ESCAPE

POINT OF NO

RETURN PART 2

After one caipifruita—sweet and fiery Brazilian cane liquor muddled with sugar and mango—I meander, a little lightheaded, between the village’s small storefronts. Candy-colored cotton hammocks weave a multi-colored web across one, and the turquoise walls of another are lined with shelves of handmade leather sandals. The sweetest souvenirs come from baskets piled high with saran-wrapped cocada de cacao. These fudgy spheres stuffed with shredded coconut are the delicious reward of the Bahian climate, which nurtures coconut palms on the beach and cacao trees in the jungle.

It was cacao that brought men to this rain-forested region of Bahia in the late 1800s. They came from all over Brazil, and fought wars for the lush land where cacao trees flourished and made them rich as exporters. The end of this violent era, “when fortunes were being multiplied and when progress was changing the face of the town,” serves as Amado’s setting for Gabriela, the book that has backpacked with me through Bahia. The sensual story makes the cocada even more appealing.

Just as I unwrap one of sticky chocolate mounds I feel a hand on my shoulder.

Busted.

“Have you had dinner yet?” It’s Magna, just off from work at the Pousada. I shake my head, afraid I’ll be scolded for fortifying myself with caipifruitas and cocada. Instead she links her elbow in mine, telling me she’s on her way to a friend’s creperie for dinner.

For days I’ve been gorging myself on traditional Bahian food: langoustines, shrimp, fish stewed in coconut milk, all with seasoning, as Amado put it, “somewhere between the divine and the sublime.” I decide to take a night off from the author’s recommended dishes and let Magna lead me into an open-air bar with surfboards and swirling fans suspended from the ceiling.

We drink fresh pineapple juice and eat crepes folded with melted white cheese, olives, salty ham and hearts of palm. I have a hankering for a frosty blended bowl of açai, an indigo Amazon berry espoused for its energizing power, but worry it will keep me from sleeping. Magna laughs out loud, and waves over the waiter. “I don’t think anything is going to keep you up tonight,” she says.

The next morning on the bus out of town, I lean my head against the window. I’m a little beat-up, but happily so, with sunburnt cheeks, jungle dirt under my fingernails and a smattering of surf-earned scrapes and bruises.

As we pull away from the village, a sign warns: “Devegar, Area Urbana.” Go Slow. It seems ridiculous to think of Itacaré of an urban area, but as access improves, development is scrambling to keep up.

The road my bus is driving on is only twelve years old. It would take me two hours to get to the nearest airport, then two airplanes to get back to Rio.

Now a new highway from Salvador, Bahia’s capital, is just one bridge away from completion. When it halves the driving time to Itacaré, that sign will take on new meaning. I hope the Bahians continue to take their own advice: deixa-le rolar, and remember to Go Slow.

-Jenni Avins

ESCAPE

POINT OF NO

RETURN PART 1

They’re paving paradise, and putting up a highway directly to Itacaré, a heretofore remote surf destination. If you want to beat the crowds, now is the time to go.

New streets had been opened, automobiles brought in, mansions built, roads constructed, newspapers published, clubs organized…But the ways men think and feel evolve more slowly. Thus it has always been, in every society.
Jorge Amado, Foreword, Gabriela, Clove and Cinnamon

Big tropical raindrops blur the waves on my first morning in Itacaré. So instead of an early morning surf lesson, I roll back into bed with my interpreter and traveling companion. One of the most important lessons of life in Brazil, especially in the northeastern state of Bahia: Deixa-le rolar. Let it roll.

So, I turn to my bedfellow—the novel Gabriela, Clove and Cinnamon, by Jorge Amado, the beloved chronicler of Bahian characters, culture, landscape and love affairs. The only part of paradise he missed was the surfing, which for some, is Itacaré’s main attraction.

