Barreirinhas

The next stretch of the trip takes us by boat along the Rio Preguicas to Barreirinhas, the main jump-off point for seeing the Lencois Maranhenses. We were picked by our third guide of a trip, and older man by the name of Xico, who piled all suitcases into the back of a launch and took us more or less across the river to a nearby town called Mandacaru that hosts an old lighthouse and a sleepy naval base. Cabure made me feel like I was in a hostile desert environment largely cut off from the convienences of modern life. Mandacaru made me realize I was basically across the river from them.

The latter is relatively isolated but still has power connected to the national grid and a wide range of  commerce including small grocery stores and artisan shops. Cattle roam the area, cashew trees dot the sand. We entered the town via a small dock next to an outdoor bar boasting its cashew-fruit caipirinhas. Eight-thirty a.m. was a bit on the early side for that sort of thing, at least for me. I got to chatting with a guy who called himself Enoc, who said the growth of tourism had for years been creating new employment opportunities in an area traditionally dominated by fishing. Even more recently, oil and gas discoveries by Petrobras and start-up oil company OGX had created new transportation routes and new demand for labor. A geological
prospecting service that used small aircraft for surveying had started carrying passengers from remote areas of Maranhao that previously relied on slow and unreliable bus transport. This sort of thing seemed
to be happening all over Brazil. I remember one of my earliest experiences in Rio was becoming a regular at one of the increasingly common juice bars in Copacabana. A particular chain called BigB was started by a man from Ceara, the state that´s home to Jericoacoara, and he mostly hired workers who had migrated from there to Rio. One of  the staff there named Olivio said he used to take a bus for five days  to get back to see his family for a month. Now he flies, not only  because its faster – it´s cheaper. A changing nation.

Xico drove us along the river to Barreirinhas, stopping at a dune-centric tourist stop called Vassouras that offered sodas, coconut  juice, snack, and arts and crafts. It also proudly displayed a set of domesticated monkeys that did tricks like hanging from rafters or walking across tight-ropes in exchange for bits of apple or coconut. I actually found the dunes more interesting, in part because monkeys are pretty common in Rio (once you spend a bit of time around them you start to realize that they´re generally a bunch of bastards). Xico dropped us off at the business end of Barreirinhas, where most of the restaurants and commerce were, a bit of a hike from the swanky resort we would check into.

We were picked up in a taxi by a man who identified himself as Ue, originally from São Paulo. He came four
years ago, following his brother who had set up a business a decade back. That´s when the tourism to the Lencois really took off, he said. Now Ue has two boats and a couple cars to work the tourism circuit.
You can leave your car open, you can walk around at night by yourself, it´s not like São Paulo. Barreirinhas is a good place to live. The real game changer for the Lencois was the road linking Barreirinhas to São Luis. Previously it was only the most determined traveller that would make the eight hour journey across the unpaved road to see the world´s most spectacular lagoons (pardon my editorializing). Today it takes about three hours – and the journey is still a complicated one, as these posts have pointed out. It´s the sort of thing you see all over Brazil. It´s a country bursting at the seams, its growth constrained by airports that are overcrowded to the point of chaos, ports that are in disastrous overuse, railroad lines without capacity to carry goods. It´s well-known – almost to the point of cliche – that trucking grain from the center-west of the country to the coast can  cost as much as half the value of the grain. It makes me wonder what Barreirinhas would look like if the remaining difficulties in making this journey – particularly for foreigners – were somehow straightened out. Brazil´s expensive for a lot of reasons, one of them is that fact that it´s just not easy to get
around.

We spent the remainder of the day lounging in the Porto Preguicas Resort, an upscale tourist haven with suburbanesque identical red-roofed cabins and manicured lawns. My instinct to pass it off as the usual tourism industry fare turned out to be entirely wrong. Along with the expected amenities like a pool, sauna, game room and river kayaks, the place had some unusual extras including an orchard that provided a considerable part of the kitchen´s food. It grew everything from mangoes and bananas to parsely and cilantro, and composted used coffee grounds along with spent charcoal. Left-over food scraps from the restaurant didn´t go into the trash, they were fed to a gaggle of chickens and goats. The restaurant´s menu included “galinha caipira,” Brazil´s way of saying chicken that´s not factory farmed (Brazil is now one of the world´s largest producers of factor farmed poultry).

The chickens in the coop in the back scrapped over a piece of lettuce that looked a lot like the one Isa and I had left on our plates the day before. They provided eggs that were also used in the kitchen. The garden hand, Jefferson, has been on the job for three months, formerly working as a painter. He knew how to tend a garden because he had one at home. The resort also houses a pottery production center with two pottery wheels being used by two teenage guests under the eye of a local resident who works there. The entire resort is filled with vases and pots that are made on site and fired in a wood-burning kiln. Next to that is a wood shop where other Barreirinhas residents make furniture used in the resort. I have to admit I was pleasantly
suprised.

Isa and I enjoyed a meal of slow-cooked chicken, possibly one of the ones we had seen earlier. I think this was my first locavore meal ever. Isa joked that eating recently killed chicken with our hands while drinking beer under a chandeliered wood-decorated dining area made it feel like we were in the Middle Ages. She hummed Holy Grail-esque flute sounding medieval tunes as we ate.