An Invitation to Parati

On Brazil's southeastern coast, town extends warm welcome

PARATI, Brazil -- The mountains on Brazil's coast 150 miles west of Rio de Janeiro are spectacular -- rough and jagged and plunging down to the Atlantic. The Serra da Bocaina National Park, a remnant of the semitropical Atlantic rain forest, nurtures strange flora and fauna -- spikey red bromelia flowers, lime-green birds, and a banana tree with an alien, phallic-looking appendage. The Gold Road, or Caminho do Ouro, runs through here, and it holds a key to the region's astonishing and brutal history.

Late one September morning, a guide took my fiancee, Janice, me and another couple hiking a few kilometers along the massive paving stones of the 12-foot-wide road. It was a sun-baked, sweaty climb, even with a stop to guzzle cool water from a channel in the rocks and take a dip beneath a waterfall on the mountaintop.

From there, we could see all the way down the valley to the resort town of Parati, a UNESCO World Heritage Site that offers graceful architecture, beautiful beaches, the warm South Atlantic, ecotourism and loads of history, plus a sophisticated dining, arts and night-life scene. The name is pronounced Par-a-CHEE, by the way, and often the older spelling, Paraty, is used.

Our guide, Elisson Alves de Jesus, a 35-year-old Parati native who works for the nationally known puppet theater in town that also conducts the Gold Trail tours, explained the circumstances of Parati's peculiar history.

At the end of the 17th century, gold was discovered inland in the state of Minas Gerais. The only route across the mountains was an old Guiana Indian track, where the Gold Trail was built. Pack trains of 300 mules, 300 African slaves and five or 10 Portuguese masters would make the trip, which took 90 days each way between Diamantina, to the northwest, and Parati. The slaves, our guide told us, walked barefoot, and each was assessed at the same cash value as a mule.

Once it reached the coast, the gold was shipped to Portugal and eventually to England, where it helped finance the Industrial Revolution. The tiny settlement of Parati became a prosperous port, but its glory days lasted only 50 or 60 years, until a new road over the mountains from Minas to Rio cut 15 days off the trip each way.

Today, Parati is a much more civilized city of 30,000 that makes its living from tourism. If you're heading to Brazil, you could do worse than to spend some time in Rio, which is not to be missed, and then get away to a little pousada (inn or bed-and-breakfast) in Parati for four or five days. But go during the low season, not during the December, January and February rush. Our September visit to Parati was blissfully quiet until the weekend, which happened to coincide with the holiday marking Brazil's independence.

A big wedding

On this trip we flew directly into Sao Paulo, about 200 miles southwest of Parati, to meet our friend Chris, who had invited us to participate in her wedding. We arrived at customs at 8:25 in the morning. I knew that U.S. Customs had begun fingerprinting Brazilians (among other foreigners), and that some Brazilian municipalities were playing tit-for-tat, so I had some idea of what to expect.

The woman who took our passports noted Janice's United Kingdom citizenship and told her, "You're OK." Then she said to me, with an ironic but not unfriendly smile, "You, over there."

I took my place in a long line by a sign that said, in English, "Only Americans." A lone employee in a little booth was processing what must have been 70 or 80 Americans just off the plane from Houston. I waited almost an hour and a half for her to get an imprint of my right index finger and take my picture. She was almost apologetic -- a gentle, older woman, who said in Portuguese, "Oh my God, these days everybody is ..." I didn't catch it exactly, but it was some kind of commiseration.

Then Chris drove us three hours north to Limeira, a city of about 260,000 where the wedding would take place. That night we met 15 members of the bride's and groom's families for dinner at a Brazilian-style pizzaria -- a fancier institution than the American version, with waiters in white pouring the beer and guarana (pop made from an Amazonian berry), and the diners using knives and forks. Some of the flavors were exotic, like chicken with catupiry, a gooey, slightly sweet cheese, and ham with hearts of palm. As is the custom, I drizzled a little olive oil on every slice.

The next evening, the wedding began (in Brazilian fashion) at 8 in a gilded Baroque Catholic church built in 1856 on one of the squares in the old city center. The ceremony, conducted by the same priest who had married the bride's mother and father 30 years earlier, was elaborate. Costumed trumpeters blew fanfares, and a thousand rose petals wafted down from a balcony onto the heads of the newlyweds as they left the church for the party at a nearby hotel. We ate, drank and danced till four or five in the morning, fueled by a band that played everything from samba to forra, the accordion-based dance music from northeastern Brazil, to versions of Anglo tunes including "I Feel Good," "Yesterday" and "Disco Inferno."

Sunday we rested up and sent the bride and groom off to their honeymoon in Buenos Aires. On Monday, the bride's parents, Fernando and Sonia, insisted on driving Janice and me to Parati.

