For a long time I thought of Brazil as a state of mind. A fantasy of sun, sea, samba and lots of other words beginning with "s". I partly blame Terry Gilliam, for in Brazil, his 1985 film, he uses the lilting samba beat of the eponymous song (known as Aquarela do Brasil in its native land) to accompany the final crushing of his hero by the mad, dysfunctional world around him. The song represents pure unproductive pleasure. Brazil as the ultimate escapist image.
The Latin American mind-set is one with which we north Europeans can't easily identify. China we can relate to because it's single-minded and industrious; India and the sub-continent is crazy and colourful and quite a bit English. Russia is dark and impenetrable but good at putting up with things, which we admire. The Brazilians on the other hand don't have to put up with anything. They have everything. Spicy seafood stews, fruits of the forest and luscious caipirinhas. Swaying music, sensual dancers and perfect bodies, wrapped in balmy warmth and enveloped in rapturous sex. As they say, what's not to like. Even as we read about drug gangs and watch violent films such as City of God, we give Brazil the benefit of the doubt. Bound to be some bad 'uns in a country that plays such beautiful football.
So, for me, Brazil's mystique grew, hot and steamy and lush as the jungles that I assumed to cover most of the country. Even its location seemed a touch other-worldly. Most of it in the southern hemisphere and not exactly on the way to anywhere, except possibly Peru or Paraguay. My early attempts to learn more about it only strengthened the mythology. Brazil's northern border was the setting of Conan Doyle's Lost World. The explorer Colonel Percy Fawcett who went deep into the rainforest to discover El Dorado, was never seen again. Peter Fleming, who went to find him, got lost too and just got out of the jungle alive. (Brazilian Adventure, Fleming's first book, is nevertheless, one of the funniest books about nearly dying.)
For whatever reason, despite having been to many countries these past 24 years, I'd been keeping Brazil at arm's length. Was it that I didn't want my fantasies to be destroyed? Could it have been that, little Protestant that I am, I was fearful of having too good a time? Of having all those layers of reserve, privacy, caution, discretion and self-doubt corroded by tropical hedonism?
Three things helped to convince me that there was no good reason for not going to Brazil. In 2001 Jim O'Neill, an alumnus of Sheffield University no less, and now chairman of Goldman Sachs Asset Management, coined the acronym Bric for what he saw as the global super players of the future. Russia, India and China we might have expected to be included, but Brazil, the "B", really caught the eye. Less than 10 years previously, Brazil was suffering 2,700% inflation. Now we were being told by a highly respected economist that the sun was shining out of its backside. Suddenly the exotic paradise sounded a lot more like the rest of the world. Only more successful.
Then, in 2007, as I was completing a travel series called New Europe, which I fully intended to be my last, Brazil was chosen to host the 2014 World Cup. Two years after that Rio de Janeiro pipped Madrid, Tokyo and Chicago to win the 2016 Olympics. By now I knew there was another journey to be done. I had to expunge the fantasy and check out the reality of the country everyone would soon be talking about.
The fifth-biggest country in the world by land area, Brazil is roughly 3,000 miles from north to south and from east to west. Despite its extent, most of its 205 million people live in towns and cities on or within 100 miles of the coast. The vast and fertile interior comprises millions of hectares of farming land as well as the biggest rainforest and the biggest river system in the world – the Amazon pours into the Atlantic at the rate of 57 million gallons a second. To travel there means to somehow deal with this imbalance between the thin sliver of human Brazil and the gigantic natural splendours surrounding it.
For the series, I split the country into four episodes: the north-east, the Amazon and Brasilia, Rio and the important mining state of Minas Gerais, and São Paulo and the south.
The north-east coast is where the first Europeans set foot, by accident, in 1500. Here the production of coffee and sugar and cotton became so successful that it created a plantation system which eventually required some seven million African slaves to work it. This coast, from just south of the mouth of the Amazon to the state of Bahia, is steeped in African influence, in religion, music, food, dress and style.
São Luís's old town is slowly benefiting from a big restoration scheme. In those streets that have been made over there are shops, bars, internet cafes and restaurants. Calhau Praia is as clean, comfortable, walkable a stretch of sand as I've come across. And it's apparently endless. Around 200 miles south-east of São Luís is the Lençóis Maranhenses national park. Here is sand in its most majestic state. Dunes up to 50m high spread and billow over roughly 620 square miles. After the rainy season, in March, April and May, up to a thousand lagoons appear among the dunes.
Olinda, over 620 miles down the coast from São Luís, is a colonial town of some beauty, stretching up and over the hills. It still resonates with style and affluence, with many churches, including the church and convent of St Francis, the oldest convent in Brazil. The Alta da Sé cathedral has a breathtaking view over the city and across the water to the skyline of Recife.
Recife has become the scene of new and adventurous cultural work, especially in music. We lunched at the Pernambuco Yacht Club, out by the sea wall. The food is glorious: caldinho de peixe (fish soup), a moqueca of fresh shrimp, red mullet and beans, caju juice.
Further south is Salvador, capital of the state of Bahia and the biggest African city outside Africa. It overlooks All Saints' Bay, believed to be the second-largest natural harbour in the world after Hudson Bay. The Pelourinho (literally the pillory) is the centre of the old town, where breathtaking architectural beauty sits side by side with corrosive poverty and decay. A non-stop music track animates and deafens, and a life ethic rather than a work ethic dominates.
Amazonia is another distinctive and clearly defined geographical and economic unit. Apart from investigating a river system that is estimated to contain over 20% of all the freshwater in the world, it offered the chance to visit some of the indigenous tribes who had lived in the rainforest long before Brazil ever became Brazil.
