Yesterday we left Belo Horizonte on highway 381. The people we encountered had that ‘morning after the night before’ look, they had that glazed appearance only without the occasional smile of a wondering happy memory. The benefits of our history of Roman rule soon became apparent, for the Brazilian highway engineer’s attitude is ‘if one bend will do, why not put in three’. If you could have straightened out the road, it would have taken half the time! The local highway driving also takes some believing, not fast, just incompetent, and this from the country that has given us Fittipaldi, Piquet and of course the late great Ayrton Senna. To be fair to the 381, it was an improvement over the mad road from Rio to Belo Horizonte, for this tarmac lunacy, the main highway linking these two mega cities, actually has speed bumps and speed cameras requiring you to reduce speed to 20mph. This is when we discovered that our car has no ABS brakes, utter madness. Mind you, it’s not as if the 318 is without its own craziness, for highway maintenance is telegraphed through the usual road signs with the addition of a foolish man waving a large flag just waiting to get run over by as meandering truck! As we approached Sao Paulo, the 381 rose to the top of a gentle hill revealing a sight that was astonishing. From corner to corner and disappearing over the curve of the horizon was a sea of tower blocks, too many to take in, let alone count. My life until now had provided no physical reference to comprehend a city holding 20m people, so to help you make sense of this, imagine you are on top of Caerphilly Mountain and looking down at Cardiff, then try to imagine that you are looking at 60 Cardiffs. As the highway entered the city extreme poverty became evident with people living in structures constructed on the side of the highway just 2 meters from the badly driven passing cars. While poor, there was evidence of great industriousness with piles of recyclable materials just waiting to be converted into a few Brazilian R$. As we drove on, the city changed, getting taller, richer and bolder, and when we got to our hotel, we could have been in Manhattan, only without the rational planning. And so to the game, Holland vs Argentina. The sat nav and when I say sat nav, I mean my phone, took us through every back street in its attempt to get us to the ground. Street after street, steadily getting poorer, with drizzle that so aptly expressed the mood of all those we passed. And then the stadium, hundreds of millions had been spent on it but I could not see where. Somebody got very rich off the building of this shabby pile and it certainly was not the locals. The mood of the crowd was like no other seen on this trip. They were of course mainly depressed Brazilians, but for those few hours they became Dutch. They so desperately needed Holland to win, for the rivalry between the Brazilians and the Argentinians can be literally murderous and the idea of Argentina lifting the World Cup in the Maracana, suicide inducing. And then the chants. The Brazilian supporters chanted ‘100 goals, 100 goals, Pele has 100 goals and Maradona had cocaine’ to which the Argentinians chanted ‘1 2 3 4 5 6 7 bye bye’ which they all found quite amusing. As the game progressed, people were twisting and writhing in their seats every time the Argentinians came close to scoring, and when the end came, it was as if they had lost twice in two days. The irony of the last two days is that it took place on a Brazilian national holiday leading me to suggest that they change its dates, as this holiday will now forever be tainted with the memory of the two worst days in Brazilian football memory. And the game? Like the weather and all those in that leaking stadium, damp. When we got back to the hotel, we were greeted by a group of ecstatic Argentinian who gave me one of their shirts leading me to promise to wear it at the final if by some miracle we managed to get tickets. And then that miracle arrived in the form of and email from a lovely young man, who we met in the Brazil vs German game, for whom the prospect of watching Argentina lifting the world cup in the Maracana was completely unpalatable. So thank Caio and Fatima, start learning Russian as Niaz and I are both crap with languages and we hope to see in Russia in 4 years’ time.
Posted on: Fri, 11 Jul 2014 14:45:06 +0000
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