The road to Parati

It's a memorable drive, starting north of Sao Paulo and proceeding east on Highway SP 125 into hilly dairy-farm country. Cows graze among big ant hills in impossibly steep pastures topped by a palm tree or two; red clay paths snake up to modest houses with terra cotta roofs topped by satellite dishes; the air smells faintly of diesel. We stopped at a roadside stand nestled in bougainvillea for cafezinhos (espressos) and pao de queijo, addictive little balls of dough and cheese, served warm, with crispy skins and a gloriously chewy center.

As we went higher, into the protected area of the Serra do Mar state park, the grazing land gave way to forest, and the road wound in and out of fog banks. Then we crossed the highest peak and caught our first glimpse of lush green rainforest and sparkling sea. Unlike, say, an ocean view in Southern California, this one lacked a wall of real estate hugging every spare inch of cliff.

At the beach town of Ubatuba, we turned north onto Brasil 101, which runs along the Costa Verde (Green Coast) up to Rio and beyond. About 20 miles on, our host turned onto a dirt road into the hills, where we stopped and looked down over hawks gliding lazily in the sun to a semicircle of secluded beach called Praia da Almada. A woman at a roadside stand hacked open a coconut and poured out the milk for us, and then we drove down to the beach itself.

It was almost pristine, with just a few cottages and sunbathers and a sailboat or two. We ate at an outdoor restaurant called Jangada. The owner greeted his American guests and chatted loquaciously with Fernando in Portuguese (a few of his sentences ended with the word "Bush," and he didn't sound happy). We dined on a delicious moqueca do peixe (fish stew) in a big black stone pot. I had my first caipirinha of the trip -- I had forgotten what a punch these cocktails of lime, sugar and pinga (sugarcane liquor) pack.

Fernando made his favorite toast, which translates as, "This is the life I asked God to give me!" Then we got in the car and drove another hour or so to Parati.

The 'street urchin's feet'

Fernando and Sonia dropped us off at the Parque Hotel Pereque, just one in a procession of pousadas along the little Pereque-Acu River, which runs into the bay. Our room was basic and clean, and it gave onto a large, lush garden of palms, ferns, and vivid flowers. Friendly cats crept onto the front porch to sit by the hammock, and the swimming pool was only a few steps from our door.

The next morning we had breakfast on the patio: watermelon, honeydew, papaya and pineapple; cold cuts; breads and sweet rolls; queijo minas, a white, mild, firm-textured cheese; strawberry, peach and fig jelly; orange juice and strong coffee.

Then we walked 10 minutes to a little bridge and across into the centro historico, the old part of town. We discovered Parati Rule No. 1 -- women should not wear heels, because the pes-de-moleque or "street urchin's feet," as the irregular cobblestone streets are called, don't permit them. For that matter, you wouldn't expect bicycles, but the locals go everywhere on all manner of ancient, rusting, thin-tired models, often with one person on the seat and another on the handlebars.

Portuguese colonial-style buildings line the streets, boasting red-tiled roofs, wrought-iron balconies and arched windows and door trimmed in blue, red, green, orange and ochre. A side street called Rua do Fogo, where bougainvillea spills over courtyard walls, is particularly pretty.

Thankfully, real people were everywhere: Kids walked home from school in uniform or played soccer in the yard next to one of the city's four historic churches. Junk men on carts drawn by horses with blinders made their way to the dump. Cars are banned from the city center, but they circled around it blaring recorded samba commercials for candidates for the October elections, including the numbers to punch on the voting machine: "For work, for Parati, 5-5-6!"

We were visiting during a religious festival staged by the Church of Our Lady of Remedies, the city's patron saint. Our first night in town, we watched a chanting procession, led by a man setting off fireworks and followed by a brass band, enter the church to sing hymns and wave flags.

Still, Parati is a tourist town. Stores line the streets, offering everything from kitschy T-shirts and kitchen magnets to strikingly beautiful, original and expensive art. The dollar was three to one versus the Brazilian real when we were there, which made buying even more tempting.

The town offers plenty of good restaurants, as well as a few that are indifferent and overpriced. I would recommend Cafe Margarida -- an elegant Italian place that serves delicious seafood, thin-crusted pizzas and chocolate-and-coffee confections.

We also liked Refugio, near the pier, another elegant restaurant where we snacked on little dumplings of dough and codfish. Dipped in malagueta pepper sauce and lime, with bread and olive oil and Bohemia beer, they're heavenly.

Much lower-priced, and where the locals as well as the tourists eat, is Sabor da Terra (Taste of the Land), a buffet por kilo restaurant, so-called because your food is paid for according to its weight.

One caveat: Any time you hear a guitarist in a restaurant singing songs by Antonio Carlos Jobim and other stars of bossa nova and the post-bossa music called MPB, you will pay for it when the bill comes. The music charge usually runs from 10 to 12 reais.

The Academy of Dining

We had our best meal in Parati not in a restaurant, but at the Academy of Cooking and Other Pleasures, in the home of a well-known Brazilian chef, Yara C. Roberts. A native of Minas Gerais, Roberts trained in France and spent time in Boston, where she was on TV. In her white jacket embroidered with her name and the blue, green and yellow Brazilian flag, Roberts and her two assistants cooked dinner for me and Janice, two Brazilian guests and Roberts' American husband, a pony-tailed businessman who looks a little like Michael Douglas.

