Passeio

So yesterday I had another uniquely Cape Verdian experience…the town field trip. It’s the end of “Spring Break” here and a couple of the girls from town got it into their head to take up a collection and rent a school bus and take the town to the valley of Paul for a picnic and a waterfall. Sweet. I was warned to bring a lunch and a bathing suit and my camera, and be waiting at the church at 7am.

Unlike most things in Cape Verde, this shindig actually started more or less on time, and the bus was honking and rolling by 8. (This despite the fact that nearly the entire town was still awake and hungover from the Going Away Party the night before…the very popluar Ge is joining the Cape Verdian Army!) Anyway, Beni and I boarded at the last minute, with my makina (camera), some peanut butter and jelly sands (sandwiches) and a pot full of arroz y fijou (rice and beans) in tow. A quick head count turned up 42 Cha de Igrejans, 3 Cruzinhans, 2 guitars and a hell of a lot of food. Just out of town we stopped in the valley for an emergency alteration of the 6 disk changer on the floorboards, cranked up the zuke jams and were on our way.

Pulling into Paul I noticed that the chatter in the bus quickly died down and everyone was staring out the windows with rapt interest at the lush and fertile valley of Paul. Almost total silence on the bus, and then I realized that my friends and neighbors were, at this moment, essentially tourists on their own island. Even though Paul is less than an hour and half from Cha de Igreja, for some it was their first time to visit the ribiera, whereas others had been there (as I later found out) “as many as” three or four times. This is a very profound difference between Cape Verdians and Americans…our concept of mobility, one which we as Americans take for granted. Imagine living on an island the size of Austin, Texas and never making the trip from the Arboretum to South Congress, or living your entire life and only leaving your neighborhood three or four times. Keep in mind that in my time here on Santo Antao (exactly 7 months today) I’ve been to Paul a dozen times, Ponto do Sol even more, hiked a good deal of the Western Coast, been back and forth to Sao Vicente, made the trip to Port Novo and back and explored some of the mountain country in the center of the island, yet there are elderly people in Cha de Igreja who’ve never been farther than Cruzinha, a fifteen minute walk. There are a lot of reasons for this…the normalcy of isolation, the expense of travel, the fact that almost nobody owns their own cars (there is 1 private car in Cha de Igreja and none in Cruzinha), the relative novelty of cobble-stoned roads and vehicular traffic (the road to Cha de Igreja still isn’t paved…even with cobblestones…and up until 1977, the only way to get here was to hike 3 hours over the mountain from Coculi or 5 hours along the coast from Ponto do Sol). Anyway, it dawned on me that this excursion that I was reluctant to go on (having been just the week before) was something that the young people in my town may not get the chance to do again for years, and will always remember…thus the insistence that I bring my camera to document the event.

Anyway we eventually arrived at our destination, a lovely park owned by the kamera in Paul. Rumor has it that gardeners tend the site, and there were indeed blooming plants and flowers all around. There were also three empty concrete pools, a small playground featuring a broken out slide, a man-made inoperable waterfall, picnic tables, a gazebo missing is roof, and several Hugh Hefner style grottos…little nooks and caves with no discernible purpose but which are, I can assure you, put to frequent use. So we made camp, and got out the guitars and the cards and the women started cooking and the boys started drinking and I introduced my friends to the wonders of the Frisbee, and eventually some of us took part in a game of washer pitching, the National Pastime of Texas. (It’s often disputed that during its brief period of independence and self-rule that Texas’ national past time was in fact horse-shoe pitching, but this is incorrect.) Later the sun came out and it got hot, so we hiked 20 minutes down the valley to the cachoeira (waterfall) where the scene immediately turned into a preamble for a really good porn film. Everyone here is a Calvin Klein underwear model waiting to be discovered, so there were lots of gorgeous people in tiny swimsuits, frolicking in the falling water. (See pictures below). After everyone had taken a dip (and after I was sufficiently chided about my EXTREME lack of color) we headed back to the park. For lunch there was rice and beans and carrots and pork stew and people had made paunche and lemonade spiked with grogue and some sort of 60 proof strawberry milkshake and everyone ate and drank and talked and played and there was convivencia (literally translated as “familiarity” but best translated “hanging out”), after which all of the couples disappeared into the aforementioned nooks and crannies, after which everyone returned to the waterfall for another swim. At some point there was a clean-up of the park, and the bus drove a sleepy, satisfied group of Cha di Igejans (and 3 Cruzinhans!) back home. Upon arrival, it was the “Gano e Sab, E Sab pa Gano” thing all over again, with the bus driving all around town honking and all of us hollering and clapping and the old people and the kids looking at us all like we were crazy drunken loons (which in fact we were)…celebrating our…picnic.

Anyway, they’ve got a name for the town field trip, its called a passeio, which literally means, “to go for a ride.”