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| Taking off in the morning from our camping spot |
Our first six days in Brazil were mostly spent on the bike, slowly covering the 1200km that were between us and Uberlandia. A couchsurfing host was really excited to meet us (had been writing to us periodically for a month already) so we made an effort to get there on the agreed date. This meant hours and hours of huge, windy, boring fields every day with main roads (we were taking them to make it there on the agreed date) full of trucks with drivers who had no manners (why they need to pass us from one metre distance if the other lane is free is simply a mistery to me). We found places to camp next to the fields, although it was occasionally difficult to find enough trees in one place (with no fence around it) to hide our existence from plain view.
We also had our first small crash - we found ourselves on a gravel road with large round loose gravel and tilted sides. So at one moment we found ourselves lying on our sides with our bike. Luckily our speed was about 15km/h at that time because of the horrible road. The fall was slow enough not to hurt us but the bike was heavy enough to bend or break off some of the necessary pieces on one side (the piece where I kept my foot for example). Luckily we were able to fix it all easily, the main fix done to us for free by some friendly local bike-shop guys.
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| Getting a free bike fix from some helpful locals |
Many (probably most of) Brazilians have not been very far from their city or state and it is extremely hard to find people who speak anything but Portuguese (oh how we miss Spanish now. We were already able to have conversations with people). So they have no idea what is happening in the neighbouring countries (or what their neighbors look like). So naturally, since we were on a Paraguayan bike and spoke a strange language, then many assumed that we were Paraguayans speaking Guarani.
Anyways, half an hour before getting to Uberlandia, it turned out that our very eager host couldn't host us after all. So we had spent six days on the most boring possible route to get to a city four days before needed (we were planning to visit a local psytrance festival, so there was no point in going anywhere else either), with no place to stay, the hotels in Brazil being way too expensive for us (sidenote: food and alcohol are cheaper than in other countries with much more choice and variety).
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| The celebration of a religious holiday in Uberlandia |
So we ended up trying to figure out our future at a local park, that was half covered with plastic chairs and tables from the nearby 'bars', half covered in people celebrating a kind of religious holiday. It was a mixture of african religions and Christian religion and mostly consisted of a very loud and extatic crowd of people with african ancestors making music with strange instruments and singing. Despite it being a Sunday evening, we saw at least one other festival-like event going on with lots of people who did not look like they had work the next day. We found out later that Mondays are for being at work, not actually doing work.
Through facebook, we ended up at the house of one of the previous owners of the psytrance festival, we were going to (Samsara). We were taken to the house/studio of some known dj's (we of course had never heard of them) and saw how the really rich live with their fancy houses and cars. The 'madame of the house' did not know how to work a washing mashine, how to cook, where juice comes from and probably has not touched a mop and bucket in her whole life. They were nice and friendly people but nevertheless, we headed to the festival grounds after one night.
Since we got there a few days earlier, we were immediately put to work, helping to build the stages and decorations. At first we did it just to feel useful and earn the food that we were also given 2,5 times a day (rice, beans and a potato salad two times a day. Also accompanied by a salad on the first days, which they seemed to run out later. Brazilian everyday food is mostly rice and beans). But in the end we also got free festival tickets and could have gotten food during the whole festival as well, as it turned out later.
When I think of Psytrance festivals then I don't really have much to compare to. I only know a small and very cosy one in Estonia that some of my friends are organising and a bigger Lithuanian one - Yaga festival. So I imagined a big group of hippies chilling out, taking part in workshops where you can make something with your own hands and enjoying the delicious artesan and healthy food choices, that have been chosen with care. The music has never been the thing that draws me there but generally I have found it mostly enjoyable, especially the stuff that is played at the chillout stage, which tends to be more experimental and understadable for me (I am beginning to sound old :D).
Brazil is a real country of Psytrance festivals. You have at least one happening somewhere in the country every weekend. That means that there are established groups of people who come and build it all - you have decoration teams, general amenities building teams and so on, who travel from festival site to festival site. Food and all 'souvenirs' sellers also go from festival to festival but arrive later. In the week that we spent at the festival site, we never saw anyone who was actually organising this festival (only different contractors) - each team was just doing their own thing.
