Checking in coming aboard looking through a lifebelt having dinner being cuddled by his assistant dressed as Columbine shaking the Captain’s

“Checking in, coming aboard, looking through a lifebelt, having dinner, being cuddled by his assistant dressed as Columbine, shaking the Captain’s hand, walking the jogging track…”"Good,” said Lima “Very good But please, photograph of me pouring coffee for you. For job document.” I said, “But my cup’s full.” Lima waved his friend forward, saying, “No problem, the pot is empty” The picture taken, Lima picked up his paintbrush. “Fantasy,” he said, “in Brazil is fantasy.”Pÿrto SeguroSmall town with a unique selling point: it’s where Brazil began, in 1500. Its claim rests on its choice by the Portuguese navigator Alvarez Cabral as the safe harbour for his 13 caravels. Those little ships could enter behind the reef, but Rhapsody’s 17,000 tons had to wait outside while we went ashore in a dandy tender called Delirio. (“In Brazil is fantasy.”)Our goal was the old colonial town up on the bluff. I ran with a pack of disco-fit Argentine girls, who nevertheless wilted in the heat and demanded short cuts.

The guide ignored their whining, but adopted a policy of dashing from one shady tree to another, with lecturettes on the provenance and industrial uses of the latex, the palm and the jacaranda – all imported, so Cabral wouldn’t have seen them.I liked that, and also finding the Pau do Brasil tree, from which the settlers got a red dye Glowing like an ember – brasa – it gave Brazil its name. These and flamboyants and hibiscus hedges, plus the bush weighed down with parasitic orchids that encircles the town, added grace to the patriotic motif.Here is the oldest church in Brazil (1526), proto-baroque but plain; here the barn-like college where Jesuits “catechised” the native Guarani; and here is an 18th-century terrace of artisan cottages, painted with pastels like Neapolitan ice-cream to distinguish them for people who knew neither letters nor numbers. We had a beach afternoon beside a mangrove swamp five miles away The lurching of the bus seemed to herald the samba. The beach resort was boom-box heaven for our Argentine lovelies, and after musical chairs in the sand they were shipshape again.Ship’s logCruising with Brazilians (550 – not one American) is travel-enhancing They do know how to party They clap everything: winners, losers, lifeboat drill. They give it 100 per cent, the children cranking slots till midnight, the older kids working on new crazy dances, their mothers gliding about the dance floor in the embrace of our tireless Italian captain.Then, at classes on T-shirt decorating, total commitment That goes for the gamblers, too.

Seven growly, jowly men who never quit the baccarat table, staking $500 a play, while dealers came and went.Salvador de BahiaFor land-lubbers, this is the piÿce de résistance, capital of the north-east, melting-pot of magic and religiosity, imperial superbia and African defiance. Given a few hours among plateresque and heavy baroque art, quizzing ancient bones, walking on cobbles laid down by slaves in the notorious Pelourinho district of the acropolis, and being confronted with the blood-boiling beauty of Bahianas in full fig, you’re bound to seed a novel. And then of course think better of it, because Jorge Amado was here before you.A colonial house showcases Amado, filled with eulogies and worldwide book-jackets and pictures of the great man meeting other great men. It’s less a shrine than a giant walk-in scrapbook – his real home is some miles down the coast.Lack of time haunted me I suffered tourist overload.

It’s a city of nearly three million people and more than 200 churches See here: rails that once carried trams. See here: skeletons that once carried the flesh and hopes of wealthy colonials. See here: tiled panels round a cloister, carrying cartoons of moral saws such as “Virtue is envy’s target”, and “The fruit of labour is glory”.”Enough is as good as a feast” might be worth a few tiles. But next door is the extravagantly decorated Franciscan church. See here: wooden angels with sour expressions, perhaps because slaves carved them. See down a steep hill: a grandiloquent church that the slaves made for themselves, taking a century over it, but happy.You often hear the Salvador word axe used for a frantic bouncing dance I asked a policeman what axe means “It means,” he replied, “like a spread, a place, an idea … of happiness.” His face became suffused with a bonhomie not often seen in coppers.