The menu consisted of dishes from Bahia, the Brazilian state known for spicy food and African-influenced culture. Figurines of saints with dual identities from the Condomble religion such as Mary/Iamanja decorated a side table. In the big, gleaming kitchen in their sleekly furnished house in the old town, we participated in making an appetizer of acaraje, a dough of pureed black eyed peas, onion and malagueta wrapped around shrimp and fried.

The chef speaks four languages, and, as she worked, she spun stories, both in English and Portuguese, of how the cuisines of Bahia, Minas and the Amazon emerged from the collision of African, European and Amerindian cultures.

We tucked into a main course of xim-xim de galinha, chicken with coconut milk and just a little of the spicy, orange dende or palm oil common to Bahian cuisine. For dessert, Roberts served quindim, a coconut custard.

Candles sputtered in pineapple holders; the wine flowed, and so did the conversation. I found myself relaxed enough to understand most of the Portuguese, and to be understood when I spoke it. Roberts' events combine dinner, cooking class, history lesson and good company in one evening, and they are not to be missed.

A schooner tour

We didn't sunbathe much in Parati, although beaches abound. The best beach in the Parati area is said to be Trindade, about 22 miles south and a quick ride on one of the frequent public buses. Closer to town, we found Jabaquara, about a 20-minute walk from the old town. The beach was empty when we strolled there at sunset, although some local guys were playing soccer nearby. I went for a dip, and the water was blessedly warm.

We also took a passeio de escuna, a schooner tour, in the Bay of Parati. Our boat stopped to explore a few of the bay's beaches and 65 islands, some of them not much bigger than an airmail stamp, where cactus and bromelia grew out of the rocks. Gaivotas, black gulls that look uncomfortably like small pterodactyls, coasted overhead. We snorkeled, and I saw schools of bright yellow-and-black-striped fish.

Our schooner was half-full with 40 or 50 Brazilians, from young girls in bikinis smooching with their boyfriends to oldsters holding hands. A good lunch was served, caipirinhas were consumed, and the sun even came out a few times in the course of the afternoon. Dedeca Zen, a talented guitarist/singer, played Jobim's "Garota de Ipanema" ("Girl From Ipanema") and other well-known bossas and MPB. The only downside was the videographer, who poked her camera in the guests' faces and then tried to peddle her tape.

Independence Day weekend

We had arrived in Parati on a Monday, and, on Friday, it began to fill up for the long holiday weekend, which would culminate on Tuesday, Sept. 7, Brazil's Fourth of July. By Saturday, the town was mobbed and had undergone a change from a gracious, one-of-a-kind resort town to one that was more generic and on-the-make. Guys on every street corner passed out fliers for this or that bar or art gallery; Amerindian mothers with their babies sat on the cobblestones selling baskets to swarms of tourists from the city.

We responded by straying a little from the beaten path. The town felt safe; we explored day and night and never had a problem. Making a left at the bridge across the Pereque instead of a right into the town center, we climbed a hill to the old fort, which offered great views. Walking back to our pousada along the river late at night, we came upon sleeping horses tied up in vacant lots, and we heard the splashes of diving birds.

On Saturday, we rented bikes and pedaled up the Parati-Cunha road, which we had taken before on our way to the Camino do Ouro. A bike path winds alongside for several miles; it ends, and the road rises steeply. After a while, we rested over beers and pao de queijo in the tiny town of Ponte Branco.

A little farther up, we locked our bikes and walked across a wobbly wood and wire bridge over a swift, rocky stream. That brought us to Villa Verde, a large park with trees, boulders and carefully trellised gardens with a restaurant and catering.

Then we biked some more, turning onto a long dirt road that wound a couple of miles into the rainforest.

I confess we stopped to ask a young man wearing a Mario Lemieux T-shirt if we could take his picture. "Nos somos de Pittsburgh!" ("We're from Pittsburgh!") I said. He agreed, although I'm sure he was thinking, "Crazy tourists."

We came to the gates of the Fazenda Muricana, a former plantation that's now a museum, restaurant and liquor distillery with beautiful grounds; we watched young people in helmets and fancy gear as they climbed rope ladders, zoomed down zip lines and rappelled.

Dusk was falling as we returned to the Cunha road and began heading back toward Parati. I hadn't realized quite how far up we had gotten -- our bikes flew effortlessly down the road. I felt a sudden urge to take my hands off the handlebars, which I obeyed.

I must have ridden like that for a full minute, with rainforest whizzing by in the gloom, the occasional rushing stream and red-dirt road, little houses here and there with laundry in the yard, smoke from cooking fires, and duos on bicycles built for one passing the other way.

To be 5,000 miles from home, in a foreign land that looks and feels foreign -- to be free of routine, and, for a minute, free of gravity -- is a feeling I won't forget.

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