Eine Kleine Sambamusik

Day 89 - Wednesday, January 29
Ourinhos to Sao Paulo

A light drizzle fell as David and Gary loaded the bikes. In the distance could be seen a ray of sunshine and with it a ray of hope. Sure enough, the rain moved on a few kilometers down the road and for the rest of the day, it was warm and sunny all the way to Sao Paulo.

Alex had said over the phone that Sao Paulo was a swamp due to all the rain the past week. As David and Gary approached the city, they anticipated a shower or two, but along with their tired bones they brought the sun with them.

A few miles outside the city, a motorcycle began to pace them. When they pulled off at a reststop to call Alex and get directions to his mom's place, the biker pulled off as well. Between his smidgeon of English and Gary's pidgeon Portuguese, he learned about our trip and welcomed David and Gary to Sao Paulo.

Alex wasn't home, but confident in their abilities to find the place without directions, already having the address in their possession, David and Gary blithely drove into what is only one of the biggest, most heavily populated cities in the world.

The country highway quickly transformed into a crazed and congested inner-city highway, and they were swept up into the flow. Faced with an immediate decision, whether to take the highway north or south, they chose south totally at random, and for the next several miles, they progressed like that until managing to get off the highway onto a side street and telephone Alex again. He wasn't home, and the directions given in rapid Portuguese by the friendly gentlemen hanging out in the gas station were for all practical purposes useless. Point and grunt, point and grunt was all we understood. Kinda like talking to a dog...blah, blah, blah, Rover. Blah, blah, blah...

Fran's Cafe appeared as a safe haven to hole up for a while, drink coffee and guarana and wait to be rescued. Safe for everything except our wallets. $3 for a croissaint?

The Bisarello family happy to have Alex home at last

Finally Alex was home. Gary did his best to tell their whereabouts, and Alex said he'd be right over. Forty minutes later, Alex pulled up with a passenger on the back, his younger brother Emanuel. Alex led the group back to his mom's, all the way on the other side of the city. We weren't even close. Well, relative to the size of the city we were close, but...

Elida, Alex's mother, and Arturo, her husband, welcomed the Gary and David warmly. Alex had prepped his family, so the avalanche of bags, accessories and smells wasn't too much of a shock. Immediately, David and Gary began the long anticipated tasks of relaxing, cleaning up, and doing laundry.

Valeria and Alex share a tender moment... drinking!

Evening came to Sao Paulo with a light rain that lasted just long enough to give the streets a shine and cool off the temperature to a most pleasant degree. Two young friends of Alex's family, Roseanna and Valerie, came by after dinner to take us to an interesting nightspot in the city. The Base, a high-gloss discotheque, was also an internet cafe, in a sense. In the upstairs bar area, a stylish bank of keyboards and monitors were available to the clubgoer to go exploring on the internet, for a charge of course.

Being the Moonriders, we chatted our way not only to free use of the internet, but also access to the hard drives sequestered away behind the wall. David had brought the laptop and digital camera, and after transferring the necessary software to one of the club's computers, and amidst the pulsating music and dancing bodies, we uploaded some text and photos to our website. (The dedication to bringing our trip to our readers is mind-numbing, isn't it?)

Roberto in the club of the future

Roberto, the club's owner, came by to check out what was happening. He is also quite a long-distance traveller. Not only has he driven a motorcycle from Brasil to Ushuaia, but he has sailed a catamaran from Miami all the way to Sao Paulo via the Orinoco River in Venezuela and down the Amazon back to the ocean. He was very intrigued by our technology and expressed an interest in putting together something similar for his next trip - sailing again by catamaran around Cape Horn at the southern tip of Argentina. We wish him luck on this journey.

Finally, we put the work aside and joined all the hot Brasilian bodies on the dance floor. We did not however join them in the plunge pool. A curious little diversion in this club, the small pool next to the dance floor overflowed with drunk men and women, some fully clothed but many only threads away from butt-naked.

