Chasing Bohemia Read Free Page B

a loud strapless candy-striped tube dress, and brightly coloured jewellery swung from her ears and around her neck.
    â€˜I came …’ I began apologetically, but she interrupted me with a cock of her head.
    â€˜â€¦ but you went out and got laid, right?’
    I felt an Anglo-Saxon bristle work its way up my spine, but Carina just giggled. She was only being friendly. It was a joke. That always happened at the start of any trip. It took at least three days to shake off that English frigidity.
    â€˜Yeah, something like that,’ I mumbled, and she disappeared underneath the ledge again, saying as she did, ‘Well, don’t worry. Everyone disappears in Rio de Janeiro at some stage or another.’
    She allocated me a bed and told me to get some sleep. As I reached the dormitory door, she called me back.
    â€˜By the way, how long are you staying?’
    â€˜Just a few days,’ I replied. ‘I’m travelling.’
    â€˜Famous last words,’ she said with raised eyebrows and a mischievous smile.
    The room was dark when I entered, so I dumped my things on the floor, turned on the fan, and went to sleep.
    I didn’t wake up until two the following morning when a tall, thin, dark-haired woman in the top bunk opposite turned on the light and started reading a book, her leg dangling lazily over the side. Behind the leg, I could make out a sign stuck to the mirror scrawled in pen that read: ‘ Could SOME guests please not treate the hostel if it were there own house. Chiara that means YOU!’
    The girl in the bed opposite me turned in her bed and grumbled, ‘It’s two in the morning. You could read outside.’
    The dark-haired woman just shrugged and said, ‘What the fuck are you doing in bed in Rio de Janeiro at this time anyway?’

–2–
    Copacabana
    Too good to be true.
    â€“ JOHN UPDIKE on Rio
    T he truth is that I didn’t really like Rio when I first arrived. It was partly Rio, but it was mostly me. After ten years of working in the travel industry, compiling enthusiastic texts for glossy brochures or hunting down new, hidden destinations to expose even the most exotic of places had started blurring into a confusion of repetitive adjectives: … relax on white pristine beaches, wander through quaint villages steeped in history, not to mention meet the charming friendly locals … blah, blah. In the fast-fading glamour of the travel industry, my love of travel had very nearly imploded. I was going to South America because it was travel, and that’s what I did. It was the last continent on earth I hadn’t done. Like half of Australian under-thirty-five-year-olds, I’d lived in a commune in London, hitched through Europe on $10 a day, lost myself in India, bummed out in South-East Asia, and been ripped off in the Middle East. By the time I got to Rio de Janeiro, I was cynical as hell.
    When I woke late the next day, Carina invited me to share breakfast, café da manha , together in the breakfast room. She had swapped her tube dress for a bright pink t-shirt with a print of Shiva on the front. She was truly tiny — no doubt the reason her business partner called her ‘the Midget’ — and a beautiful woman with long, wavy brown hair and sparkling coffee-coloured eyes. She was very well groomed, like Latin American woman always seemed to be, and lounged easily beside me on cushions on the floor.
    We exchanged a few obligatory details about ourselves, and she told me that she had set up the hostel on her own after working in the five-star hotel market for several years. Her friends said she was crazy, that Santa Teresa was dangerous, but she didn’t care. ‘I would rather get robbed in Santa than go back to working for other people,’ she said, and laughed lightly.
    At the start I thought she was younger than me, due to her supple, unlined olive skin; but, as it turned out, she was a year older. She was of