Mexico, Central & South America > Brazil > The Northern Beaches > Pernambuco > Festivals > Articles > Carnival of Carnivals

"Do you have a fantasy?" I get asked this question a lot during the days running up to carnival. And I'm never quite sure how to respond. The first couple of times, I assume I’m being propositioned, Brazilian style. This is, after all, the place where you're supposed to be free and easy about such things with strangers - especially under the sub-equatorial heat of a party aimed squarely at celebrating all things of the flesh.

After the sixth person makes the same inquiry, it begins to dawn on me that I am being accosted on my choice of fancy dress: what am I going to wear during this five-day bacchanalia? The answer seems to dictate itself: as little as possible. No shirt, no hat, no glasses, no wallet, no watch. Just me, my shorts and the elements - along with 800,000 people under one groove.

Welcome to carnaval. I'm not talking about Rio, which has long gone the way of a Vegas-type extravaganza - since 1984, in fact, when the party moved off the streets and into an open-ended stadium (the Sambódromo), which holds all the charm of an aircraft hangar. And I'm not talking about Salvador, which was all the rage four, five years ago, but has now swelled to a phantasmagorical bottleneck of horrendous crime, high-priced platform-seating, and three million people in corporate-sponsored T-shirts dancing to mammoth sound trucks.

No. For the fiesta I speak of, we must head further north, to the state of Pernambuco - to Recife and its satellite town of Olinda, three miles away, whose marvellously preserved colonial charm reaped UNESCO World Heritage status in 1982. Internationally, the shores here are known to rival the danger zones of Australia and South Africa for highest number of shark attacks in the world. But in Brazil, this northeastern outpost is now known for something far fiercer: the carnival of all carnivals.

Sure, Rio boasts the iconic cliché of boa feathers and bobbing boobs: mere Broadway-style showmanship. The Recife-Olinda combo is all about interaction. Time and again, I'm approached by random women, singing what turns out to be this carnival’s signature song: "Kiss me, kiss me, hot and steamy." And I am, it turns out, expected to oblige. For those seeking intoxication, the aphrodisiac of choice here is Pau do Indio ("Indian Dick"), a muddy brown concoction of cane liquor and Brazilian herbs that my indomitably hard-drinking Irish friend samples one morning, after which he has to go lie down for the rest of the day. And the music? Greater Recife is widely considered Brazil's chief hotbed - not for samba (the traditional soundtrack of Rio), but for the more heavily infused African and rock-fusion rhythms that make up the dizzying musical language of the northeast.

This includes the slow, processional maracatu, a frisky dance music called forró, and frevo, whose signature horn riff sounds like Brazilian party music scored to a Benny Hill runaround, and over which the locals go bananas. It's not just the dancing that kindles the magical explosion of sound and color - everybody skipping about with tiny rainbow umbrellas, everybody smiling megawatts (if they could bottle this kind of happiness, Brazil would have the world's economy under its little finger). It's also the spectacle of 600 people converging at a crossroads and singing perfectly in tune; of garishly home-made 20-foot dolls floating gracefully above the mass of heaving bodies; and, particularly in Olinda, of everyone squirting everyone else with water pistols.

And let's not forget the kaleidoscope of fantasies - sorry, costumes-- each flavoured with a twist a tropical eccentricity. Consider, for example, the Sunday Superheroes Parade, featuring manifestly underdressed nuns, nurses, brides, bunnies and fourteen-year-old schoolgirls dressed up as fourteen-year-old schoolgirls. But that only represents the tamer side of the Pernambuco imagination - at least compared to, say, the supremely pregnant Superman that I see, sporting a giant electric blue Afro, or the heavy-set man nearby dressed as Superpenis, accompanied by both his companion Superpussy and-- perhaps redundantly - a six-foot-long papier-mâché phallus.

Oh beautiful. That's what Olinda means in Portuguese - a wholly appropriate appellation for this sixteenth century hillside jewel, whose narrow cobbled streets lend carnival its particular fervour. For here there’s literally no space for stands or floats or spectators. All these streets allow is the unceasing parade of the people, and the beat that drives them - a beat whose thunderous sound spills off walls, around corners, and between facing houses, close enough to kiss.

At times, you feel you can hear the music coming at you from all directions. And at times it does. Like when I stop for a fresh coconut juice in the plaza, and I find myself slap-bang in the middle of a jam of eight criss-crossing blocos - the marching musical groups that represent a particular block or neighbourhood affiliation. With 250 blocos (more than any other city in Brazil, and concentrated in a considerably smaller zone), Olinda's intensity is off the charts. So much so that conventional local wisdom dictates a cyclical party rota to retain some sense of sanity: Olinda by day; Recife by night.

Olinda's morning blocos ruck up around 8 a.m., rousing the town with big pulsing drums. By lunchtime, the out-of-towners have moved in, and the alcohol's flowing fast. Come sundown, the sensible folk have started to retreat to the more family-friendly sanctum of Recife. I am not among them. For amid the random fisticuffs and the unsolicited gropings and the rivulets of street piss that multiply throughout the early hours, there is a singular sense of loveliness in the air, shared by increasingly familiar faces (many of whom have known one another fleetingly, once every 12 months, for years).

Harder, purer, more intimate than Recife, Olinda's nocturnal celebrations invoke a collective happiness fused with what Brazilians call saudade, the broad translation of which is heartache, or a certain type of longing. Yet in the context of this small town Olinda painting the night big, saudade takes the guise of something at once romantic and melancholic - the poetry of conspiring with strangers, outsiders, the people who have wound up in the wrong place but are somehow exactly where they want to be. It is a seditious kinship of spirit not unlike, say, the feeling die-hard New Yorkers experience during the month of August, when everyone else has fled the urban stickiness for more breathable climes. And from this camaraderie is born the realization that carnival in Olinda is not just about participating, it is about belonging -- to a place and a time and a demented extended family you can call your own.

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