The Brazilian Dispatch of London, England
We interrupt your schedule for a field report from our man in Brazil's North-East
If you were to chose two nations so far apart as to be almost exact opposites, you might pick Brazil and Britain.
The weather
The quality of our football teams
The wildlife
The cities
The food
The dentistry
The contrast between these two countries & cultures has been a huge part of my life for the last decade, as the person I’m lucky enough to be married to is Brazilian.
A great deal of The Gringo Cultural Imagination of Brazil focuses on the giants of the south, Rio De Janeiro and São Paulo - but much of my experience has been of the Brazilian North-East, right here in Fortaleza, Ceará.
The North-East is famous for its beautiful beaches, Forró, the Sertāo backlands of its interior, the sense of humour of its citizens - and also many other accelerated versions of Brazil’s national pathologies like poverty, crime and violence.
I’ve been coming here on and off for more than a decade now, and I’ve amassed large quantities of notes, thoughts and writing. Now seems like as good a time as any to start sharing them. After years of my Brazilian wife and friends pointing out exactly what about British culture is odd or charming, it’s time to retaliate return the favour.
For the record, my credentials: I speak intermediate-to poor Portuguese dependent on the amount of alcohol I’ve drunk, I’m crap at football and I’m utterly out of sync with the rhythms of Samba, Pagode, and Forró, even if I know the lyrics to a lot of Brazilian music.
I am not by anyone’s criteria an expert - and if I wait to become one on somewhere as complex and culturally rich as Brazil, I will die before penning a word - but I am an amateur in the old school sense of the word: someone who does something because they love it.
Brazil, as the popular saying goes, ‘is not for beginners’, but I hope never to lose the beginner’s sense of appreciation for a country that’s already given me a great deal.
So, with apologies to Wes Anderson, welcome to…..
The Brazilian Dispatch of London, England.
In Portuguese, ‘para Inglese ver’, translates as ‘for the English to see’ but means ‘fake’. I make no pretensions to presenting an authentic and unseen version of one of the most wonderful countries on earth. This is an affectionate outsider’s eye on Brazil from a bemused Englishman who loves it like a second home.
So, enough with the prelude, let’s get into it.
The Bumpy Road to Paradise
I’ve spent the last week in one of my favourite places in Ceará, and the world: Jericoacoara.
The North-East of Brazil is littered with lowkey beach enclaves (look up Icaraizinho de Amontada, or Ilha De Guajiru) which, if they were in Europe, would be the pearl of any nation’s coastline. For the average sun-starved gringo, any of these places will do. But Jericoacoara is something else.
Jeri, as it’s known, is a beach paradise situated in a protected national park. It first became a destination due to its bay and wind patterns making for excellent windsurf and kitesurf conditions, two pursuits that remain popular here - the water is always dotted with sails and boards in between the fishing boats.
You can only get in via a 4x4 or beach buggy, and have to lower the pressure on your tyres to drive into it. Before the dune bashing, you have to attempt a five-hour drive across Ceará in the heat of the North-East. I am English with Irish blood, and to say that I’m pale is undercooking it: I’m as white as a human can be without being either blue or translucent like a jellyfish. My wife’s social media posts of me in direct sunlight are often littered with concerned Brazilians enquiring if I’m wearing strong enough sunscreen.
In the North-East of Brazil, to me any cloud and shade arrive as a sort of mercy. We pull over at a truckstop and see a pond full of ornamental fish cowering in the shade, terrified they’ll be poached alive in the water. A visit to the toilet reveals ice cubes in the urinals, which just makes the bathroom smell of piss-flavoured sorbet.
On the drive I spot around 100 different forms of automotive health and safety violations: as many nuns as it’s possible to fit into the back of a flatbed truck, a mother with a one-year-old wedged onto the back of a motorcycle, and another truck with the entire front facade of a house loosely strapped into its bed.
As we scale the dunes into Jeri we pass an ice-cream truck with “Vai Dar Certo” - the North-East’s answer to Keep Calm and Carry On - emblazoned across its windshield, trapped in the sand with its payload melting in the heat.
Once we arrive in Jeri, we do the same thing everyone does: take our shoes off. It’s not uncommon for people to stay in bare feet until they leave. This also means that upon leaving our pousada in the morning, the first thing I see is people hosing the sand down with water to prevent it getting so hot that it burns your feet.
Several hours short of mid-day I see a large green lizard flop down out of a tree and drink chlorinated pool water just to cool its blood.
The beach, like most beaches in Brazil, is not just a leisure site but also a catwalk for the gravity-defying possibilities of cosmetic procedures. I imagine that to Brazilian plastic surgeons, the beach is their Sagrada Familia, their Everest, their Shea Stadium - the sacred turf on which all their hard work and training finds its true stage. The incredible dedication and craft of Brazilian plastic surgeons is supported by ‘filo dental’ (dental floss): the string-thin bikini bottoms by which people here ensure an even dosage of vitamin D is delivered across both full butt cheeks, the rectum and lower colon.
