Inscrever-se, no jeito do gringo (Sign-up the Gringo Way)

How to register (like a gringo) for a running event:

1. Google "corrida Fortaleza" and find out that there's a run in Fortaleza on my first weekend there.
2. Find out that one has to register by going to a local Farmácia Pague Menos ("Pay Less Pharmacy"), the main title sponsor for the race.
3. Go to the Pague Menos on Av. Nazaré in Belém. Show ad to lady behind the counter. No one has any idea how registration works. Leave defeated.
4. The next day, go to the Pague Menos at the Praça Batista Campos in Belém. Show ad to guy behind the counter named David. David takes your name, says he'll investigate, promises to call you back.
5. Three days later, go back to same Pague Menos and ask for David. Find out that he doesn't work again until after you leave Belém. No one else knows anything about the race. Leave discouraged.
6. Go to the Pague Menos on Av. Jerônimo de Albuquerque in São Luís. Again, no one has any idea about the event.
7. Go to Pague Menos on Av. Castelo Branco in São Luís. Again, no one knows what to do.
8. Send an email to marketing[at]paguemenos.com.br asking if there are alternatives for registration. Email bounces back, undelivered (in Google's words, refused).
9. Call the 0800 Consumer Service number for Pague Menos. Explain that no one at these stores knows what to do. Attendant asks which one, and promises to email the Av. Castelo Branco location with instructions.
10. Go back to the Av. Castelo Branco location, where people instantly light up when you pull out the entry form. Receive attentive service, leave, registered and thrilled.

This sequence is a good parable to describe my current work/life. It's often full of frustrations, but the rewards are good. Friday, I went back to the bus station looking for the umbrella transport organization, which has an address there. No one seemed to be familiar with the group, including the state employees charged with bus inspections. I was only looking for another phone number to keep the chase alive. The number listed on their website went to a residential number. (I called. I then apologized.) Oh well.

Here's a picture of an attractive street scene in Belém.



Another week in São Luís (big beach, historical center) and a Friday midnight flight to Fortaleza.

UPDATE: I should have looked below. I already shared that photo. My apologies. Here's a photo of a really nice nearby building that really looks like it should be a hotel. It is not a hotel. It is not a convention center, a museum, or a restaurant. I'll leave its function to your imagination. (I was both surprised and disappointed when I found out.) Answer in a forthcoming post.

Thank Goodness for the Rain: Belém, Pará

My memories of agreeable little Belém would be far different had it not rained (which is to say, fell in a downpour) every single day. The rain usually came around mid-day, lasted anywhere from an hour to six hours, and did a great job of clearing out the morning heat. Of course it brought afternoon humidity, but nothing worse than what one might experience in other parts of Brazil. The cooler air and the shade provided by mango trees made walking around Belem a pleasure.

Side note: the mango trees were planted by the city father many years ago. Although they provide excellent shady sidewalks - and apparently Manaus does not have the same - the trees have the bad habit of producing and dropping fruit. These heavy (not always ripe) mangoes often fall on cars, denting car bodies and cracking windshields. Use caution when parking in Belém.

There’s little of excitement to report. I started running again, and made a course out of going down to the docks, up to Ver-o-Peso, and back to the Praça Batista Campos for a few laps. There’s a 10km run in Fortaleza when I arrive, sponsored by the Pague Menos line of drug stores. I’m motivated for it, but I’ve now been to four different Pague Menos locations and no one seems to know how to register me. (And no, it can’t be done online. To my consteration.)

On Saturday, I had a chance to walk down to Belém’s Old City, which is colorful



Bustling (this is Ver-o-Peso, so-named because the Crown would weigh goods shipped from the interior and the Amazon in order to collect the royal ten percent duty)



And sometimes fragrant.



The history is that the Portuguese built a fort here in 1616 to protect their interests further up the Amazon River. I’m not entirely clear on how that was supposed to work. The Amazon delta is enormous, and it has multiple islands behind which one could slip by undetected. Perhaps the settlement at Belém was designed to prevent any permanent settlement upriver. It seems plausible that the French couldn’t plant (and supply and maintain) an Amazonian city without eventually being discovered by the crew at Belém.

In any case, the last above photo is taken from the Fishermans’ Wharf area around Ver-o-Peso, pictured below. This area stands between Ver-o-Peso and the fort; the latter was a nice place, but didn’t seem to warrant the price of admission.








Oh, and in case you’re wondering, I haven’t really changed. Below, I’m standing in front of the Casa das Onze Janelas, or the House of Eleven Windows. It’s a former mansion-turned military hospital-turned chic art gallery and pricey restaurant.



