Not every port is amazing. There’s your foreshadowing…
Recife, pronounced “hee-seef”, is one of those cities whose building design kind of shows you how their glory days were 40-to-60 years ago. Most paint is peeling. There is the hot-and-muggy smudge (fungus?) on all the walls. It does has a nice beach, with an 8km boardwalk. But all the hotels are from another era. It mostly reminded me of when I visited Berlin in the early 2000s. You stand on the spot where the wall was, and you can still see buildings on the east side that had not yet been updated. Just barely look to the west and the difference is crazy.
So, I took the “Recife & Olinda” highlights tour. We started on the nice beach. Many Cruiseboysians know that I grew up on a beach, so things like this don’t do much for me. But most people don’t have that background. I get it. We needed to drive thru the “downtown” to and from the beach, and… not much.
We then headed to Olinda, which is the earlier city. The colonial powers traded blows here, with a lot of “this church needed to be rebuilt four time” kind of history. We had to swap from the bus to vans for the final legs into the historical district to protect the roads and buildings. It was a large, simple church at the center, but the hill had a nice view.
That’s about it. The tour kept stopping at older buildings full of… local shopping. Imagine that! The four-hour tour could have taken 90 minutes. Welp, every port can’t be Paris. It didn’t help that today was especially hot and muggy. We are nearing the equator again.
I was surprised to see one of my Rio carnival videos have over 600 views. When I mentioned this to the group one of my fellow passengers laughed and said she’s emailed the link to her friends, so perhaps I’ve gone a little bit viral.
