By James Sturz

Tinharé, Brazil

My Portuguese is lousy, but I could guess from the name of our ferry, Biônica de Tinharé, that we were supposed to be feeling energetic. Still, as we pulled out of Salvador for the two-hour ride to the Tinharé Archipelago in February just about everybody on-board was sleeping.

It had been a long night for everyone. There is a saying in Brazil that the world travels to Rio for Carnaval, while Brazilians travel to Salvador, the capital of Bahia and the music capital of the entire country. The night before my wife and I had followed the processions through town, joining the 2 million revelers who make its six-night celebration the largest festival in the world. In Brazil, many cities start celebrating Carnaval early, and in Salvador it starts on a Thursday, when the trio elétricos roll out. They’re 24-wheelers crammed to every inch with amplifiers and speakers: trucks that exist just to haul live tunes. Popular local bands like Chiclete com Banana and Vixi Mainha play on their roofs, while blocos of revelers dance behind them. It should go without saying that this kind of daily hard work isn’t done sober, and sometimes it’s done wearing pink wigs and tutus. Long after Paula and I returned to our hotel, the partying kept going. From what I recall, the music ended around 5 a.m. It started again an hour and a half later.

So it was a relief when the Biônica sped south for Tihharé Archipelago the next afternoon. In the 16th and 17th centuries, the islands were a battleground for French, Dutch and Portuguese fleets, and a hideaway for pirates. But today visitors don’t come armed with much more than swimsuits. Of the chain’s 26 islands, only three are inhabited — Tinharé, Boipeba, and Cairu — and with just 12,000 residents, they’re where Salvadorans go to enjoy Carnaval in Bahian beach style. Still, as I watched my boat mates stretching out, I had to wonder if they weren’t making up for lost sleep because they knew Tinharé was going to be another big party.

Two hours later, the Biônica passed a colonial stone fortress and thick forest of palms, before docking at Tinharé Island’s main village, Morro de São Paulo. Until recently, there weren’t motorized vehicles in the archipelago, so Tinharé’s taxi drivers wear flip-flops and cell phones and push around wheelbarrows with TAXI stenciled on their sides (when not transferring luggage, they’re involved in the equally crucial business of hauling coconuts and beer). We piled our luggage into one until it was essentially a double-decker, apologized sheepishly, and then followed our driver up a steep incline into town — now I was learning that in Portuguese “morro” translates as “hill.” Just past a 17th-century carved stone gate, there’s a church at the top, the Igreja Nossa Senhora da Luz, built in 1845, as a place to rest and give thanks back when people still traveled with cumbersome luggage made of metal and wood.

But immediately it felt as if we’d passed over a threshold. We stood in Praça Aureliano Lima, Morro’s main square, with the ocean to our backs. Women in white Bahian dresses, draped with red and gold beads and their hair twisted high into turbans, were setting up food carts and frying cakes of mashed beans, while artisans laid crafts around them, and toddlers ran gleefully — even in Brazil, around Carnaval, the most popular costumes for 3- and 4-year-olds are pirates, princesses, and Batman. In Morro, a single sand street leads from the square, past restaurants, boutiques and pousadas, before reaching the island’s beaches. As we followed our driver as the sun began setting, samba and axé songs played through a shop’s open window. Men danced outside, watching their moves in the glass. Each time women strolled by, the men turned to watch them. Sometimes, the women stopped to trade a few steps. It wouldn’t take long in Tinharé to figure out that Morro de São Paulo was a place for pursuing romance with the rigorousness that Carnaval in Brazil suggests, but it’s also close enough to Salvador that the well-heeled fly in for the weekends with their miniature poodles.

We slept soundly our first night to the sweet smell of Atlantic rain forest that runs down Tinharé Island like a spine, and shimmied against our bungalow, like a hip. The next morning, we set out for the beaches.

There’s a different one here for whatever you want. Heading south from the village, their names are numeric, but still sound colorful in Portuguese. Primeira Praia is a surfer’s beach and the shortest, at just a thousand feet long. Next to it, Segunda Praia is a full-time party, whether it’s day or night. On the quarter-mile crescent, lithe young things wear even tinier things, while men wear sungas, which look like the bottoms women wear to play beach volleyball. When the sun goes down, the beach is lined with red-draped stands equipped with blenders, cachaça, vodka, and all manner of fruit, because in Brazil succulence and roundness aren’t only for looking. Next, Terceira Praia is a half-mile bay. At high tide, it’s anchored with weathered wood boats, until the water ebbs so far out at low tide that a lunar bottom is revealed, and saucer-sized blue crabs scramble across it, their carapaces glistening. Then Quarta Praia is where Tinharé’s beaches stretch far into the distance. There was a permanent horizon of coconut palms and turquoise, as we walked. A few horseback riders clomped past us in the surf, their hoof marks and our footprints quickly disappearing in the hot sand.

