manaus 2012

Sailing north on the Atlantic for four days and west on the Amazon River for two, we eventually docked in the city of Manaus, the most populous area in northern Brazil. Most of us had no idea what to expect. Even the trip up the more than two-and-a-half million square mile Amazon was full of surprises, not the least of which were schools of pink dolphins.

Also, even though the river accounts for nearly one-fifth of the world’s total river flow and spans up to thirty miles across during the wet season--which this is not--we sailed close enough to shore to see it. I’m actually looking at land right now because we’re on our way back down the Amazon, out of the largest drainage basin in the world.

So let me just say, forget what you think you know about the Amazon River, jungles, rain forests, and yes, even piranhas, because what I learned these past few days is that most of what I thought about the above came from, can you believe it, films, including but certainly not limited to You Only Live Twice, The Jungle Book--yes, I know it takes place in India--and Fitzcarraldo.

I can definitely say that most people on the ship enjoyed the port of Manaus. I heard a lot of crazy stories, but most of them ended with, “Still, this was the best experience I had on the voyage.” In looking back over my photos--at this point, to create space by eliminating the blurry ones--I can easily recall where I took them, what the day was like, and how each experience felt: each hike, each view, each cloud, moon, star, wave, sunrise, sunset, person I met, street I explored. Even each push-up, each pull-up, each time I walked up or down the ship’s stairs. This trip, I’ve found, allows space for me to feel around in the moment for whatever the moment is going to be. I don’t have a single “best” experience here; I have a voyage full of them.

I said to someone last night, “I’m having an organic reflection.” What I meant was that while we have opportunities built into ship time, such as “post-port reflections” in which we’re consciously thinking about the trip, I’ve had an increasing number of moments lately when I think something along the lines of, “I appreciate this, I’m going to miss this, I’ve grown because of this, I look at this differently, I am more because of this.”

This entry isn’t a round-up, however, so let me get back to Manaus. I spent the first day in port walking around the city center, the area relatively near the dock. Manaus is fairly large--4,402 square miles--so it’s not like I covered all that much of it. In addition, it was hot. Not hot like the desert hot; hot like a tropical inferno hot. In other words, moist. Sticky also comes to mind. Staying hydrated involved replenishing not only hydrogen and oxygen in that magical combination known as water, but also glucose. Two fruit drinks got me through about four hours.

The city center was an area full of twists and turns, with a map that was grossly out of scale. Street vendors lined the sidewalks selling soaps, auto parts, watches, and of course, sunglasses. We watched as people boarded river boats, which get used as landlocked people use taxis, and stood amazed as a line of men tossed watermelon after gigantic watermelon from a truck into a market. We passed other men carrying at least a hundred pounds of bananas on their backs. These were not football players either. Unlike in northern Europe, I didn’t feel like the shortest person out there.

Watermelons and bananas are common enough in the U.S., but there were other fruits in the Amazon that were new flavors in my mouth, at least in so pure a form, fruits such as açaí (ah-sigh-EE), guaraná (gwer-ah-NAH), and cupuaçú (cuh-pooh-ah-SUE). All great flavors, all really good for you.

That night, a large group of us went to the 700-seat Amazonas Opera House to hear the house band, aka the Amazonas Philharmonic Orchestra. The theater was built between 1884 and 1896, during the rubber boom, a time that was great for rubber barons and unsurprisingly bad for the indigenous people forced to work on the plantations. We learned more about this on a later trip in Manaus, where we got to see and feel the latex sap harvested from a rubber tree. These trees can reach 100 feet in the wild, so I think the little ol’ ant would have some problems moving it, no matter how high his hopes.

Like the ant, the town had high hopes for the theater. In addition to its 198 Italian chandeliers, its European bricks and French glass, the opera house features a roof decorated with 36,000 painted ceramic tiles, which the mayor promised to replace with gold. The continued profits from the rubber boom, however, went bust not long after Englishman Henry Wickham smuggled seeds back to the Royal Botanic Gardens, where they germinated. Nevertheless, the roof of the opera house is quite stunning as is. The concert was amazing, too, definitely worthy of the standing ovation we gave the orchestra and conductor at the end.

The next day, I was ready for a trip to the town of Presidente Figueiredo, about two hours north of Manaus. We began at Cachoeira do Santurário, where our guide somehow spotted a small brown frog--yes, I got to hold a frog in the Amazon!--and we hiked to a waterfall. A bunch of us jumped in and swam right up to it. Obviously, this waterfall had nothing on the huge Iguazú Falls, part of which is also in Brazil, but the current was strong enough that I had to work to keep myself underneath it.

Thanks to Ali Guglielmi for taking the shot of me under the waterfall!

After the falls, we walked into caves and hiked through water that was almost up to our knees.

