Ain't Rio grand

By Griff Rhys Jones, Mail on Sunday

Last updated at 11:33 02 December 2002


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Think of the sweetest thing you have ever eaten. It's probably one of those Greek things, made out of honey, nuts and layered fibre-board.

One of those things my chum Mad Arthur stuck in his mouth for the first time on a small boat in Hydra and sat, with his eyes rolling, in a sort of mucousy ecstasy, groaning.

OK, imagine that and double it. Think of a lip-puckering, tongue-furring sweet gloop made by boiling down sugar, honey and candied papaya into a syrupy toffee, and you haven't even got close to 'pudim'.

I am still reeling from the effect of a spoonful of the Brazilian dessert sampled in a penumbrous dungeon somewhere in Rio. Like the whole country, the food is over the top.

We were there because Catherine, who is 15 and had been reading too many brochures, wanted to throw herself down on a boomerang of sand by a pendulous bracket of a palm tree.

'No. Not some dumb island. Please,' I begged. 'Rio!' I said hastily summoning up an exotic but bearable destination. Yes. Think! 'Rio, Oh Rio, Oh Rio, Oh Rio, Oh Rio!'

'What?' 'Zero Mostel in The Producers.'

She looked at me with the unflinching scorn that 15-year-olds hold in reserve for their fathers. 'We Are Flying Down To Rio! - Bryan Ferry.'

Withering pity.

'Tall And Tanned And Lean And Lovely, The Girl From Ipanema Goes Walking - Tom Jobim!' (I'd looked it up.) 'There's an Awful Lot Of Coffee In Brazil! - Nescafe.' (There is, and it's mostly stewed.)

For us 20th Century people, the lure of Brazil is Carmen Miranda and samba, samba, samba. For Catherine, Brazil is what she studies for Geography GCSE.

'It's where a lot of poor people live in slums.'

'It's a miraculous sub-tropical paradise.'

'It's actually experienced a boom-and-bust economy since the Second World War rush to industrialisation.'

'It's further from one side to the other than from London to Moscow.'

'It has malaria in the north and dengue fever in the south.'

One fifth of the fresh water in the world flows out of the Amazon Basin and 150 million people live there.

Statistically, Brazil has more statistics than any other country in the world. We had to go.

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