Subject: Brazil
Date: November 19, 2005 1:17:32 PM from the East China Sea just west of Japan
Tomorrow we'll be in Japan. Since leaving Hong Kong 3 days ago we've had 3 violent days of high seas in the East China Sea, but today I'm finally able to write about my time in Brazil over 2 months ago - September 13-17. I've also posted my Brazil photos: http://atsea.amyburky.com/brazil/index.html
Getting through the immigration process in Brazil was one of the most complicated and time consuming of all our ports. We all had to do a face to face with the health officials when picking up our passports, we don't usually have to see the officials, they usually just care about seeing our passports.
My friend Rico who is the AV Coordinator is from Brazil, he's been living in the US since he was 11 (15 years) and just became a US Citizen 2 days before leaving for SAS, but needless to say he was very excited to come back to his home country, and we were very excited to have our own local tour guide to translate and show us around. Salvador is divided into an upper and lower part which is connected by a cable car and an elevator. The ship is down in the lower city, but the Pelo (the main square in the upper city) is the place to be, so the first thing we did was take the cable car up to the Pelo. Brazil is amazingly beautiful! It's hard to explain, but it has a lot of the charm and colors of a combination of Italy and New Orleans. There are tons of cobblestone alleyways with beautiful colored buildings. Everything looks very old.
We got to a main square pretty quickly and were attacked by tons of vendors. Chris and I ducked into some shop to change money - it wasn't an official money-changing place, but it seemed legit and Rico said it was OK. Rico threw off all the vendors by actually speaking Portuguese to them and then many of them were very helpful and led us around and gave us lots of pointers about what to do and not do and where to eat.
For lunch Rico ordered several dishes for the table and we all just split stuff. There is a drink that is very strong and we were warned several times not to drink more than one or two at the most, but everyone ordered one of those, of course I ordered water. The drink is called cachaça and is a sugar cane alcohol with tons of limes in it. The food, when it finally came, was amazing. The national dish which is Rico's favorite is a soup made up of pretty much every part of a pig and it's all thrown in together into kind of a soup. It's called feijoada and It's pretty fatty, but delicious. It's served over rice and then you sprinkle this stuff called farofa that is about the consistency of wheat germ or sawdust over it to kind of dry it out. We also ordered Chicken Fricassee which was amazing. After the meal, Rico ordered everyone a guaraná, which is a Brazilian soft drink and is super caffeinated, apparently containing one of the main ingredients of Red Bull. I don't usually drink caffeine, but I made an exception for this cultural experience. Rico told us that Brazil has great ice cream, so we got ice cream for dessert which was indeed very good.
Next stop was the beach where we spotted quite a few Brazilian bikinis and skimpy boy suits and sipped milk out of coconuts. Rico, an incredible gymnast, showed off his skills on some rusty parallel bars on the beach, and then we ended the evening by a fort with a lighthouse where we sat (on a hill of fire ants) and watched an incredible sunset.
The next 3 days were spent going to my Lençóis (pronounced Lensoys) which was about a 7 hour bus ride away. Our tour guide, Roy, is an American who came to Brazil 30 years ago for the Peace Corps and hasn't left since. He married a Brazilian woman and has settled in Lençóis. Actually, Roy is responsible for making Lençóis what it is today. It was a sleepy run down diamond town, and he realized that this area needed to be saved, so he convinced the government to turn the area around Lençóis into a national park, creating Parque Nacional da Chapada Diamantina, or Diamond Highlands National Park. This is a case where environmentalism and tourism mesh well and are mutually beneficial. Creating the park has turned Lençóis into an area supported by tourism, and it is because of tourism that they are able to protect the environment.
It was very interesting looking out the bus window at the Brazilian landscape. As we drove inland (west) to Lençóis the landscape became more and more desert like. It was very strange to see palm trees growing on the side of the mountains, just as you'd see evergreen trees in the northeast US or aspens in Colorado. Roy told us that these were dry land palms. The rainy season is just ending, so everything is very lush and green right now, but everything dries out in the dry season. The landscape around Lençóis looks a lot like New Mexico or Arizona, lots of cacti. One of our busses had an interesting trip, overheated at one point and then hit a vulture which busted their windshield which of course wasn't fixed for the remainder of the trip.
Our hotel was gorgeous. It sits on top of a beautiful waterfall and strives to be environmentally friendly and have friendly service. My room was gorgeous, it was actually 2 large rooms, the front room a sitting room with a couch and the other room the bedroom with a double bed. There was a foot bath in the bathroom next to the toilet and they provide clips for you to identify your towel so they don't waste water washing sheets and towels every day. I even had a balcony with a hammock which I spent many hours in reading and sleeping - heaven!
Lençóis is beautiful. Our first stop was really cool pools and rock slides formed from conglomerate rocks. The conglomerate was very smooth in some places where it had been worn down by the water. We were led on a little side trip over to some sand caves where you can find any color of sand but blue. These caves were all man made by the artists who come in looking for sand. They use the sand to make sand art in bottles, I bought a little tiny bottle as a souvenir. This area used to be a diamond mining area, but it's now protected and pretty much all of the diamonds are gone anyway.
After dinner I wandered around the cute little town on my own. The town is very safe unlike the cities we've docked in, so it was perfectly OK for me to be wandering around alone. This posh hotel with incredible 5 star meals and clean quiet town was drastically different that what SAS students in other parts of Brazil such as the Amazon were experiencing. In Lençóis even the water is drinkable, it's that clean.
