Paradise found: a journey through Brazil’s balmy northeast

Urban thrills and barefoot beach chic in Recife and Kenoa

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When I first arrived in Rio de Janeiro a few years ago I was quite the European cliché, on the run (from work and debts and family tragedy), and looking (with half-remembered photographs of Carmen Miranda crowding my tangled brain) for sun, sand, fruity cocktails and happy people pointlessly balancing pineapples on their heads. My comeuppance was swift – not in the form of robbery or dengue fever, as I had vaguely feared, but owing to the fact the place felt like Bridlington in December.

It was cloudy and chilly, and on the Flamengo seafront the stolid fin-de-siecle apartment blocks glowered resentfully across windswept acres of concrete to the choppy grey waves beyond. More depressing still was the famous Sugar Loaf rock, hunched in the dead light like a big black tumour on the pallid corpse of the sky. It felt unreal. I wanted badly to scratch the city somewhere and reveal polystyrene or papier mache beneath, proving I had accidentally stumbled into an abandoned Siberian studio back-lot and was looking at the tatty set of an old tropical adventure movie, and that the Rio of my dreams might still be found elsewhere.

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