Although Itacaré’s surf breaks are impressive enough to bring the Billabong Women’s World Tour, the waves remain un-crowded, as does the cobblestone road running through the village. Pastel-painted colonial cafes, bars and shops line the street, along with pousadas, bed-and-breakfasts. The food from Jorge Amado’s “land of pepper and sea breeze, of shellfish and coconut water” seems designed for hungry surfers, and they don’t have to pay much for a heaping plate.

Not today, anyway. But a new road is about to shorten the drive from the nearest international airport from six hours to two, and construction of a 40-pavilion luxury resort looms on one of the jungle bluffs overlooking the waves. However, it’s not happening overnight—this is Brazil, after all. There’s still time for travelers to pick up a copy of Gabriela and book a beachfront room at Pousada Macaia, where the manager Magna looks after her guests with a laid-back, maternal warmth.

When I finally roll out of bed, she is setting a table on the deck with granola and grated coconut, passion fruit yogurt, fried bananas, slices of ham and French bread.

“How do you want your eggs?” She asks, as I plop onto a cushion at the low-lying table.

“No eggs,” I say, stirring granola into the creamy yellow yogurt as Magna pours hot milk into my coffee. “This is perfect.”

She raises her eyebrows, telling me I will need energy to surf.

“I’ll call Marcelo?” She asks. “The sun’s about to come out.”

Magna dials the phone, assuring me that Marcelo Roveran, who runs a surf school and board shop in town, will take me to all the best breaks.

“Só preciso de marolinhas,” I whisper, meekly reminding Magna that I only need little waves. She gives me the thumbs up, leaving with the phone to negotiate my day’s details.

An hour later, the equatorial sun has blasted between the clouds, making dappled shadows on the jungle trail that wraps around the side of a steep mountain. Birds battle to be heard over the sea, which roars below at Engenhoca, a point break known to be beginner-friendly.

I keep an eye on the root-ridden path as a troop of ants carrying tiny green leaves marches across it, like a miniature version of our surfboard-bearing crew, single-file behind Marcelo. There is Paula, a nervous novice from the landlocked state of Minas Gerais, stepping carefully behind him, then Teresa, a sure-footed local who hitched a ride from the village, then me.

I had heard about Itacaré’s well-formed waves, but I was not prepared for the lush Mata Atlantica (Atlantic Rainforest). The tropical jungle holds the world’s greatest diversity of trees and in places like Engenhoca they practically spill over cliffs and straight into the Atlantic.

After 25 minutes the trail disappears at a crescent-shaped beach about the length of a football field, with an emerald-green arm reaching into the sea at either edge.

The treacherous path to Engenhoca keeps crowd to a mere a handful of surfers. But construction of Warapuru, a multimillion-dollar hotel and spa, hides just beyond the bluff above the beach. It’s not finished, but once it is, Engenhoca will be the resort’s main playground and surfers will have to share.

Marcelo crouches on the sand to wax the yellow longboard he’s brought for Paula, who admits she’s hung-over. She stayed out all night dancing to forro, the jaunty folk music of Northeast Brazil. It’s tough for Americans to imagine spring break set to accordions, but forro parties are a big draw for Brazilians who vacation in Bahia.

The day after is no party for Paula, however, shivering in her rash guard despite tropical temperatures. She wades gingerly into the water, and lies on the yellow board, gripping its sides as Marcelo pushes her into the little white waves that wash into the cove. Meanwhile Teresa is already up, a tiny silhouette where the jungle tapers into the sea and the real waves rise and curl. I paddle for a position in between, where small waves steamroll over the sandy bottom with the perfect amount of push.

Suddenly the sky darkens, reminding us we are in a rainforest. We catch waves back to shore, and just as we make our way up the path with our surfboards on our heads, giant drops began to fall.

Deixa-le rolar. It was happy hour back in town anyway.

