Travel with Indigo

The seas calmed a little during the night—or did I just get used to it? This time at sea gave me a chance to do a little more reading about Brazil so here goes: Brazil is called a racial paradise because of the high number of inter-racial marriages and the absence of open racial conflict. I read in one place that 55% are white, 6% black, 38% mixed and 1% other. The forty percent of the population that is black and mixed is considered black and “black” in Brazil means poor—for the most part, much poorer than what we think of as “poor” in this country. Crime is considered the product of the huge influx of Brazilians into the large cities since 1960 when there was little rainfall in the interior and many people moved to the cities looking for work. That trend has continued over the years. Unfortunately, there is a high unemployment rate in the cities and it is believed that this results in crime. There is little chance of a poor Brazilian becoming anything other than that and that is true no matter what the race or color of the individual. The gap between rich and poor is reportedly greater than anywhere else in the world.

The people everywhere we went were friendly and courteous and there was a sense of equanimity. Everyone was amazed to see Americans—we saw no other Americans the whole time we were there except two business people in the airport when we were leaving—and they were curious about where we were from and the few people who spoke any English at all wanted to practice. The people are really a national treasure—except for the ones who commit crimes. And it sounds like the Brazilian jails are not somewhere you would want to be. We were told by everyone not to wear our watches or neck chains or any other jewelry—apparently grab and run crimes are big here. We were also told not to walk anywhere at night and during the day, only where we were told to go, and to use taxis everywhere. Most of the time, the taxi drivers would wait for us to finish eating or whatever we were doing and would kind of watch out for us. There were “tourist areas” in some of the cities and they were heavily guarded with armed guards. There were also armed guards outside all of the high-rise condo buildings and some of the hotels. Not exactly a tourist friendly place. More facts later.

We arrived in Natal (Portuguese for Christmas) and anchored right by the city; there was no marina or dockage or internet access. There were car ferries crossing regularly from one side of the water to the other and we soon figured out that people were going to the other side (from the city) because of the dune buggies that operated out of that side—we’ll try that tomorrow. We took a tour of the town by taxi and went to the “tourism center” where it turned out that a restaurant owner spoke some English and his wife spoke even more.

We agreed to meet for dinner and that was really fun. They picked us up in their cars—there were the four of us and then the couple, their two teen-age boys and a friend of the boys. We went to their house where they had a snooker table and a ping-pong table. The home was spartan by American standards but secure—with two huge dogs. Their two boys are in private school (the public schools are reportedly really bad) and one of them was willing to try his school English on Grant and Will. Of course, the whole group of boys shared all the bad words they could think of. We then went to Camaroe’s (Portuguese for shrimp) and had a wonderful dinner. We sat down about 10PM and there were still families with small children coming in at 11PM—definitely a different schedule from ours. But the food was delicious—one order could easily feed two—and to get a local perspective was such fun.