After the caves, we had an amazing lunch at a local restaurant and then went zip-lining over a river. It was my first time on a zip line and one of the students told me how to flip myself upside down, which more or less, I did.

The guy below was charged with stopping us before we zip-lined onto shore. It looks much tamer on his side. Going the other way, the guy usually wound up jumping into the water to jerk the rope when our leg-dragging seemed like it wasn’t going to stop us in time to avoid a spectacular crash into a wooden dock. Everyone made it just fine and we then took a swim in the river, drank coconut juice, and ate açaí ice cream before taking a nice, wet, air-conditioned bus ride back to Manaus.

The next day, we’d thankfully planned a more mellow adventure: the Meeting of the Waters, an almost four-mile section where two rivers—the Rio Negro and the Rio Solimões (Sah-lee-MOJS), which is what the Amazon River is called at this point—run side by side without mixing, a phenomenon that occurs because at 1.2 mph, the Rio Negro runs half as slowly and at 82 °F is 10° warmer than the Rio Solimões.

Boarding a river boat, we headed down the Amazon, a sight in itself. Along the way, we got to see palafitas, houses built on stilts to accommodate the water level rising drastically during the wet season.

Fortunately, we didn’t have to stop at one of these, which may look like just another boat but is actually a floating gas station. There were a number of these on the river.

Our next stop was Terra Nova, a very small fishing village and rubber plantation, where we saw a rubber tree leaking its sap-like latex, the primary source of natural rubber. We also got to watch a demonstration of the transformation to rubber, and when our guide threw the vase-like object--which one of the students, Jean Ouye, is holding--to the ground, we were all surprised when, instead of shattering, it bounced!

The village also depended on visitors buying locally made crafts. Our group gladly purchased a lot, although blow darts, knives, and mounted piranas are not on the list of items that pass security on the ship. Students in other groups learned this the hard way: the ship’s crew incinerated many a blow dart and fish head before we left the port.

This does, however, give me a perfect opportunity to dispel the myth about piranhas. Locals swim in areas teeming with piranhas. No one gets eaten; no one even gets bit. If you’ve got a large gash, made by say, a slippery machéte, then yeah, maybe you want to stay out of the water, but for the most part, it’s live and let live. For the most part. I didn’t need to test it out, believe me.

After all this, the morning still wasn’t over. We took a hike to see some giant lily pads and I got to hold a baby sloth, which I can only hope was returned soon after to his mother. As soon as I reached for him, he turned right into me and held on for all he was worth. He screamed when I had to pull him away. It was heart-wrenching, actually, and days later, I still think about this little sloth, who moved, sure enough, so slow I could have floated across the river on a lily pad before he completed a head turn.

Finally, here are some other honest-to-goodness real Amazon crawling and flying things.

As we close in on the Atlantic, we’ll exit the 50-mile wide mouth of the river and enter a 150-mile wide estuary that’ll put us back into the ocean and on course for the island of Dominica (Doh-men-EE-kah). Final port before the United States. Really? Already?! I’m sure I’ll have more to say then. Meanwhile, as usual, I’ll let the sun, clouds, ocean, and another flying creature do the talking.

Yes, I really was this close to an albatross.

rio de janeiro 2012

Wow, Rio. Even though the city is immortalized in numerous songs, I had no idea what to expect. They’d primed us with warnings about the danger, but when we pulled into port, I thought, this is going to be good.

That doesn’t discount my surprise at our ship being buzzed by a police helicopter as we were being tugged into port.

One of our business professors, Sergio Carvalho, is a native Brazilian. He shared so much about the Cidade Maravilhosa known as Rio de Janeiro, his first order of business being that the translation of maravilhosa (marvelous) does little to capture the heart of Rio, a city full of people who practice the sort of flexibility known throughout the country as jeitinho brasileiro.

Rio de Janeiro mostly faces south and was built up along the Baía de Guanabara, the inlet where our ship was tugged into port. You enter Rio near the mountainous slice of land known as Pão de Açúcar (Sugarloaf Mountain), which is located at the Guanabara Bay on a peninsula that leads into the Atlantic Ocean. The name derives from the 16th-century Portuguese notion that the mountain resembled the blocks of sugar placed into conical clay molds for trading.

We got off the ship fairly early and hopped a cab for Ipanema, where we walked around a Sunday arts and crafts fair known as the Hippie Market. Along with artists’ booths, there were a couple dessert vendors. I tried something that resembled an incredibly dense cupcake that I later found out was called--I think--queijadinha, prepared from grated coconut, sweetened condensed milk, sugar, butter, egg yolks, and possibly cheese. Sergio told us he preferred quindim, a custard served as an upturned cup that contains some of the same ingredients, but I was more than content with my selection. Fortunately, I was traveling in the company of the ship’s doctor in case my arteries seized up.