Continue Reading the Rest of the Story Tomorrow. Tune back in for Part II

-Jenni Avins

SHOPPING LIST

LAUREL CANYON

Thursday night marked the grand opening of Laurel Canyon, a vintage boutique in SoHo that is like heaven’s closet for NYC-bound California girls at heart. Neil Young pipes through the background while handpicked jean jackets, plaid cowboy shirts and long flowered dresses hang over an outstanding assortment of cowboy boots.

Every piece in the store exhibits that added value of vintage—not just for the nostalgia, but for the workmanship. Just blocks away from the masses of splatter-painted leggings at Topshop, exquisite dresses with tiny pintucks and crocheted-straps, accented with velveteen ribbons and Mexicali embroidery feel more than fairly priced, mostly in the $160 range. A flutter-sleeved black one is scattered with hot-pink and lilac blossoms that fall into full bloom at a floor-grazing hem, begging to be twirled.  

“We wanted to create something that’s an expression of our friendship and our history,” said co-owner David Munk, who met his partner and best friend Elisa Casas in the NYU dorms in the early ‘80s. The two immediately connected through their common love of music, flea markets and road trips. They were apart for a while when David worked in the music industry and Elisa started her own clothing label, and today their experiences combine perfectly at Laurel Canyon, where old photos of Fleetwood Mac, Linda Ronstadt records and baseball shirts from Crosby, Stills & Nash remind us how in the southern California canyons of the ‘70s, fashion and music were inextricably intertwined.

Elisa pointed out a poster commemorating Carole King’s week at The Troubadour—a Brooklyn girl falling in love with the music scene of Southern California. Lucky for us, now David and Elisa are bringing a little piece of Laurel Canyon back to New York.

Laurel Canyon, 63 Thompson Street, NY, NY 212.343.7090

–Jenni Avins

GIRL CRUSH

A BIRD

IN THE HAND

Birdie Busch breezed into New York last night to start her summer tour. The sandy-haired songbird’s voice is sweet and raw–a little bit like Lucinda Williams with a touch of Feist.

Though she’s got strong Philly roots, Birdie’s blue eyes look wistful when she talks about touring. Her band’s not going with her this time, so for the next couple of weeks it”ll just be a girl and her guitar, opening shows for Luka Bloom in L.A., and San Francisco, and then taking a 16-hour train ride to play in Portland before she finishes her west coast run in Seattle.

When Birdie takes the stage, singing stowaway lullabies about benders, tenderness and slow dancing in the kitchen, she sounds as natural as she does on her albums, and looks like she grew up in the spotlight. It’s hard to believe she’s only been playing music for six years, but she says she’s always been a determined person.

“From the get-go, I just decided that this what I was doing,” she said, after a sold-out show at Joe’s Pub. “I just put blinders on. I was kind of delusional, I guess.”

Sometimes flying blind is the best way to go.

–Jenni Avins

BLOGSPOT

This flight of fancy originally took off onJaybird.
Now that it’s raining more than ever in NYC, here’s a question for another drizzly day:

Who has done more for the umbrella’s place in pop culture–Mary Poppins’ magical nanny-transport or Rihanna, forever adding an extra syllable to the word, making it um-ba-rella? Sorry, now it’s stuck in all our heads.

I’m more of a Poppins girl myself, channeling her today in a restrained (but slightly ruffled) navy dress, stockings and sensible black boots–punctuated, however, with this little number, a gift from my nieces:


A yellow umbrella that looks like a longshoreman. I highly recommend the yellow umbrella (though maintain that carrying an umbrella of any color in midtown should require a license.) It’s a portable piece of sunshine on an otherwise grey day. This fellow I captured for Dossier was onto it too, with an even cuter canary-yellow accessory on his shoulders. Perhaps his Gene Kelly jaunt yesterday inspired today’s Ms. Poppins.
If only we could all pick out parasols at Catherine Deneuve’s shop from The Umbrellas of Cherbourg–a fantastic film for a rainy day.

But alas, we cannot, so here are some picks of the parapluies online:
…in bubble-gum pink
…with English roses
…a touch of Magritte
…and of course, yellow
Run between the raindrops in the meantime!

