Bertioga

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 barca arriving in Bertioga where the channel widened as it met the sea. 

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!