The World's Most Spectacular Party

When the lights and the echoes of the holiday season are still fading out, when the rest of the planet gets unwillingly set to go back to the salt mines and treadmill tribulations of daily life, Brazilians take a roguish look around and say to themselves –honestly true- that the best part is yet to come, promising to throw a bigger carnival bash than the year before.

Preparations for the world's biggest party, so lit up like a Christmas tree and so teeming with music and gaudiness, with dancing and singing, begin under a sweltering summer sun that can only be soothed at the beaches of Ipanema, Copacabana, Rio de Janeiro, Recife or Salvador de Bahia, or just with an schooner of icy suds in the middle of the night.

The Rio Carnival, the best-known of all under that same searing sun, sired for years in the schools of samba, takes a painstaking money-collecting and time-saving job for sewing fantastic gowns and disguises made with dazzling materials.

People embark on that hardworking effort throughout January and the first two weeks of February, trapped in rehearsals, choreographic stunts and plenty of music. These playing and dancing bands usually engage 400 people that play drums, cymbals, bass drums, bells and other instruments that will make temps shoot up to feverish degrees.

Every weekend, samba schools hold parties of their own and use huge outdoor or roofed spaces to stage contests and competitions of dancing, off-the-cuff singing and much more. The bands deploy their carriages and the foliones, those frenzied dancers that love samba more than they love themselves, hit the streets.

The carnival rhythm spreads through towns and cities like a prairie fire. But it's summer anyway in Brazil, a time for vacations, for resting and relaxing, for having fun and forgetting about your job for awhile. Many New Year's Resolutions are put on hold until after the carnivals are over in late February or early March.

The international scope and impact seem to grow with each passing year. Some samba schools have their platoons of foreigners, groups of up to 400 samba enthusiasts that hail from several countries around the world and take a hands-on attitude during the preparations before the big frolicking kicks off. There in their schools, they read the lyrics of the songs because it's compulsory to belt out in one voice during the parades. As soon as these foreigners get to the airport, they start rehearsing their lines, getting set for the main event in their hotels and inns. Then they head for their assembly points where their white skins will soon melt into a sea of Negroes and brown people.

This mammoth cultural expression, that stretches out all across the South American country, reaches into the wee hours of the morning in the northern city of Recife, capital of the state of Pernambuco, with a traditional daybreak at the edge of the beach having hen's feet soup for breakfast. A multitude of up to half a million people coming from every nook and cranny of the country swarms over the place in a colorful celebration that doesn't stop anymore.

In the Olinda colony, declared World Heritage by UNESCO, the parades of ancient disguises and musical bands playing old-timed instruments –identical to those that were all the rage during Portugal's colonial rule- match up with the well-preserved buildings of the 16th and 17th centuries that line up on both sides of the streets.

Even a steel-and-concrete giant like Sao Paolo, with over 10 million inhabitants, shrugs off the refine manners of bankers and businesspeople that roam this mighty financial center and gets carried away with the carnival fever that invades the modest neighborhoods.

Carnivals in Salvador de Bahia deserve a few lines of their own. The former capital of the country –a.k.a. the Capital of Joy for the jaunty and prankish character of its residents- features a festivity in which ordinary people are always willing to take visitors for a grand tour around the famous Pelourinho, a place marked by steep cobblestone streets where the real flavor of this humongous bash is close at hand.

But Rio is the real McCoy. The Samodromo (Samba Dome) is a 1,935-foot-long strip that extends from Marquis of Sapucai St. all the way to the so-called Apotheosis Square –designed by Oscar Niemeyer. Slithering their way through bleachers and boxes, people dance there for three days in a row. The apex comes at the third day when dancers, drowned in a blend of loud music and yells, reach the homestretch across from the Square and perform their finest deeds with peerless imagination and creativeness on the world's largest stage.

Some critics blast the remarkably acute commercial and tourist scope of these carnival celebrations in Rio that lure more than a third of a million foreign visitors and tens of thousands of Brazilians every year. But the truth is it's the popular roots, the African spirit transformed after five centuries of race-intermingling and the fusion of cultures what actually keep an out-of-this-world spectacle like that going and going, on and off avenues that boast the high-tech lighting technology of today.

Either from the bleachers or the comfier boxes, or with the bird's-eye view provided by the cabins installed by megabuck companies that are exclusively reserved for black-tie patrons that pay a mint for a chance to watch the show away from any perils, the party and the fun are simply unlimited.

The night passes by full of joy and happiness, amid unknown people and movie celebrities, businesspeople wearing nothing but humble motley tee-shirts, European nobles shrouded in the dark of the night and even prominent political figures from the turf and overseas. They all find themselves in the same boat of bliss, eager to cash in on this once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to free their spirits and their flesh, to feel engulfed by the pleasure of crooning a tune or two in a place where there are no rules and no jackets are required. It's time to live tons of fun and spend unforgettable hours.

The images of bursting fireworks, of huge carriages packed with knockout girls that blare out ear-splitting music through the speakers, keep parading before your amazed and wide-open eyes. Even after the party is over, the morning after makes you feel as if you were having some kind of hangover that floods the senses and fills your soul and stays for forever more in your memory. Those memories will one day be the graphic keepsakes of those great times you had in the company of friends and relatives. Those memories will soon be the cherished mementos you'll still enjoy when you're back home.

Many a word has been spoken about the dangers, murders and other crimes that are committed at the shadow of Brazil's carnivals, yet most of those chilling stories stem from the kind of tabloid press that does anything within its power to sell its morbid stuff. Indeed, seeing is believing. Hundreds of thousands of people party at the beaches of Ipanema and Copacabana, in the plazas and in the streets, where rivers of beer, pleasure, frenzy and madness flow up and down without any misdemeanor at all.

The subway keeps running all night long during the weeklong celebrations, securing a safe means of transportation for all. In addition to that, there are taxis galore with cabdrivers willing to take you back to your hotel or any other place you're staying in.

Of course, you don't have to make friends with anyone you immediately hit upon in the streets, nor venture out to far-off neighborhoods, no matter how attractive they might look like, carrying huge sums of cash in your pockets. If you don't count on the support of a decent local family, the best thing visitors can do is hire the services of a guide provided by travel agencies. That's no doubt the best way to enjoy the cidade maravillosa, as residents call it.

Besides parades at the Sambodromo, the weeklong party spills over onto the streets and squares where beer runs deep like a river, pleasure gets a hold on you and frenzy overtakes you. There's nothing that can humanly or divinely stop residents of Rio de Janeiro, all Brazilians and their visitors from having a heck of a ball at the world's biggest bash.