The decorations of the festival were really amazing and there also was a number of hippies (or at least colorfully dressed people) and the music at the chillout stage finally turned into chillout on the last day. But there were also some considerable differences to the Baltic festivals: First, and biggest difference, was that people do not drink alcohol. They basically exclusively do only drugs. Drugs are cheaper than alcohol and more legal (you were not allowed to bring in your own drinks but LSD, mdma, cocaine and everything else were completely natural). That brings us to the second difference: the music was insane - a lot of the time it was so fast and 'full' that I did not even recognise any rythm in it. That goes especially about anything that was played after dark. And the chillout stage was not very chillout either for the first two days. (I did hear some music on the main stage that I also enjoyed on the third day, although it was still quite agressive to me) Thirdly, most people are not very interested in chilling out in the nature but going crazy on the dancefloor (with the help on the forementioned substances) so there were no workshops or anything like that. Fourthly, the food options were not similar to the carefully crafted healthy options of the festivals I know either. (There was one vegan place as well but their food was not very interesting or filling). It all does not mean that we didn't enjoy the festival, we just needed some time to adapt and realise what is going on.
After the festival we spent a week with one of the decorations teams of the festival. We stayed with one of them and saw the beginning of the construction of a new festival site. While staying with them we saw a closeup of how things are organised in Brazil (we also saw it before and after but we started understanding it there... so nothing personal).
Plans are made to be changed and then not shared with anyone so even if we had asked two minutes before where we were going or what was happening, there was a big chance that everything had changed already. When someone promises to meet you at 8 then by 12 you just stop waiting and leave (no need to apologize or feel bad because arriving late or not arriving at all really isn't something that is considered bad manners). Being efficient is not really a value here either (if you don't have a hammer for the nails then you wait for the hammer for an hour instead of doing something else that needs doing as well). The same 'speed of life' applies to anything from buying a loaf of bread from the store to doing official business in the bank. So I am not very surprised that South America has difficulties developing to be not a third world country - people are just way too relaxed to care enough. Everything I just described applies to all of the countries we have been in so far and it seems to get worse and worse the more north we get (and we still have a long way north to go).
But actually we are in the middle of Brazil to visit our Capoeira teacher proffesore Cocao. We had moved 260km away from his town by the time he got back home from his trip and now we attempted to cover the distance in one day. We also decided not to take the main road and chose a smaller route through some small mountains. We were very happy with the choice because unlike the big roads, we didn't have to stay near the edge of the road all the time to let all the trucks by - there were very little cars and virtually no trucks. But of course nothing can go smoothly without some adventures on the road.
Our first long stop was when we planned to have a 10-minute stop to see a cave on the way. We ended up having a 1,5-hour private guided tour in the caves. Our tour guide got carried away when he found out that we actually know and understand something about geology and kept taking us to new hidden parts of the cave.
When we first bought the bike we had a sure plan to strengthen our luggage rack a bit to carry the weight of our two bags better. Of course we didn't do it right away because it carried the weight well enough. Until it didn't. Luckily the thing broke of in a middle of a small town. Unluckily it was a Sunday. But with a help of some local guys at a pub we found a man who could weld and agreed to fix our luggare rack for us. He was a very idealistic guy who clearly had a plan to build our rack to be strong enough to never break off again. So after 1,5 hours of welding and bettering the system we were barely able to put the protecting panels back on our bike (the number of modifications is getting too high. I didn't mention that we also built a mobile charging system on our bike all by ourselves). After all this work he refused to take any money from us. That was the second time that happened in Brazil already.
The third longer stop happened when we were on gravel road up in the mountains with no real civilization close by. Suddenly something went wrong and when we got off the bike, we could see pieces of metal cought between the chain and the gears, the chain off and badly bent. At first view we were sure that this field was were we were going to spend our night (the sun was setting and we still had about 100km to go). Luckily we were able to get the pieces of metal out (still don't know where it came from because neither of us had seen it on the road) and bend and tighten the chain enough for it to work again (not working perfectly because one section of the chain was still bent) and take us to Cataláo the same evening after 12 hours of being on the road. So right now we are chilling in Cocao's farm with chickens and horses wandering around and trees full of fruits.