Afterwards, Roseanne and Valerie took us to a more casual place, and a little more to our personal tastes. This small joint was filled with the bohemian set, and people were chilling out all over the place. Outside, a small group of percussionists played an impromptu samba beat on the hot-dog vendor's cart. David eagerly joined in, grinning from ear to ear. Seems the San Francisco Brasilian music scene is right on the rhythm because he knew half of the tunes they were tapping out. A big ol' thank you to Urubu, Gilda, Carlos Aceituno and Bobby Wallace for this one. Without them David would have been lost.

The energy of the Brasilians was inexhaustible; ours was not. As our heads drooped onto our chests, the girls were finally convinced we were tired and took us home.

Miles - 237

We chowed down a quick breakfast of cafe com leite and pao com dulce de leite. Ema, Alex's brother (short for Emanuel) translated the Riding to the Moon fact sheet into Portuguese on the laptop, which we would later format into some letterhead, print out, and keep copies handy for handing out.

Caio

Gary called his film industry friends in Sao Paulo that he'd met a few years ago. Adriano Civita was hard at work at his company Prodigo Films, and Caio Ortiz, director and all-around great guy, was there as well. We were all invited to come by for a visit. Ema took the directions and off we went.

Hey, where did the guy behind me go?

Our ride through Sao Paulo was by far as "big-city" as we've ever been on the trip. Alex's mom Elida lives just off Avenida Paulista, a very large avenue bordered with tall, modern office buildings, shops, restaurants, and municipal buildings. The sidewalks were crowded with thousands of pedestrians. Our heads swung left and right to drink up all the sights and sounds.

Within a few kilometers, Avenida Paulista merged with a more sedate, tree-lined boulevard, the tall buildings giving way to small, one- or two-story shops and businesses. The neighborhood changed once more as we got further out of the downtown area into a congested mix of factories, warehouses, shopping malls, and tall apartment buildings. It was out here where Prodigo Films had their offices and motion picture sound stage.

In so many ways, the city felt like home except for the number of small-bore motorcycles that continually buzzed by us, weaving in and out of traffic on their way delivering food or documents or whatever. It wasn't uncommon to be among ten or more other bikes at a stoplight, and it was comical to see them brake quickly and spin their heads to look us over, trying to keep one eye on the road ahead of them. We were later told there are 10,000 of these guys, and up to 3 are killed each day on the road. We are glad none of those unfortunate incidents were due to gawking at us.

It was also here in Sao Paulo, and indeed starting back in Corumba, that we began to see a wide variety of motorcycles similar to what exists in the United States. Besides the multitude of small work bikes, which were practically the only bikes we saw all throughout Central and South America, we saw lots of everything else from low-ride cruisers to crotch-rocket super bikes, from good-old standards to, of course, lots of enduros, dual-sports and dirt bikes. Yamaha Tenere's and Honda Sahara's comprised most of the dual-sports. Unfortunately, we didn't see too many Kawasaki's, and no KLR's, not because they weren't popular, but because they hardly exist here. (Hey, Kawasaki, there's a huge market down here just waiting to be given the good stuff!)

Adriano

Adriano and Caio greeted the Moonriders with open arms. Gary was very happy to see his old friends again. They had met when Gary came down to Rio de Janeiro a year and a half ago on a documentary, and he had told them he would be coming back one day on his motorcycle. Well, they couldn't believe it, but here he was. Adriano proudly showed us around the new offices and sound stage. Brasil has a booming television commercial industry, and Prodigo Films has begun to make strong inroads as a production house, with an eye on making original TV shows as well.

We ended up staying well into the evening, held captive by an incredible downpour. The roads outside rushed with water, and the pounding drops on the roof of the offices sounded like a stampede of wild guanacos. Gary and the Brasilians reminisced about old times. We watched some of Prodigo's work on videotape, half-succeeded getting our e-mail from their internet connection, and in general filled everyone in on our trip. When the deluge ended outside, we quickly took our chance and dashed back to Alex's family's apartment.

