Chasing Bohemia (2 page)

The woman closed her eyes and kissed her silver cross, and the plane dropped suddenly into the north of the city, where the high-rises crumbled into rusty, undulating suburban sprawl. As we swung wildly towards the runway, she clapped prematurely, setting off a ripple of congratulatory applause in the cabin and a stampede of Brazilians to the exits. The back wheels of the plane had barely blistered the tarmac before the locals were lined up at the front of the plane, their arms overflowing with inappropriately large electrical purchases and misbehaving children.

Indignant European passengers watched on in horror as their highly evolved plane-exit queuing culture was so unapologetically ignored. ‘That's just not right,' said a man with a northern English accent in the seat in front of me. ‘And against safety regulations, moreover,' added his wife with prim disapproval. There was a muted murmur of support from the surrounding seats. The Spanish hostesses, still secure in their emergency-exit seats, gave sympathetic shrugs to the seated passengers, their serene, glazed-over expressions suggesting a history of previously unsuccessful attempts to deter this crass third-world custom. When the plane finally shuddered to a halt I struggled vainly to enter the flow of Brazilians, and was eventually shown mercy by a tough-looking woman dressed in a leopard-skin-print silk blouse and solid gold bangles who changed her mind several times before finally letting me in with a loud grudging sigh and an, ‘Aw, go on then.'

I thanked God and the Americans that I didn't have any luggage to collect. All I had was a carry-on five-gallon khaki German-army issue from World War II, stamped UB — ‘for
uber
cool,' said my friend J, who'd bought the bag for me before I left. It was a generous present. J had been travelling with his UB for five years, to the envy of most of our group of friends who never managed to get out of London with less than a giant wheelie bin, and he eventually revealed his sources the week before I left. ‘Travel backpacks are gay,' he said, taking away my old red one with the iron orthopaedic back-frame and zip-off day pack and throwing me the well-worn UB. J and I had been friends for a long time, but we struck up a strange relationship in the month or so before my departure — a sort of war-time relationship, where it took the prospect of death or disappearance for two people to overcome their inertia and declare their attractions. It always happened like that. Sometimes I even suspected that I subconsciously travelled in order to get boyfriends. They flocked to me in their dozens once they realised I was leaving. And, conversely, left me in droves each time I came back.

‘Maybe you should stay for a while to see what happens,' said my friend Skye as she watched me pack and repack the UB in her Battersea apartment the night before I left London. ‘And then again maybe she
shouldn't
,' cried my friend Stephanie, who had known J as long as me. ‘He's even more of a backpacking bastard than she is.' Skye, who had been in South America for nine months the previous year, retrieved a pair of cowboy boots and a red studded Diesel belt from the overflowing UB and shook them at me with a loud ‘tut-tut'. ‘These are
not
going, darling.' I looked at the discarded items forlornly. Those two pieces had been the cornerstones of my cowgirl-chic look for the past six months. ‘Really?' I said with a pleading look. Skye looked at me warningly. ‘Really.'

I CLEARED IMMIGRATION
and, not having to collect baggage, made my way through the empty customs area. I was expecting a little chaos at the exit gates: pedlars, hotel touts, pushy taxi drivers, perhaps even a line of miserable porters — it was a poor country, after all — but the airport was nearly empty. A couple of bleary-eyed tour-company representatives slumped over the arrivals fences with hand-drawn signs on cardboard. Bored women at the Avis and Hertz counters chatted and smoked cigarettes through pink-painted mouths that matched their nails. A cluster of taxi drivers around a tin cylinder ashtray burst out laughing. One looked up at the people coming out of arrivals and said something that prompted the rest of the group to look around, but after a second they returned to their conversation. There was almost an intentional lack of interest in the few tourists filtering through the gates. I hesitated for a moment, realised nobody was going to approach me, and then walked up to the group of taxi drivers.

‘Taxi?' I suggested. They turned towards me.

‘Santa Teresa,' I said with the firm superiority of a ‘customer' and handed one of them a scrap of paper with the hostel address. He looked at it.

‘Seventy reals,' he said in English.

‘Fifty,' I bargained expertly.

‘Nuh,' he said, handing it back to me and turning back to his friends. I looked around at the empty airport and then turned back.

‘OK. Seventy,' I shrugged hopelessly.

He turned, smiled pleasantly, took the UB from me as delicately as if it were Prada (or a piece of dog shit), and we walked out to the car.

We drove out of the Galeão Airport along a smooth, modern concrete flyover with trimmed lawn inlays, potted palms, and polished street signs — all indistinguishable from any other airport in the developed world — until we were about five hundred metres out and the road crumbled into pot-holed disarray, the ditches filled with rubbish, and the earth grew crowded with slums. It made me wonder why third-world countries even bother with those five-hundred-metre-circumference poverty-free zones around their international airports. Maybe they are for stopover travellers who never leave the airport. Maybe they are for the passengers who travel to the airport by helicopter. Or perhaps they are just to prepare weary travellers for the confusing wealth inequalities of the third world. Now you see it; now you don't. Personally, I prefer the earthy honesty of Mumbai Airport in India, where you land a hundred metres from someone's kitchen, and the sheets of tin that serve as roofs flap in the slipstream of each landing plane. I know it's offensive, but at least it's real.

The taxi driver turned on the radio, and a drum-heavy samba blasted into the cab. Sweat was pouring down my back, but my driver remained gloriously sweat free; not even a moustache of moisture graced his flawless olive skin. Brazil skin. Africa, Portugal, and the Indians, blended into a delicious hue of burnt sugar. His eyes were a hypnotic green; a throwback to European blood perhaps, and a feature he seemed to be well aware of, because at any given opportunity 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 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.

‘Hello,' I called out.