The Recife adventure didn’t really start in Recife but in Boa Viagem. Like most Brazilian cities, Recife is huge and counts several very different bairros (neighbourhoods). Boa Viagem is where you’ll find the tall buildings, straight streets. The three islands—Recife, Santo Antônio, and Boa Vista—are where you can enjoy the markets, old churches, and colourful buildings. More picturesque, for sure, but not the most practical or safest place to stay as these bairros are packed during the day but empty at night.
I don’t mind Boa Viagem. Sure, it’s not the most exciting bairros but it’s easy to shop and it’s a good place to come back to at the end of the day—remember, sunset is at 6 p.m. in this part of Brazil. The entire population of Boa Viagem (100,000, no less) seems to hang out at Shopping Recife after dark, one of South America’s biggest shopping centres.
There are basically two main avenues in Boa Viagem—southbound Avenida Eng. Domingos Ferreira and northbound Avenida Conselheiro Aguiar—so it could also be an easy place to get around if it wasn’t for the sidewalks. Let me describe you the mess. It usually starts well, for a meter or two. Then there’s a tree in the middle of the sidewalk, then for the next ten metres you have to be careful and step over the huge roots. Then the paving company crew apparently took a break at one point because it’s no longer paved, it’s just sand. Five metres further, some other company must have been hired to finish the job because it’s paved again… kind of. Like there’s a hole with loose cobblestones. Oh, lovely Portuguese-style pavement here! For… ahem, two metres. All in the same fucking street, repeat all over the city. Bonus, watch for cockroaches at night.
But people don’t come to Boa Viagem for the city streets, they come for the lovely beach that stretches over eight kilometres. It looks perfect, but in fact, you’re just all-you-can-eat buffet food for sharks—the long beach is plagued by tiger shark attacks. There are detailed warning signs every few metres and these are not fake Canadian warnings, like “proceed with caution—daily life may lead to strong emotions like fear, happiness, excitement and disappointment.” There are shark attacks.
I walk on the beach every day. It’s a great way to witness the moody Atlantic weather. No matter what, it’s very hot and humid, but the sea is never the same colour.
Your description of the sidewalks remind me of the ones we had in Port Louis, Mauritius 😉 In a street close to where I lived, there was a piece of sidewalk paved with beautiful old stones (not so easy to walk on when you had a baby in a stroller, but beautiful anyway). And one morning, the pavement had just disappeared. It had been stolen during the night !
That’s hilarious! It would have been in France, I would have said it was used during a protest as projectiles 😉
In Brazil, most municipalities barely take care of the roads, so to take even LESS responsibilities in city planning they leave sidewalks to the residents. That is why most beautiful sidewalks appear in front of the fanciest apartment building (often competing for the fanciest sidewalk, nevermind if they don’t match), and it explains too why there are simply no sidewalk in the poorest or newest neighborhoods…
Yep, I can see that… and I can also see the difference between a rich state and a poor state now. The roads in Sergipe were really bad compared to Alagoas (not sure Alagoas is rich, but roads were smoother!)