Three miles later, we passed a lush mangrove thicket, twitching with lizards, and entered Morro’s fifth beach, the half-mile Praia do Encanto. There are a few quiet pousadas with bungalows here; but essentially the beach exists as a retreat from the rest of the island: a hint of what Tinharé must have been before the colonizers and missionaries and pirates and parties arrived. If guests want to go into town, they take horse-driven carts along the beach or four-wheel drives through a forested interior road. (True, the Toyotas bump up and down and slip into ruts, and the horses sometimes are mules and sometimes get whipped — but the idea isn’t to use either of them, and in a country like Brazil the point is you have to be willing to accept the underbelly of civilization if you want to enjoy its perks.) Thirsty from our trek, we stopped for aguas de coco at the new eucalyptus- and pine-built Anima Hotel, and had long meaningful talks with its French owner about living in paradise, the importance of drinking caipirinhas at sunset, and waking to the cries of parrots and monkeys (all of them apparently good). Then we wondered about lunch, but Philippe had a better idea. Two coconuts later, Philippe’s friend Jerónimo picked us up in his skiff to take us another 30 minutes south to Garapuá, a fishing village of 500. We waded out from the beach past brightly colored fish, and sailed trailing a line. In Brazil, you can ask whomever you want for the fish names, but the answer always includes whether they’re good fried.

We finally ate at the Barraca do Capitão Pipoca, a thatched-roof shack with a mural of an octopus ensnaring a lobster on its wall. Bahia is the most African of Brazil’s states, and one place you find that is in its food. More slaves were brought to Brazil’s northeast than anywhere else in the New World. They arrived with dendê palm seeds, and the Tinharé Islands are part of Bahia’s Dendê Coast. So we asked Captain Pipoca for his list of moquecas. They’re seafood stews swimming in coconut milk and dendê oil, served with rice, spicy malagueta peppers, and manioc flour. We considered our choices: shrimp, oyster, grouper, perch, stingray, lobster, octopus, and even cacao, before selecting the crab. Pipoca kept rushing around, greeting everyone — back at Salvador’s Carnaval, we’d learned that pipoca means “popcorn,” and it’s the term for a person who doesn’t stick with his bloco but visits them all — and while we waited we drank more cold coconuts chased with cold Antarctica beer, and then ate as much as we could from a multi-ring circus of small pots and dishes, while parrots flew by, trying to steal our sunglasses. Afterwards, we were feeling a little heavy. So we opted to digest floating up to our necks in the water, buoyed and buoyant, bobbing like coconuts ourselves. On the beach, two girls ran by, swinging a younger boy by his arms. Each time they released him, he’d twirl around, sneak up on the adults, and then attack their behinds with his fists.

It wasn’t until later that evening that we saw the real whirling moves of capoeira. The martial art is another example of the African influence here. Devised in the 16th century as a self-defense against slave owners, the maneuvers were quickly disguised into a dance. Today, experiencing capoeria can easily remind you of the story of the Pied Piper of Hamelin, as groups in flowing white pants stroll through the streets, singing to the single-stringed twang of a berimbau, made from a bow and a gourd. Paula and I were busy ordering caipirinhas and cacaoroskas (made with cacao and vodka) on the second beach when we heard their songs. Before long there were a dozen musician-dancer-fighters; one played a floor-standing atabaque drum and two shook tambourines. There were two women. The men stood shirtless. They sang of desire:

É de manhã, Idalina tá me chamando.

Idalina, meu amor,

Idalina tá me esperando.

In the morning, Idalina is calling me.

Idalina, my love,

Idalina is waiting for me.

And then two started moving, squatting at first and then springing up in a flurry of acrobatics. They flipped, cartwheeled, leaped, kicked, twirled, and swept with their legs. They stood on their hands, and they spun on their heads. Then another two went. And another. And another. The dancers never touched. They kept playing and singing. They were smiling the whole time. As were we.

As Carnaval progressed on the island, we continued exploring. On horses, we ventured into the rain forest, past flocks of green parrots, bamboo, ferns, bromeliads, orchids, and butterflies the size of our hands. On foot, we climbed the half-mile turreted wall from Morro’s dock to its colonial fortress. In 1823, the fort was the Brazilian Navy’s base during its War of Independence, and today it’s the archipelago’s premier spot for watching the sun set — even if the real show on the island happens along the way. As the sky starts blushing, boys jump from the ramparts into the water 30 feet below. Invariably, there’s talk first of tides and submerged rocks. Then they follow a path into the forest, past coconut and banana trees, for a running start. The first time I visited, a Brazilian man in his fifties was passing by with his wife. Both wore middle-aged skepticism with their floral shirts. But then the man started grinning, as he stripped down to his sunga. His belly poured out, and he handed his wife the camera, whooping and yelling as he leaped. Now his wife understood they wouldn’t reach the fort by sunset. She kept clicking away, exasperated and amused.

