The weekend after my post ordeal I had planned to spend a little time relaxing, and the rest of the time preparing my equipment to being work when my student, Natalia, returned on Monday. However, the rain that began on Friday continued all weekend, which confined me to the house almost entirely, and I started to discover a rather worrying number of places where the roof leaked. On top of this, when I finally got around to doing some work and trying to assemble all my equipment which had finally arrived, I realised that one vital piece was missing – my supervisor had accidentally forgotten to include the power cable for the laptop, which would be necessary to download my data. The laptop is so old that it won’t even turn on without the power cable. This discovery pushed me to a point of total disbelief. How can so many things go wrong in such short succession? I quickly began devising a new work plan, knowing it would be at least a week, probably two, before the cable could be posted here – assuming it ever arrived!

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The two weeks since my return from Salvador turned out to be the busiest and craziest so far. When I arrived in Campo Formoso we had half an hour before the shops closed, and Aline offered to take me to the phone shop to try and get a mobile internet modem to take to the farm. After a short chat with the shop assistant, it transpired that, contrary to her previous advice, it might not be possible to get one without a CPF number, the Brazilian ID card system. She recommended that I go to a nearby town, Senhora de Bomfim, the following day and speak to someone there. So the next morning I dragged myself out of bed bright and early to catch the 7:30am bus. When I arrived I met Natalia, one of the students who has been helping me, and we proceeded to spend over 2 hours in the phone shop, mostly waiting, to get a modem. Natalia was kind enough to use her ID to get the modem, and eventually we were successful. I was extremely relieved to know that I would not be completely isolated in the farm house for the next two months.

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Ah, rice and beans, the staple of the Brazilian diet, how I’ve missed you….

My journey to Campo Formoso, Bahia, began at 8am, sleepily boarding a bus to Salvador. Thankfully I had my lovely friend Fernanda to help me to get my luggage there and sort out the formalities, I don’t know how I would have coped without her! As was the case in Argentina, the long-distance buses in Brazil are really quite good – very comfortable seats which recline most of the way back, and regular stops to get food (or smoke a cigarette!), although they do insist upon over-air-conditioning to the point where I was actually far too cold most of the way. The other less comfortable aspect was the on board video. After about half an hour of traveling, they put on Legally blonde 2, badly dubbed into Portuguese. I was so tired that I didn’t mind too much because I was able to sleep through it, but when it finished, they let the title soundtrack play on repeat for about 10 minutes before finally pressing play, and making us watch it again. If this is their idea of entertainment, frankly I’d rather be bored!

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