In the wide, lake-like waters of the Rio Negro I swam with pink Amazon dolphins. They bounced off my body and came back for more sardines.
Anyone who visits Amazonia must at some point pass through its biggest city, Manaus. The internationally renowned opera house, Teatro Amazonas, is an ornate jewel in a rough and ready city.
The city of Belém stands at the southern portal of the Amazon delta and is home to the vast waterside Ver-o-peso market, selling fish, fruits and handicrafts. Belem's offshore islands offer a tantalising glimpse of rural riverbank life. Santarem, the third and most intimate of the Amazon's big cities, has a museum with a rich collection of pre-European ceramics, some dating back 10,000 years.
Fordlandia was Henry Ford's industrial dream town in the middle of the Amazon jungle. Now a ghost town, it was abandoned in the 1950s.
The state of Minas Gerais, on a high plateau north of Rio, has been a heartland of national wealth for over 300 years, and iron ore excavations as deep as volcanic craters scar the countryside around Brazil's fourth city, Belo Horizonte. It has few memorable sights. One is the graceful rectangular Praça da Liberdade, ringed by an esoteric collection of good-looking buildings. I'm told that Lourdes is the hip new quarter for smart clubs and trendy restaurants, but I must have got the wrong time of day.
The discovery of gold in the nearby mountains at the start of the 18th century transformed the balance of power from north to south Brazil and was the reason that Rio de Janeiro flourished.
Cardeal Mota is a long, thin tourist town within the Serra de Cipó national park north of Belo Horizonte. Brazil has no peaks higher than 3,000m and this corner of Minas is exceptional in having anything that looks like a real mountain range. It's a diverse and fragile ecosystem, with more than 2,000 species of plants.
This left São Paulo and the south. The southern and south-eastern states cover less than 18% of Brazil's land area but contain 60% of the population. And they feel different. If the north-east is African Brazil, the south is European Brazil. If the Bahians work to relax, the Paulistas work to make money. São Paulo, the biggest city in the southern hemisphere, is also the richest. There are billionaires all over the place, moving around the vast thrombotic city in helicopters. Further south is a string of affluent, progressive cities like Curitiba, Florianópolis and Porto Alegre, where you can think yourself in Bilbao or Bristol or Antwerp.
There's a feeling Curitiba is trying hard to be cool, though the Oscar Niemeyer Museum in the centre doesn't have to try. It just is. Around the museum is a park, one of many carefully laid out green spaces that dot the city, making Curitiba one of the world's greenest cities. Tourist trains run from Curitiba to the coast.
Inland there are towns that have gone out of their way to preserve their European roots. Blumenau, in the state of Santa Catarina, is so proud of its German origins that the town's sign reads Wilkommen, and the council offices are in a six-storey Alpine chalet.
You can find temporary refuge in a Brothers Grimm world of cobbled streets and tall brick-and-timber buildings. Steins of beer are available and accordion music chortles out. The big event of Blumenau's year is the Oktoberfest, the largest celebration of its kind outside of Munich. Nearby Pomerode, founded by Pomeranian Germans in 1861, is even more obsessed with its Teutonic heritage.
Where Brazil finally rubs up against Argentina and Paraguay, the Iguaçu Falls, one of the largest waterfall systems in the world was a spectacular climax to my trip.
I can say now that Brazil is more than just a state of mind and yet, after a year steeped in the country, I still haven't completely figured it out. In many ways the Brazilian way of life seems to live up to all the cliches. It is seductive and easy-going. The sun shines on mile upon mile of sparkling clean ocean-washed beaches. Delicious fruits grow in Eden-like profusion. Brazilians of every age and shape exercise in tiny slips of clothing, caressed by sea breezes. Music and dancing is hard-wired into the system. Drinking seems to make them happy without tipping them over into aggression. They are tolerant and informal, and live very much in the present. Socrates – the footballer, not the philosopher – described his fellow countrymen as "a shrewd, vain, happy people".
Yet Brazil is perceived by many outsiders as a dangerous place, where crime and corruption are high and there is every chance of being mugged as you walk the streets. These fears seem to be based on the image of the overpopulated favelas, some of which do have a fearsome reputation. In Rio, favelas accumulate on the hillsides overlooking Copacabana and Ipanema beaches, frightening people who live down below in some of the most expensive real estate in the country. Vik Muniz, one of Brazil's most celebrated artists, described it to me as "Saint-Tropez surrounded by Mogadishu".
But most of Rio's million or so favelados have nothing to do with organised crime. They are mostly people who work in Rio and keep the city running. The rehabilitation of the favelas is showing good results, but will it come fast enough for a World Cup that is only two years away, with an Olympics hard on its heels ?
Growing international stature could be the greatest threat to this happy situation. With Bric-led prosperity has come responsibility, not just for Brazilians themselves, but for a world looking desperately for strong economies to help the weak. A seat for Brazil on the UN Security Council is already being discussed.
After four months travelling the country my impression is that people are a little apprehensive about the global status being so swiftly thrust upon them. They will now have to compare themselves with other countries in a way they've never bothered to do before. They will find themselves increasingly assessed and judged by outsiders.
While I was there I made a not-altogether-serious list of English words and phrases that seemed to have no counterpart for Brazilians, such as "introvert", "early" and "turn the music down". One word at which they always shook their heads when I asked for a translation was "self-conscious".
I hope that, with world recognition, the essential, infectious live-and-let-live attitude that I so enjoyed in Brazil will not have to be reined in. Or "self-conscious" be added to their dictionary.
