The foolish foreigner's tale

A line from my previous post, about reinforcing prejudices, got me thinking: did I come to Brazil with a desire to see only the bad side ?

It's true, I did arrive in, shall we say, an unusual state of mind. The headline might read: "First-time visitor to Brazil comes to 'take delivery' of his first-born child", whose Brazilian mother had partly decided and partly been forced (by UK visa problems) to give birth in her home country. A home she hadn't seen in over five years.

My experience of Brazil, therefore, has been as an all-hands-to-the-deck full-time parent. And until the robbery, we lived in a less affluent part of Sao Paulo. It's not a "lifestyle" most visitors to this country, or well-remunerated expats in their bubbles, would recognize. Still, for all it's challenges, I've been given some unique insights and perspectives, the kind of reality you couldn't buy and the kind of strangeness that does indeed make you stronger. I've never been one for packaged holidays anyway.

But before this experience, there was in fact one other brush with Brazil. A very, very expensive brush, it now appears.

Back in the final sputtering moments of our formerly "strong" global economy, I did what so many other fools before me have done: I rushed in and bought an off-plan "villa" in a "piece of paradise" by the sea.

Just outside Maracajau, a fishing village which is now quite famous for its coral reef snorkeling, my fantasy island went by the exotic moniker of "Portos dos Corais", Coral Port. About 65 kilometers north of Natal, in north-east Brazil.

First payment was in the dying days of 2006. Further payments followed but then came to a halting stop, along with the development. The man in charge was a Swede married to a Brazilian and living in Natal. Among the many dumb ideas clouding my judgement at the time was the assumption that a Swede gave credibility to the project: it would surely be run competently, honestly and efficiently. After all, many of the buyers were from that country or other Nordic lands.

As with other bad investing decisions from the same period, it now seems impossible to untangle personal culpability from malign global economic forces. Sure, the sensible Swede turned out to be just another wideboy whippersnapper who'd bitten off more than he could chew. But the bottom line is that a tsunami of almost free money which had propelled the foreign property and other bubbles for many years suddenly disappeared in the blink of an eye. No more Peter to pay Paul, no more money-go-round. The old saying about bricks and mortar being the safest of all investments was completely upended: it was the one place you did not want to have your savings.

Amazingly, The Port of Corals is still running. Well, that probably isn't quite the word to describe it. Slumbering, resting, mothballed, comatose would be nearer the mark. Many of the European buyers, including myself, have tried valiantly to get things unstuck and have used the Internet to add a sense of "order and progress" where basically there is none. Listening to the developer and other assorted characters connected with this ill-fated enterprise is a form of surreal entertainment to rival anything offered by Family Guy ... but with tears instead of laughter. How do you revive trust ? Apparently, no-one in Brazil, including these people, could care less. It's the one commodity you can't buy.

I finally managed to visit my imagination's wonderland. We spent three weeks last December staying in Natal and touring the area. The development is accessed either by a drive down the beach in a trusty four-by-four, sloping into alarmingly aggressive waves, or else via a circuitous ride along deserted terrain. As we drove back one evening, we were approached by police, having stopped to fill the baby's bottle. They told us to be careful since we were vulnerable to hijacking by thieves on this lonely, unlit stretch.

All over the region you see home-made signs saying "Se vende" or "Vende se" (must be that famous illiteracy again). "For sale". Seemingly endless tracts of scruffy-looking land with or without already constructed dwelling places. It's all for sale. And that hardly inspires confidence. Plus the fact that the area seems so, well, empty, so devoid of human life, human enterprise, industry, progress; it just makes all this property speculation seem even more absurd. I imagine that in reality there are few actual buyers and sellers.

I spoke at length to a retired Norwegian couple, living in a completed villa on PDC. Nice people and with that wonderful Scandinavian restraint that makes the English look positively Latin. They seemed totally torn between, on the one hand, joy at being far from a Norwegian winter and, on the other, frustration at being in the ghost-town that was, and by all accounts still is, Porto dos Corais. They were undecided on whether to return there in the new year for a longer spell and from what I hear they did not. Probably a wise move since this year brought reports of break-ins and robberies. A lack of security was blamed, which also explains why one of the local free-range cows was found in the swimming pool !

Ah, what fun ! What stories I have to tell for my many thousands of probably-lost-forever euros. Thankfully, what is also lost is the armchair traveller, the off-plan fantasist who, rather than fearing the worst about Brazil, imagined it to be heaven on earth.