Exploring Bahia, Brazil’s Afro-Brazilian Roots
My hotel, Casa dos Arandis, which was nestled between the palm-fringed beach and the rain forest, had the laid-back vibe of a surf retreat, with bungalows made of salvaged wood and Tibetan prayer flags flapping in the salty breeze. Lying in the hammock on my porch, I could hear the churning of the Atlantic beyond the clusters of tropical greenery that shaded the sandy footpaths. Jogging down the beach, I passed three people in the span of a mile. The co-owner, a surfer in his early 60s, was a white guy from Rio nicknamed Cacau, which means “cocoa,” and although he tried explaining the origins of the nickname to me over a fresh bowl of locally grown açai, it was a complicated story and I got lost. He served nectar from cocoa fruit in a shot glass as soon as I stepped out of the car and continued to offer it to me throughout my visit, sometimes spiking the milky ambrosia with cachaça, always extolling its myriad nutritional benefits.
Cacau was bullish about the local cacao industry’s prospects of recapturing its former glory. A growing number of farmers, many of them his friends, were embracing organic methods and other ecologically enlightened practices, partly to stave off the sorts of diseases that had ravaged the region’s cacao crop in the past. Each morning at the hotel, I sat down at a table laden with their products—not just cacao nibs but also banana and papaya and mango and a cherry-like fruit called pitanga, as well as coconut milk and coconut water, all of it local and organic. One day after breakfast, I followed Cacau on a stand-up paddleboard through a maze of mangroves to an uninhabited island where some of his farmer friends had been growing all kinds of fruits I’d never heard of, let alone tasted. I bit into a capiá, a small yellow ball with the texture and taste of a sweet potato, then one of the farmhands hacked apart a cocoa pod—oblong, orange, with ribbed leathery skin. We all just stood around grinning at each other while chewing on the sweet lemony pulp, spitting out the bitter seeds that are used to make chocolate.
Chapada Diamantina, my final stop in Bahia, is a national park in the sertão, the rugged outback that ripples across northeast Brazil’s interior. It’s difficult to sum up the place’s staggering scale and scenic beauty and sheer ecological variety without just resorting to a recital of its greatest hits. I’m thinking of its dozens of waterfalls, some hundreds of feet high, and its cacti, many of which grow taller than houses, and its extraordinary caves, which draw spelunkers from around the world, and a freshwater pond carpeted with ancient white seashells so tiny you could fit dozens on the tip of your finger.
The land is mostly dry and rocky, dominated by dramatic bluffs and buttes. Stretches might remind you of the American Southwest or the Black Hills of North Dakota, but then you’ll spot a little capuchin monkey scurrying across a cliff, or a tree that sheds its bark each day so the green skin beneath it can draw energy directly from the sun, and you’ll realize that there’s no other place like this in the world. Right in the middle of all this natural beauty is a burst of unnatural color, the pastel-painted colonial town of Lençóis. I spent four nights at Hotel Canto Das Águas, a rambling pousada of pink and green stones on the banks of a rushing river. In the mornings I’d sit on the veranda with my coffee and watch jewellike birds peck at the papaya that the staff had set out for them in bowls. In the evenings I’d stroll across a footbridge into the town center, where scores of backpackers sat outside the restaurants that lined the cobblestone side streets, while street musicians strummed and sang mellow bossa nova classics.
Decades ago this town wasn’t so charming. For a brief stretch in the 19th century, it was the diamond capital of the world, and the African people and their descendants in the area ended up working in the region’s mines. This persisted for generations. My guide, Mil, told me that the mining companies would buy diamonds from the workers at just 1.5 percent of their market value—and in most cases probably less, since the workers were essentially confined to their isolated settlements and had no way of ascertaining the value themselves. Mil said his father had been a miner. The family lived day-to-day, trading diamonds for sacks of tapioca and beans. Now the mines were closed, and the locals worked as guides, mining the beauty of the park itself.
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