By boat, we toured the islands, starting with the half-dozen beaches of Boipeba, to Tinharé Island’s south. We swam and sunned at Boca de Bara, Tassimirim, Cueira and Bainema, gauging the subtlest differences between each cubic inch of turquoise and square foot of sand. At Moreré, there was tide pool for snorkeling. The sergeant majors were so small I could have fit a dozen into a cereal bowl. I chased banded butterflies, damsels, and angelfish. Then suddenly I started thinking about Carnaval, and saw myself in a circle of hell, slithering with fish. But instead of fire coral, there was a floating café — the Bar Flutuante Lorena — where drinks were served on floating trays. We stopped for lunch on shore and had more moquecas, this time with bananas and shrimp. But I ate knowing our trip down the Rio do Inferno was next. Portentousness made our suntanning feel important.

Jesuit missionaries named the river separating Boipeba and Tinharé Islands in the 16th century. They called it the River of Hell because ran so shallow at low tide that their boats often got stuck. But it was high tide now, and waves lapped at the Rio do Inferno’s mouth. Once we passed the palm-covered coast, mangroves surrounded us. Egrets watched, as we threaded through spidery green lushness. I started thinking this could be the Amazon, save for the piranhas. Or maybe I was Captain Willard looking for Kurtz. Our own captain slowed to avoid the sandbars. The river was about 30 feet wide. Suddenly, it seemed like a good place to go snorkeling, if snorkeling the River of Hell the day before Ash Wednesday was your goal. So I jumped in. The current was powerful. The water was brackish, and I couldn’t see much past my arms. But I let the water take me, and grabbed hold of the mangroves only once our boat was a speck behind me. If I’d learned anything about Carnaval, it’s that you have to let the current take you wherever it goes.

But mostly, in Tinharé, we stuck to the beaches. The most unexpected one was outside Gamboa, two miles west of Morro de São Paulo. An inland route there passes the Fonte do Céu waterfall, but it was more fun sticking to the coast. The toasted cinnamon sand squished beneath our toes, warm even when it was wet. Along the way, heliconias hung in the woods like suspended red stickpins, but what really caught our eyes were the bathers caked with pink clay. A few played it up, loping like primordial creatures. So we grabbed handfuls of the soft cliff outside the town, and started anointing ourselves.

First, we tried rubbing loose clay on our thighs and arms. Then we made balls, and used them like bars of soap. They thudded when we dropped them by accident. Then we dropped them on purpose because we liked the heavy, squishy sound. Tinharé Islanders say you get a year younger for each hour you’re coated with clay; so we tried out various calculations while the clay dried. Then we waded into the water. We rubbed our elbows, heels, and knees. Paula grabbed a handful of algae, and said, “Here’s my sponge.” Once clean, I’d never felt my skin so smooth in my life. We couldn’t stop touching ourselves until we realized we could also touch each other.

We returned to Gamboa for Carnaval’s final night. If Salvador, on the continent, has trio elétricos, sandy Tinharé relies on tractors to pull its live bands. When we arrived, a speaker-packed trailer was parked in the village’s sandy square. Between each blasting song, it was easy to hear the generator’s roar. But wherever I looked, people were dancing. Arms pumped, hips ground, lips pursed, and feet stomped wildly. And the thing about these revelers — whether they were half-soused fishermen, women in hot pants, or nine-year-old boys dancing together — is that they were all very good.

At 11:30 p.m., the trator elétrico started growling toward Gamboa’s soccer field, which rustled with streamers. The whole town followed, dancing with every step. Now there wasn’t a single pipoca. Perhaps we’d come to Bahia to understand that the Pied Piper didn’t have to be a fairy tale, and it didn’t have to involve mice. Even the drink vendors were dancing as they pushed Styrofoam crates balanced on wheelbarrows.

Ash Wednesday would be a day of processions. Bleary-eyed stragglers would find their way back to their rooms after nights of drinking and singing. Islanders would walk somberly from the Igreja de Nossa Senhora da Luz to mark the 40 days of Lent. More Salvadorans would arrive by ferry and plane for the five days of post-Carnaval celebrations known as ressaca (Portuguese for “hangover” and “undertow”), during which they’d naturally continue to dance and sing some more. Others would return home to a city that had finally eased back into quiet. A surge of biquínis and sungas would exit their bungalows for the beach. Even the blue crabs would scramble along Terceira Praia at low tide. But right now all of Gamboa was dancing, because in Paradise each step should be a celebration and a choice.

This entry was posted on Sunday, March 2nd, 2008 at 12:37 am and is filed under Destination, Great Stories, Second Annual Solas Awards Winners. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.