Arembepe, or beauty spots, south and north

It is only natural to concentrate a lot of these posts on Scandi- navia, since that is where we are right now. But the natural beauty, particularly the northern sunlight of Finland, called up a visual memory of another kind of remarkable light, that of the tropics, which I know best in Brazil.

One of my favorite places on earth is Salvador, Bahia, Brazil, for a lot of reasons. And one of my favorite places, just outside Salvador, is a little fishing town called Arembepe. I got interested in it intellectually first. It is featured in a very good ethnography, ASSAULT ON PARADISE, by an anthropologist I know, Conrad Kottak, who has been visiting the place on and off since it was isolated fishing village in the 1950s. His description intrigued me so much that a Salvador friend, Sergio Mattos, drove me up for a first look. I have since taken several overseas study groups there for visits and discussions of the issues in the book.

One of the first things you seen is an fresh water lagoon, between the mainland and a big sand ridge and beach on the ocean side. The first two photos are both of that. People drank from and washed in the lagoon, and fished in boats in the ocean.

The village got changed by a lot of things, a paved road linking it to Salvador so now it is a beach suburb of the city, nearby factories to work in, mechanization of the fishing fleet, and somewhat bizarrely, an inter- national hippie invasion in the 1960s. Somehow the word got out about the beauty of the place, so a bunch of hip types, including Mick Jagger and Janis Joplin, wound up hanging in a "hippie village," that was turned into a national park and preserve. The only hippie preserve that I know of.

You can see my son Rolf, who went along on one of the study abroad groups standing in front one of the houses still occupied by genuine hippy artisans who really want to sell you some handicrafts.

Other people have decided to capitalize on the whole hippy preserve thing, like the hippy camping area shown here.

The town also has a natural harbor protected, or partially obstructed by a reef. Here you can see some fishing boats grounded on low tide behind the reef which you can see off to the left.

In some ways I cannot think of places much more different in cultural terms that Brazil and Denmark or Finland. It goes from a wonderfully creative but very socially inequitable hybrid of Europe and Africa on one end in Brazil, to the amazing organization and fairness of Scandinavia. Both are strikingly beautiful in their own ways. Both add things that I miss in the USA.

More later.