A three-week assignment in Brazil offered a nice break from the process of settling in to life in Panama. Not tourist Brazil though - we don't have an office in Rio, or Salvador, or the Amazon - but the city of São Luis in the little-known state of Maranhão.
It has a historic centre which is a UNESCO-listed heritage site, but this is run-down and empty enough, in the day-time, to be rather unsafe.
Some 280km away from São Luis though - enough to be done in a day-trip if you can face getting up at 4am - is the National Park of Lençois Maranhenses. This amazing place consists of 1,500 square kilometres of white sand dunes, with small freshwater lakes in the dune valleys.
The other unusual feature of Maranhão state is its love affair with Jamaican reggae, and I went with some colleagues to a very popular Sunday evening reggae bar where I sipped caipirinhas and danced under the palm trees. The place was a great illustration of how liberal the place is; the crowd was of all colours and all ages, one Brazilian colleague had brought his boyfriend along, and a friend of another colleague - tall and broad-shouldered, with a strong jaw but otherwise seemingly feminine - was apparently part-way through her gender reassignment. She described herself to me as "an androgynous boy" with no apparent concern. What a contrast with the illiberal society I left behind in West Africa!
Speaking of which, my next trip will be a three-week assignment in Dakar! How strange it will be to go back...
Hi Lou. Good to see you are settling in. I always look forward to your next post because you have an easy, casual and chatty way of writing about your experiences. It reminds me a little bit of Bill Bryson's style (thats a compliment in case you were wondering.) Barney x
ReplyDeleteThanks Barney, that's a nice thing to say!
ReplyDeleteSorry to hear about your stuff. If it makes you feel any better, my DB9 was broken into in a secure underground car-park a few weeks ago. B
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