No one here but me and my crabs

Sheets of rain fell all night last night and continued until late morning. After a quick meal of yet more leftovers carted with me from Olinda and once the rain ceased, I headed off to Tamandare, the village 4 kms away from the beach, with Leo in his beat up beach town truck to get groceries:

My new buddy, Leo, buying road chicken

It quickly became clear that Leo is like the Big Man on Campus in Tamandare, a one-horse town of about 2000 people. He moved here from Recife 10 years ago and has been managing the apartments here, owned by an Italian from Recife, ever since. A nice gig that comes with an apartment on the beach. He knows EVERYONE in town. He took me to the supermercado, and Roberto’s Peixiaria (fish shop) where I purchased a half a kilogram of local shrimp for 2.50$. Sounds awesome right? That turned out disappointing. I went to clean and de-vein them for dinner later and they were so small that I spent an hour, up to my elbows in shrimp shit and central nervous systems, and barely made a dent so I gave up.

Cleaning shrimp FAIL

After getting all my food and drink needs met for the next few days, Leo and I headed back to the apartments, cracking jokes about the intense and explicit religiosity in the town. When we returned back, I was once again offered food, some grilled chicken, by Leo and his beautiful partner, Eliza. It was only a small grilled chicken he had bought off the street, grilled in a sawed in half oil drum-turned-BBQ and, and while it smelled amazing, I didn’t want to take their lunch away from them. I respectfully declined, made a joke about how much food I now had in the fridge and made myself a grilled cheese sandwich before heading out to the neighbourhood pub one building over down the beach:

Neighbourhood pub

 I was sitting alone with my B & B (beer and book) overlooking the water for about 3 minutes

Monday afternoon beer and book.

 ...before the couple sitting at the next table struck up a conversation. Shirley and her husband were from Sao Paulo, on business in Recife but taking a day to beach-hop. Their order of calabrese and fries came and they invited me to join them at their table and share their food with them. I began to see a trend with the offering of food and I wondered if it was similar to my experience in South Asia where “food is love” and refusing food was viewed as insulting. And I love calabrese sausage. So I didn’t refuse this time.

The rain finally ebbed and I decided to go for another walk. The beauty of touristing on a beach in a rural area is the simple itinerary: Day1, walk north up beach; Day 2, walk south down beach; Day 3, sit on beach. I planned to venture about 3 km north up the beach, around the point. Around the point there are natural pools created in the rocks when the tide is low that I guess people take mud baths in and snorkel in or something like that. I began to walk and walk and walk and soon realised that I essentially had 8 km of tropical beach to myself. It was surreal and it is unexpected that isolated places like this and solitary experiences like this still exist on the planet.

Where the heck is everyone??

I arrived at the natural pools and waded around in them not really noticing much except they were wading pools contained in rock formations with sandy-ish bottoms. Then, all of a sudden, my perspective shifted and I began to notice. The pools were teeming with life: little tropical fish, some see-through ones, some with leopard patterns, some with striped black and yellow patterns…and the little shells…like the shells you find all over beaches in Canada…well except here is where all those shells must come from because all of them here are the homes of a creature. If you really pay attention you see every single shell moving slowly along the beach on the backs of some little crustacean. I have never had the pleasure of seeing these little dudes in action before! Unfortunately this is so often how we experience life around us, viewing only the big pictures of the past and future and not seeing what is directly in front of us right now, the minutiae, William Blake’s proverbial ‘grain of sand’.

My favourite creature of all that I saw for the first time ever are these sand coloured crabs, about the size of the palm of your hand, with pearl white claws, scuttling everywhere across the beach. Again, if you are not noticing the minutiae, these little fellas will escape your view with their excellent camouflage and smooth scuttlin' style. As soon as I noticed one, I paid closer attention and looked around and noticed they were everywhere. As soon as their big black, protruding eyes catch a whiff of you they either pretend to be statues or scuttle rapidly down into their perfect little holes in the sand. Here’s a crappy photo that you'll have to look at closely to see the little guy but it helps give an idea of what they look like:

My shitty photo

What they actually look like. Thanks: www.animalhi.com 

On my way back home, I took a float in the ocean as the sun was starting to go down, highly anticipating my shrimp pasta (that totally barely happened) and my bottle of Chilean wine. What’s the term one of my friends uses? Champagne socialist? Yeah I’d say that’s me right now.