Waking up in a brothel at a truck stop was not how I hoped to be spending my 30th birthday. To be fair, there is some debate about whether the establishment was a brothel. All I know is that the proprietress was very unwilling to let us stay, in a way that made me suspect she had other plans for the room. Will was quick to opt for the single bed with very suspicious stains on the mattress. Leaving Tim and me sleeping under the weirdest mosquito net contraption the world has ever seen. Incidentally, there was also raw meat hanging from a washing line just outside the door to our room. There is a Brazilian dish called ‘carne de sol’ but this looked just as likely to be the ears of previous guests. Tim and Will tried to make me feel better by claiming this was not nearly the nastiest hotel they had ever stayed in. They didn’t succeed.
The day of my birthday was spent speeding across inland Brazil. Thanks to our lengthy delay due to customs we are now in a hurry to get to appointments so we decided to cut a corner and drive inland between Salvador and Fortaleza. Luckily Beatrice can handle the pace after a full service in a very swanky Land Rover dealership in Sao Paulo (thank you very much Augusto, Marcos and Land Rover Brazil from all of us at Atlantic Rising). The boys put in 12 hours driving and managed to come up with special birthday mixes on the ipod. I did the cryptic crossword to demonstrate I am not senile yet.
We arrived in Fortaleza, the big city on the coast where our message in a bottle landed, in the evening. And after desperate attempts to find some cleanish clothes we headed out for supper in the smartest seafood restaurant in town. My birthday presents included fridge magnets of two black children and a house in a favela (bought by Will) and a exceptionally short but very brightly coloured skirt (from Tim). Somewhere between the brothel and various petrol stations a bottle of champagne had been located and we ended the evening in a way that couldn’t have been more different from how it started.
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