–Jenni Avins

OFF THE GRID

NATURE WALK

In all my travels, Brazil’s Atlantic Rainforest remains the most magical place I’ve yet to go.

This jade green blanket teeming with life used to cover an area of Brazil twice the size of Texas. Now just seven percent is left, so when an invitation for a “Party To Save The Atlantic Rainforest” landed in my inbox I was intrigued. It came from the Nature Conservancy’s Young Professionals Group. I didn’t even know the Nature Conservancy had a Young Professionals Group. I was glad to see they did, and that their annual gala this year would benefit their campaign to plant one billion trees in Brazil’s coastal jungle. (Ten bucks for ten trees!) Sadly, I couldn’t make the benefit at Manhattan’s Bowery Hotel, but I caught up with them at their after-party where I learned about the Young Professionals’ bird-walks, hikes and beach clean-ups. Sounds like a good way to escape the concrete jungle until I can get back to Brazil.

Stay tuned for a surf trip to the Atlantic Rainforest in our fall issue.

–Jenni Avins

Wanderlust - Alex Kopps makes a pitt stop

By Jenni Avins

Alex Kopps insists he’s not a nomad, but then again, he’s also in denial about being called a surfer. A nomad is a person who keeps on moving, usually in the search of some seasonal supply. Whether Kopps’s path is tracing a source of waves, artistic inspiration, or both, he doesn’t seem to stay in one place long—all the while producing work that could be the fantastic result of a creative collaboration between Wes Anderson and Jeff Spicoli.

Though Kopps has a home and studio in West Oakland, he doesn’t have a phone and sends elusive emails from undisclosed locations with messages like, “i live out of a bike now… eating lavender blossoms and recycled paper.”

Depending on who you ask, Alex Kopps could be a filmmaker, a painter, a surfboard designer, a graffiti artist, a writer of fictional histories (see gothicdolphins.blogspot.com), a teacher, an animator, a researcher… the list goes on. And he could be creating these paintings, surfboards, stories or cartoons anywhere from Oakland to Australia. Oh, and he might be working under a pseudonym. Suffice to say, he’s a tough person to pin on a map, figuratively and physically.

I first encountered Alex Kopps via vacadelmar.com, another surfing mammal who posted a link to the trailer for Kopps’ film, Displacement. The trailer is a mesmerizing vignette that brings portholes and Polaroids to mind, like a symphony shot through a salty lens.

The title refers to the film’s subject: a special breed of surfboards born in the 60s when kneeboarder George Greenough combined qualities of long and shortboards to create a round-bottomed surfboard to sit lower in a wave instead on top of it. Displacement boards have a discerning design element and sub-cultural stigma that makes them perfect subject matter for a self-described “closeted” surfer like Kopps. The film has taken him and partner Steve Krajewski to remote locations in Australia and secret spots in mainland Mexico.

Kopps roams creative media the way he roves the globe, taking the best of each mode or place to complement the next. To raise funds for Displacement he auctioned his paintings, compositions of elements that are at once organic and precise, such as spirograph-like shapes that look like they could appear under a microscope. Friends like artist Barry McGee and mad surf scientist George Greenough himself also contributed pieces, motivating Kopps to focus on finishing the film for “everyone who was in the auction and the people who ride the boards.”

Today, Alex cites his Bay Area base as evidence he’s made surfing secondary to other pursuits. As he says, “nobody moves to San Francisco to be a surfer.” Mind you, this was over a phone call made from a store in Ventura, as he watched waves through a window.

It seems that what Kopps strives to separate himself from is a dated stereotype of surf culture, of what he calls the “endless sunsets and slow motion” of retro movies and monotonous “campfire vibe” that comes from too much time staring at the horizon. But if Alex Kopps has anything to say about it, this generation of modern medium-hopping grid-skipping surf culture will be nothing to be ashamed of.