-and-breakfast signs. No touts. Not even a rack of old postcards in a doorway somewhere. The most attention I received was from a cross-eyed black mutt and his tribe of multicoloured mongrels, who stopped, sniffed the air around the UB, and went on their way.
    On a wall I saw a room for rent sign — ‘ ALUGO QUARTO’ — and immediately regretted getting Ruth to book the hostel. I should have just turned up and taken my chances like I always had. Hostels were usually such a bitter disappointment; places where all that gorgeous ripe exotica was guaranteed to dissolve into a bland international-airport lounge of internet facilities and cheap day-tours. Still, I guess I owed it to Carina to go there after years of selling her hostel, even if our relationship had been no more than a virtual one. And besides, it was free — one glorious privilege of selling my wandering soul to the travel industry.
    It turned out that the Rio Hostel was back on the lower end of the entrance street, near the convent, and signalled to the passer-by with only a small black graffiti scrawl on its outer wall. It was a chalet-style terrace, nestled between towering art-nouveau mansions with steep terraced gardens; I looked up at it for some seconds, the burglar-light shining in my eyes as I considered the long, vertical stone staircase that ran unbroken up one side of the house. The door clicked open in front of me and I made my ascent.
    When I arrived, the reception was unattended.
    â€˜Hello,’ I called out.
    Carina was even shorter than me, and the reception desk at the Rio Hostel was enormous. Eventually a pair of friendly brown eyes popped up above the ledge.
    â€˜Hi,’ she said in a high voice. ‘You must be Carmen.’
    She got to her feet, adding another ten centimetres to her height. ‘We were expecting you earlier,’ she said with a friendly smile. She was wearing