As if the dessert hadn’t been enough, we stopped for lunch at Vinícius, where I decided it’d be a good idea to try the Brazilian specialty, popular on Sundays, known as feijoada, essentially a stew of black beans, pork, and beef served with side dishes. I won’t get into all the salted and smoked pork parts I found in the clay pot in which it was baked because that’d be an appetite suppressant. My side dishes included a shot, which was apparently too strong for anyone at the table to drink, an orange, and a pot of the hottest pepper sauce I’ve had since South Africa, as well as rice, collard greens, pork rinds, and roasted cassava flour. It was actually delicious. I even made a decent dent in it, but when all was said and done, our table gave away about half our food to a table of friends who had just sat down behind us and who, in spite of all warnings, ordered full meals and appetizers themselves. Good luck, guys!

What else would one do after a heavy meal but go to the beach, of course. Most of you probably know the famous bossa nova song, “The Girl From Ipanema.” Well, according to Sergio, that woman is still living in Rio and though much older now, still walks the beach. It’s possible we saw her. The beach was packed, and as I walked with my feet in the surprisingly cold water, I thought, I get it. I understand why Ipanema and Copacabana get star-billing in so many songs.

In addition to being known for its beaches, Brazil is of course, known for futebol, or soccer, as we call it. They also engage in a sport known as beach football, which is a lot like beach volleyball except you don’t use your hands. Seriously! It was inspiring to watch and perhaps explains all the World Cup appearances by the Brazilian soccer team.

Our next stop was Sugarloaf Mountain, which rises 1,299 feet above sea level and is composed of granite and quartz. It takes two cable cars to reach the summit. The first cable car, or bondinho, takes you to the top of Morro da Urca, where you can walk around before boarding the second car to Sugarloaf Mountain. Each car holds about 60 people. I tried to stand near the window so I could have a great view of the city below.

You also couldn’t forget to look up because off to one side, you could clearly see the 130-foot Cristo Redentor (Christ the Redeemer) statue, located atop Corcovado Mountain. Although less than half as tall as New York’s Statue of Liberty, it’s high enough to be seen for miles on a clear day or night.

This was our destination the following morning. We took a van as high as we could up Corcovado Mountain and then walked the two hundred or so steps to the top, where tourists were doing their best imitation of the statue as friends and family took photos, oftentimes with the photographer lying full out on the ground. How more people don’t get trampled up there is beyond me.

We spent the morning at the statue and then we got dropped off in the town of Santa Teresa, a great community of artists and others who actively seem to mourn the loss of their tram, which until an accident in August 2011, brought business to the community. We had a great lunch at Sobrenatural and then dessert and coffee at Cafecite, just up the road.

We decided to walk to our next destination, which was the Escadaria Selarón, the world-famous steps by the Chilean artist Jorge Selarón, who began renovating the old stairway in 1999. At first, he covered the 250 step risers with blue, yellow, and green tiles, the colors of the Brazilian flag. The Escadaria Selarón straddles the Santa Teresa and Lapa districts of Rio and now contains over 2,000 tiles from more than 60 countries. The artist was at the steps during our visit. He still considers them a work-in-progress and he didn’t seem to mind people climbing all over his art. Find me on the red “steps” below.

We kept walking toward the ship, and downtown, we found the São Sebastião Metropolitan Cathedral, a behemoth structure that shoots its conical form 246 feet in the air. With an internal diameter of 315 feet and rectilinear stained glass windows standing 210 feet, it holds around 20,000 people and is the seat of the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of Rio.

On our last day in Rio de Janeiro, we toured Tijuca Forest, a 12.4 square-mile hand-planted rainforest in the middle of the city. By the mid-1800s, the original forest had been nearly destroyed to make room for coffee plantations. Major Manuel Gomes Archer set out to change that, replanting the forest to safeguard the water supply for the city of Rio. Below is a statue dedicated to the workers who did the replanting.

Our guides had a much different day planned for us than weather allowed. Igor tried to point out the various sites of Rio, which we’d have seen on a clear day from this helipad. Apparently, Christ the Redeemer is behind us in the distance somewhere. I was going to have to take his word for it.

Rain in the rainforest, however, was an amazing experience, in spite of the lack of visible animal life and panoramic vistas.

The Tijuca Forest is home to around 2,000 species of plants, 600 species of animals, and 1,000 species of insects, one of which you can see below. I found it at the Vista Chinesa overlook, a gazebo resembling a pagoda, where our group stopped to eat our boxed lunches.

As you can see, our view continued to be obscured by the fog that ate the city.

Meanwhile, we were treated to a brilliant sky the following night.

As an aside, one of our guides told us that the main difference between the Tijuca Forest and the rainforest of the Amazon is that the latter is flat, lacking hills or mountains. We’re headed there next. It’ll take six days on the Atlantic and two days up the Amazon River, and then we’ll be in the Brazilian city of Manaus. Catch up with you then!