Elida and Arturo ordered in a smorgasborg of middle-eastern treats for dinner from a neighborhood restaurant. We relaxed for a while watching CNN International and MTV Brasil. Roseanna and Valerie took us out again, and Adriano met up with us. It took a while to find a place we all liked, and while driving around, we couldn't believe the variety and sheer number of places to go at night. One particular street had easily no less than six large nightclubs in less than 2 blocks.

We finally found a casual restaurant/bar for a drink. But eager to feel the pulse of samba again, David wanted to go back to the cool little club we went to the night before. This time, the scene was a bit more energized, and we danced in the basement to reggae, rap, and alternative rock.

Maybe I don't look Brasilian, but I sure can bang on me drum all day!

Back up on the street, David found his drumming partners and again beat out some rhythms on the hot-dog cart with the others until it was time (5 am!) to go home.

Miles - 25

The meeting was with Jornal do Brasil, the main rag in Rio and the country's de facto national newspaper. Once again, this interview came about without our looking for it, and even involved our distant compatriots, Jim and Jason. When they were in Chile at an internet café, they met a young man who became interested in the trip. This young man e-mailed his brother, a reporter for Jornal in Rio. We received an e-mail before leaving Bolivia from the reporter, Alexandre Mansur, asking us to call him when we got to Brasil.

Alex had called when he got to Sao Paulo and set up an interview for Friday morning. A different reporter from the Sao Paulo office, Fabricio Marques, showed up with a photographer at Elida's apartment right on time at 11:00 am; we had barely finished getting dressed. Sitting down in the living room, we overloaded Fabricio with information on the trip. We tried to just stick to his questions, but his English was vague and we just kind of blabbed. We hoped he got it all down.

The photographer agreed with us to get a photo with the bikes in a setting that said "Sao Paulo", so the whole group drove off in a convoy to a nearby park. The newspaper took a few action shots driving down the shady tree-lined lanes, then a couple portraits with a lake and fountains in the background. We snapped a few pictures ourselves. Fabricio didn't give us a very specific answer as to when the article would come out, but we thanked him and the photographer for spending so much time with us and being so thorough and we went our separate ways.

Go Ema!.. Go Ema!

Alex went off with Ema to teach him how to ride a motorcycle. Within no time, this energetic young man of 16 years had the hang of it, driving up curbs, down stairs, over pedestrians (just kidding). Motorcycling is obviously in the Bisarello genes.

Adriano from Prodigo Films called to say he'd arranged an internetting session at another production company called Planeta Films. David and Gary headed off on their own, driving once again down their favorite big city avenue, Avenida Paulista.

Any friend of Adriano's is a friend of ours, they said, as the bikers, heavily laden with gear, stormed into their cramped offices, filled to the walls with computer equipment. Doca, the head honcho at Planeta, introduced David and Gary to the computer guys, who enthusiastically put aside their normal work and logged on to the internet. The office runs primarily on a Macintosh system, so it took a while to work out the kinks between our two different operating systems. (Amazing that once up on the internet, all computers read the information the same.) Eventually, things were running smoothly and everyone stayed after hours until we'd done all we could do. Thanks a million, Planeta Films!

Alex went with his family for a delicious dinner of Japanese food. Such cuisine made him pine for the great sushi in Los Angeles, but this was a more than welcome change from roadside ham and cheese sandwiches. Sao Paulo is actually very well-known for its fine international dining.

Gary couldn't handle another night on the town, prefering instead to vegetate in front of the tube and try and to pick up a little Portuguese. (Yeah, right.) David and Alex managed to join Roseanna and Valeria, our untiring Brasilian hostesses, for a cruise down some of Sao Paulo's most festive streets. Late night again, but as they say, when in Rome...

Miles - 14