James Norton writes from South America.
"You’d have to be nuts not to swim in Brazil, with the world’s most obsessive beach culture and the nation’s sporting zeal at fever pitch in the runup to next year’s Olympics. Only the mighty rivers give us pause, not for the Piranha, whose bite is apparently overrated, but the Candiru, or Toothpick Fish, is to male swimmers the most terrifying creature in all creation for reasons that need not detain us here.
A long distance swimmer has to keep training, so when inland a pool may be the safest bet. The charming hill town of Ouro Preto is full of opulent baroque churches with only one modern building permitted to trespass on its heritage, a hotel designed by the great architect Oscar Niemeyer who owed his inspiration to the curvaceous forms of Brazilian women. The hotel pool combines the voluptuous and the linear and is a generous 0.0004% the length of the English Channel.
At the next stop, Petropolis, where the Emperor used to escape the summer heat, the winter garden of a surreal abandoned hotel featured an interactive panel inviting visitors to design their own butterfly. I created one in Serps colours with our (2015 English Channel) Butterfly team name, which the machine had obviously been waiting to do since its installation. The Imperial museum has a sedan chair named the Serpentine after the lake in London favoured by those who also prefer a mode of transport that combines maximum effort with slowest speed.
Rio itself is a swimmers paradise, though surprisingly few of the thousands thronging and thonging the beach (there is as much silicone in the bathers as the sand) make it past the thunderous glassy green breakers and out to the gloriously warm and calm Atlantic beyond, so I had the length of Ipanema Beach to myself to practice my atrocious fly technique under a blazing autumn sun.
This stroke has a special place in Carioca mythology, for the city is dominated by the monumental statue of some bloke called Christo Redentor, who is clearly depicted halfway through the forward butterfly stroke with which he won the Serpentine all-clothes race in 1931 in long flowing robes, an aquatic feat for which he is rightly revered to this day."
Postscript: following the visit to Rio and Sao Paolo, James and family will travel to Sao Antonio and Sao Giovanni and pay their resepects to Santa Maddalena before returning home.
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