I noticed the other day that a couple of people are reading my old posts from 2009 from when I did the Camino de Santiago. I hope they find them interesting and feel inspired to do a Camino themselves. It was such a special experience that I went on to do three more, walking over 2000km altogether. I still want to do another one, health and finances permitting.
Silly me...in a recent post I was concerned about rain spoiling our Saint John´s Feast party...I got the wrong month, it will be in July, not June! Don´t know why they are holding it so late though.
The village of Bertioga is on one side of the channel where it widens to meet the sea. The other side is a jungle-covered hill and rocky headland with a little lighthouse at the point. Both sides have the remains of forts built in the 1600s by the Portuguese to defend against French, Dutch and Spanish invaders who would be caught in cannon crossfire should they attempt to sail up the channel to Santos.
We continued to go to Bertioga for holidays for a number of years. Over time a road was built along the coast so it became easier to get to, although I missed the trip 'up the Amazon'. Instead there was a fifteen minute ride on a little car ferry which trundled back and forth from the headland to the now growing village.
In later years we wild camped on the beach instead of staying at the Lido Hotel, but it continued to be an idyllic place. My parents actually bought a dugout canoe which was looked after for us by a fisherman. It was the most tricky thing to try and paddle in, turning turtle at the least excuse!
One year when I was in my teens I decided to swim across the channel from the headland to the village and my mother accompanied me in the canoe. I waited for high tide as the current was extremely strong, but it was still a very foolhardy thing to do as I was no swimmer, only being able to do the breaststroke and never having swum any distance before. It took me a couple of hours and I could hardly stand when I reached the other side. My father was furious when he found what I´d done.
Sadly those halcyon days of childhood holidays are long gone and the sleepy fishing village exists only in memories. Nowadays Bertioga can be reached in a couple of hours by an inland motorway and has become a busy and somewhat tacky resort. The miles of beach are still there but no longer backed by scrub and no longer empty. There are high-rise apartments as far as the eye can see and beach vendors every few minutes.
Sigh...
This ornament sits in my kitchen. When my cleaner comes she always arranges the little chicks looking at Mum after doing the dusting.
I rearrange them to be either going around in circles or
facing away from Mum.
I have been waiting for my cleaner, Zara, to say something about this but she hasn´t said a word so far, maybe she hasn´t noticed. I know it is just a silly game, but it amuses me. Maybe my second childhood is looming.
It has been raining steadily for two days here which is most unusual at this time of year, winter is usually very dry. I hope it stops soon as this weekend we are having a communal open-air party to celebrate the Feast of Saint John. This is celebrated all over Brazil with traditional country music and dancing, bonfires and special food as well as a spicy punch called quentão. People dress up as peasants in straw hats, check shirts and dungarees or long dresses and there is sometimes a shotgun wedding often performed by children.
I believe it was originally a religious Catholic festival brought over from Portugal in the 16th century by the colonists. June has Saint John´s Day and also Saint Anthony´s Day so they are both celebrated. Let´s hope this year the festivities won´t be too damp.
When I was a child, aeons ago (in the ´50s actually!), we used to go on our family holidays to a place called Bertioga. It was a small sleepy fishing village about 30 miles up the coast from Santos, a major port then and now in Brazil.There were no roads to Bertioga back then, it could only be reached by a winding salt-water channel from Santos on a small foot passenger ferry called a barca, and the trip took several hours.
The city of São Paulo where we lived (and I still do) is on a plateau and to get down to the coast and port we traveled by coach on a highway called the Serra do Mar which wound down the mountain range via a series of switchbacks and hairpin bends with steep drops to the side and magnificent views of the coastline, a thrilling start to our holiday.
In Santos on the little ferry we would settle down for a quiet trip putt-putting along the sinuous waterway which narrowed and widened between jungle-like vegetation and mangrove swamps. I used to wonder how the helmsman never lost his way as the channel divided, twisted and turned in a positive maze to my childhood eyes. Occasionally a clearing would appeared on one of the banks with a bamboo hut and a few chickens running around and someone would get on or off the ferry or we would pick up bunches of bananas. I used to imagine it was just like traveling up the Amazon.
Eventually we would arrive in Bertioga where the channel reached the sea, and tie up at a long wooden pier where we would be met by the hotel proprietor in a rusty old Ford pick-up truck. My brother and I traveled in the back with the suitcases as we drove along sandy roads to the hotel which was along the beach a kilometer or so past the village.
The Hotel Lido was a no-frills, family-run place getting on in years, but it was the only hotel there. There was no electricity so they ran a generator every evening until 10pm and you had a candle and matches on your bedside table should you need to get up in the night.
The hotel led directly onto the beach, which ran for miles with golden sands backed by scrub and only the occasional person in sight. It was a real paradise for children as we were free to run wild, swimming in the ocean and exploring unsupervised (what were my parents thinking!) all day and only went back to the hotel to eat and sleep.
To be continued...sorry about the quality of the photos!
The complaint of one parent has managed to get the Bible banned in an American school for "vulgarity and violence".
There was a play in the '60s called "Stop the World - I want to get off"...I know the feeling!
Photo by Samantha Sophia on Unsplash
My recent blogs seem to harp on about old age so I´ve decided to write something positive for a change...
One thing I´ve learnt with getting older is that things will get done in their own good time. I´m the type of person who always had a mental list of "must do's" niggling away at me. I don´t mean things like regular chores but that occasional stuff which needs seeing to sometime, like clearing out a cupboard, doing some mending or suchlike. Even when I´ve caught up with everything I´ve always managed to find something else to nag myself about.
Being older and wiser (lol) now, I have come to realise there is no need to force myself to tackle the "must do's". At some point I now know I will actually feel like doing them, which means they no longer feel like a chore. Result!
There are a couple of turnstiles in the reception area of my gym. You have to go through one in order to enter and you do this by having your fingerprint read by a sensor.
There is only one problem with this, as far as I´m concerned - my fingerprints are so faint they appear to be practically unreadable. I don´t know whether they have worn away due to age, a lifetime of housework or my activities as a potter, but they just don´t work!. Instead I have to key in a sequence of 17 numbers which is a bit of a faff to say the least...one wrong and you have to start over. Anyway, without fingerprints maybe I should consider coming out of retirement and become a Pink Panther, or rather a Gray Panther?
Photo by George Prentzas at Unsplash