No, I don’t have photos, you’ll have to imagine it.
The beach is also a miniature market place: sellers hawk everything from fresh coconut water and hair braids through to hand-carved wooden frescoes of the Last Supper of Christ, and digestive gambling in the form of oysters. As I cower in the shade, a seller of lace tablecloths just keels over onto the sand at exactly mid-day with a thump, like a beach clock sounding noon to warn all sane people it’s time to get out of the sun. He has to be resuscitated by a crowd of concerned bystanders showering him with water, ice lollies and offers of shade, after which he comes straight back up off the sand like a champion fighter and tries to sell us all a table cloth again.
I may be as hot as Dante’s Inferno, but it’s also paradise.
At around 4pm drinks carts wheel down onto the beach and everyone gathers for one of the day’s main events, watching the sun set.
The drinks in these carts have politically-correct names like Xoxota (pussy) and cost about £2.50 for a cocktail, which for someone used to paying £8 for a pint in London is about as close to heaven as this life allows.
Once the sun disappears over the horizon, the assembled onlookers clap like passengers on a low-budget airline after a wobbly landing. This happens every single night, without fail, and is as pure an expression of the human capacity for appreciation as I’ve witnessed.
In a place where people clap at sunset, I make no effort to grasp any of those old traveller’s clichés: self-discovery, productivity, ‘doing a place’. I come, I rest, I move at a slower pace, I take leisure. Part of the magic of this pocket of the world is how little it asks of you.
Too Good To Last?
In describing Jeri, there’s a danger that I make it sound like the crapper bits of the traveller trail in Thailand, but it’s retained its own Nordestino charm for a long time.
And yet, I worry that may not last for ever. Perhaps it’s just the amount of press headlines about the post-Covid travel boom creating an efflux of barbarian twats spoiling places. Perhaps I’ve been trained by all the European places ruined by hordes of plastered Brits to believe that anywhere good cannot last, but the last few times I’ve sensed that Jeri may be approaching some sort of tipping point.
In addition to the tourist tax all visitors pay, they must now also suffer that most punitive of fines, Influencer Tax: the toll in pleasure we all pay when somewhere wonderful is infested with people using it as nothing but a backdrop for social media content.
One afternoon I witness a pair of influencers work through TWO FULL HOURS of thirst trap photo poses at the poolside. They buy colourful drinks purely as props, and leave without even sipping them or swimming in the pool. Sundown now comes with influencers recreating the video of Destiny’s Child ‘Survivor’ on the beach, or arriving at sunset in a dress with a three-metre long train of red silk, purely ‘for the gram’. These are people for whom no beauty exists unless it can be captured for likes, and it’s hard not to seem them as the harbinger of touristic enshittification.
The friction involved in getting to Jeri (three hours by plane from Sao Paulo to Fortaleza, followed by five hours in the car) has been its main defence against the ruin inflicted on most places too lovely to last.
A while Jeri got its own airport, and even in the last two years I’ve noticed buildings totally out of keeping with the rest of the town start to spring up. A few of the hotels at the tonier end of the beach make me involuntarily sing the theme tune to The White Lotus. You know how it goes.
Of course, tourism is just the dreadful thing that other people who aren’t you on holiday do, isn’t it?
I have no ownership of this place. It’s dangerously convenient for gringos wishing for a place they visit once a year to remain ‘authentic’ and ‘rustic’ whilst ignoring all the material benefits rapid development would create for the people who live there, especially in a part of the world that could use some help. If Jeri continues on this trajectory, it might well be great for a lot of people, but I resent a false binary where the choice is small and beautiful or big, tacky and shit.
It’s not always easy to say what makes somewhere unique other than the sense that it has, through friction or distance or some other quirk, just resisted the slide into the average that afflicts so many places. Jeri is littered with details that feel distinct to Brazil’s Northeast, from the donkeys on the side of the road to the Capoeira on the beach at sunset and the Forró dances at the weekends.
Perhaps the mere act of writing about it condemns it to a never-ending touristic death spiral, and I’m just doing in verbal form what all those influencers are doing visually.
But if we are to continue to enjoy special places on earth, part of the new social contract for people visiting has to be some aspiration to not be part of their ruin. So if you’re lucky enough to have the means and time to travel here, one plea from me: it staying wonderful requires considerate visitors fighting a heroic rearguard action - one day, one trip, one sunset at a time - against the day someone spoils it.
Eventually, someone, somewhere, is going to be the person that ruins this place. Visit, but don’t let it be you.
Obrigado.
“Oh, must we dream our dreams
and have them, too?
And have we room
for one more folded sunset, still quite warm?
- Elizabeth Bishop, Questions of Travel
‘Enshittification’ 😂 Just popped that one in my travel dictionary.