Our second day in Lençóis we hiked up to a waterfall. I was hoping for a hardcore hike after being trapped on a ship for so long, but you don't exactly get that with a group of 80, even when we split up into smaller groups. I think I've been spoiled with some great hiking in my day because I thought it was all very cool and beautiful, but not breathtaking by any means. The desert landscape is something I'm not used to hiking in.
We had a 7 kilometer hike up to a waterfall which was our destination for the day, so I figured roundtrip we were looking at about an 8 1/2 mile hike. According to Roy, Lençóis is at about 1000 ft, and the high point in the park is about 5000 ft., so there's a decent amount of elevation change, about like hiking in the Whites, but I don't think our high point of the day could have been more than 3000 feet because it seemed like a very easy hike to me. Of course most of the people who signed up for his "strenuous hike" were drastically unprepared. I gave out an entire sheet of Moleskin and used up an entire roll of athletic tape fixing people's blisters. I for once didn't get blisters, it was a nice change.
Pedro our guide pointed out several little shanties built against the rock walls that miners lived in. One was just a big burned area where a couple of years ago a miner was killed when her shanty instantly went up in flames. Drinking is their biggest problem around Lençóis, so they thought that she probably fell asleep while drunk, maybe with a cigarette and the whole place went up in flames. Quite awhile up the trail a man has a little canopy area where he sells coconuts (for the coconut milk), water, beer, etc. He probably makes a killing, but he has to cart everything there on his head every day, and it's not a short hike when you're carrying that much heavy stuff.
It was a nice relaxing day boulder hopping and stopping in several swimming holes along the way. After lunch at the waterfall we turned around and hit a natural rock water slide. This thing was amazing. I've been on some fun water slides in New Hampshire, but this was unlike anything I'd ever seen. It was about 150 feet long, a single rock slide that ended in a large pool. We had to be pretty careful climbing up the wet rock, but there was a guide at the top helping us get in position. It was pretty fun, although water shot up my nose a few times. I only went down three times, but the last time one of the locals got behind me and gave me a running push start. The local guys were crazy, they went down standing up, sometimes going backwards, and dove off at the bottom. We were doing well just to stay on our butts.
Before getting into town, the guide took us to a Capoeira academy which wasn't in session right then, but would be later that evening. Capoeira is a very athletic martial arts dance developed by the slaves of Bahia. It is very common along the beaches or even in the squares in Bahia (especially Salvador) to see men balancing in side handstands and moving in ways that requires incredible strength. The guys who practice Capoeira are incredibly ripped. I wish I had captured some video of this art.
That evening I sat in my hammock and read and star gazed. I thought that I may have seen the Southern Cross for the first time, but after e-mailing Jimmy B. for some constellation guidance, I don't think the cross I saw was actually the Southern Cross.
We had a short drive the 3rd morning to a plateau called Morro do Pai Inácio where we had to hike about 15 minutes up from the bus to get to the top. It was at about 3500 ft. and had a great view of much of the plateau filled valley below. The top of the plateau was one of the coolest things I've seen. I felt like I was underwater. The water pitted rock looked like the ocean floor and there was a shelf that looked like a coral reef that a shark would be hiding under, but instead of sea plants there were cacti.
Rico had told me that Brazilian pizza was very good, so before we got on the bus for our 7 hour journey back, we tried some Lençóis pizza which had cactus and heart of palm on it. It was good! I also ordered mango juice which was literally a fresh squeezed mango in a pitcher, amazing!
I'm not sure if I talked about the favelas in Venezuela which are the little shantytowns, but Brazil has plenty of favelas of its own. These favelas are built sometimes on public land, but often on private land. Peasants who don't have enough money to buy land will move onto someone else's land and build a structure. If the farmers are not successful at keeping these squatters off their land in the first place, they'll never get them off. These structures start off as quickly built little things and gradually develop into permanent brick structures. Sometimes these houses will be built within 15 feet of the road between the road and the fence which marks off the private land. Favellas are all over Brazil, and we drove past several on our trip back to Salvador.
Since I hadn't had any money to souvenir shop in Venezuela, my goal for my final day in Brazil was shopping. Shopping in foreign countries to me is more about the process than the stuff I buy. I love bargaining! It's a fun game for me. My friend Beth doesn't like the process at all and offered me her first born to do the wheeling and dealing for her. I later found out that I got a hammock for almost a quarter of the price my friend Chris paid, and he though he'd gotten a good deal. These skills have been sharpened and refined throughout the journey. I met my match in China last week when I went to visit Kristi Lanier and Dave Pfleeger. Kristi and I made and excellent team and came to find out how incredibly high the markup is on some items. Kristi and I ended up getting a fan in China for 8% of the original asking price.
The Brazilian souvenir that I'm still wearing is two ribbons that were tied around my wrist and knotted 3 times. You're supposed to make a wish with each knot they tie, and then when the ribbons fall off (sometimes years later) your wishes come true. It's been over 2 months and my ribbons are looking pretty ratty, but they're still there, I'm hoping the threads give way soon!
I loved Brazil and would love to go back! I did feel like I was at a disadvantage not knowing Portuguese and my Spanish wasn't as useful as I'd hoped. Portuguese is a difficult language because words aren't pronounced how you'd think they'd be pronounced (based on a basic understanding of English and Spanish). R's are pronounced as H's and vowels and some consonant combinations are different depending on where they fall in a word. Then there's vowels with tildes over them, I still haven't totally figured out what to do with those.
When we left Brazil we had a new guest on our ship, Archbishop Desmond Tutu and his wife Leah. My next update will be about the incredibly inspiring Atlantic crossing with the Archbishop and his wife. Keep those e-mails coming. We have one more port and I'll be trying to send these updates more frequently on our Pacific crossing before arriving in San Diego Dec. 7.
Lots of love to you all,
Amy