Workaway

Updated: Jun 20, 2023

Boiçucanga – an insignificant, isolated and idealistic beach town, unfamiliar to everyone except those living there.

Why go there? To teach – time to put the TEFL qualification to good and proper use. The Liceu English school (https://en.centroliceu.com/) is a modest, family-run English Language School, headed by the wonderfully dedicated Dayana Hilário. The school encourages students to learn English through using a teaching method known as the Callan Method, taught to them mostly by passing travellers in need of food, water and a sad, springy, single mattress.

Teaching Portuguese speaking Brazilians English is an entertaining and gratifying way to spend a month or so whilst bunny-hopping around Latin America. It’s a worthy challenge; a remedy to heal the wounds of unfulfilling previous employment. It’s a rewarding vocation for sure, if only for a little while, and being around locals so consistently is the only way to better understand a new way of living. The students, in truth, taught us as much as we taught them.

When travelling throughout a greatly varying land, jumping tracks every other day to embrace a completely new environment, a pause for emotional and physical recovery is an arguable necessity. Familiarity and consistency are not always bad things, they’re human traits; biological norms that, by adhering to, we can operate at our best. Add in new skills to learn (teaching) new perspectives to consider (meeting locals) and new terrain to tread (as always) and you will find yourself in a place that will live on in the memory forever.

As for the place itself, Boiçucanga is exactly what one would expect when one closes one’s eyes and imagines a small Brazilian coastal town. It has clear indications of some quite extreme poverty. It has a stretch of beach so sumptuous, so beautifully unspoiled, bothered only by the relentless gyration of the tepid South Atlantic. There are panoramic lookouts guarded by Yellow Fever and scary dogs on fraying leashes. Impossibly green jungles, blurring the entrances to serene waterfalls and mazes of skinny nature trails. The small restaurants here are packed each and every night with merry locals, ambling down from the hills to get a £2.50 (R$16) trivial dinner (meat, rice and beans). It’s the perfect place to make friends, if you disregard the obvious language barriers. Everyone is interesting, and everyone is interested in you – the open landscape seems to ingrain its bewitching aura upon its inhabitants. There is love here. Love for life. Love for the sake of love.

Boiçucanga holds many memories. For us they will always be treasured – stories resurrected down the pub with a reminiscent smile and a five-pound-pint. We’ll talk of plagues of flying bugs chasing us the length of the beach. We’ll talk of the dog that followed us the entire day, shepherding us through the eerily quiet forests. We’ll talk of our friend Sieds, and how we drank Caipirinhas and played cards for hours everyday. Or our friend Andy, the sixty-something stoner who frustrated and entertained us both in equal measure. We’ll talk of paramedics taking selfies with the badly injured (maybe dead) woman in the car crash below our school. We’ll talk of being routinely swept out by the sea, beyond sandy-toed safety. But here in this tiny, insignificant town, the unpredictable tides always brought us back to shore with a genuine, unabated happiness.