In selecting among museums, I went straight for the Pará State History Museum. It reminded me of the state history museum in Santa Catarina (oh, 1,800 miles away or so). In both cases, the state history museum is the old governor’s mansion, with plaques and exhibits on the development and uses of the mansion, but with very little actual state history. I was disappointed, but the nice guard let me (the only guest at the time) break the no-photographs rule if I took pictures without my flash. Below is the entrance staircase, with various marbles imported from Italy.




I should say that another example of this museum-as-old-fancy-residence genre is the Imperial Palace in Petrópolis, RJ, which is very worthwhile.

I had planned to take more photos and continue my walk, but the camera’s battery decided that it was finished for the day. On Sunday, I did go by the Teatro da Paz, in the Praça da República nearby my hotel, and I got a final photo of my favorite example of belle epoque architecture in Belém. (Quick history: Belém in the turn-of-the-century grew rich off a boom in the demand for rubber tires, which was limited to one worldwide supply in the Amazon. The city prospered, and rich rubber barons built elaborate homes in a town that came to be known as “the tropical Paris.” It all ended when an Englishman smuggled a rubber tree sapling out of Brazil and to Southeast Asia, to be planted far from the plant’s natural enemies/predators. Leeson of the story: never trust the English.





Pará is also recently famous as the site of most of that factoid I always heard growing up: one football field worth of rainforest was being destroyed every 10 minutes or so. Pará is home to the greatest extent of rainforest desmatamento (Portuguese for deforestation).

So I wasn’t surpised to look up and see this NGO was in town.



I’m now in São Luís, Maranhão, after a 16-hour bus ride. It was supposed to be a 12-hour bus ride. The bus broke down and we had to take a detour because the main road was flooded. I’m very secure in my decision to fly on to Fortaleza now, and not bother with the 20-hour bus ride.

More about São Luís soon. In short, as I had expected, it’s very much a little Salvador.

Buffalo in the Amazon Basin: Ilha de Marajó, Pará

Leaving Salvador, mono, lethargy, and Easter behind, I arrived in Belém late Monday night. My plan to connect through São Paulo and thereby pick up a Vivo SIM Card with the Sáo Paulo area code (11) failed. TAM Airlines's computer system crashed nationwide, which made all planes late and shortened my connection time. And Guarulhos terminals are still, well, Guarulhos terminals. They have a pub, a magazine shop, a duty-free shop, and that's about it. (Guarulhos, for the uninitiated, is the busiest airport in the country, located in an adjacent suburb of São Paulo. The city has another domestic-only airport - the second-busiest in the country - in the south end of the megacity.)

So I arrived in Belém at 2 AM on Tuesday, and paid through the nose (R$90) for an okay hotel with a wireless connection only in the lobby and a generous breakfast spread.

I'm as far north as I'll be for the entire trip. Belém sits at about 1 degree of latitude south of the equator.

It was a low-quality first week, in terms of work. Due to the Easter holiday, my letter requests for interviews hadn't arrived and so peole didn~t expect me to call. I ended up sending multiple follow-up emails, which set back the days in which I could make requests. My late arrival didn't help.

Despite the work troubles, I've been quite taken with Belém. It's my kinda town. There are trees along the sidewalk for shade, a grid-like layout (though not as straight and orderly as Campo Grande), public plazas and parks, and enough compactness to put most sites - both touristy and work-related - in walking distance. Were Belém in the US, it would receive a high walkability score.

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I decided to use my first weekend in town to, er, leave town. Belém sits on the southern part of the Amazon River delta. The delta (drainage basin) is immense. It's difficult to overstate just how much fresh water is coming out of the rainforest.

Anyway, in the middle of the Basin is the Ilha (Island) of Marajó, the largest littoral island in the world, and a landmass approximately the size of Switzerland. The island's main attractions are water buffalo, their meat and cheese, and isolated beaches. (Belém, a city with a working port, has no beaches and some not insubstantial water pollution.)

So I arrived at the River Terminal early at 6 AM on Saturday to catch the 6:30 AM ferry to Camará. I had three objectives for the weekend: see buffalo, eat buffalo, and go swimming.

The ferry ride took three hours and was pretty boring. You can see the sights below. I left my computer and all books back in luggage storage in Belém, and thus had nothing to entertain me. Well, that's not entirely accurate. My phone has Sudoku puzzles as its only free game. I don't really see the attraction of Sudoku. I play it when I'm waiting in line for things like vaccinations and grocery check-out. It's a pretty formulaic, repetitive game.


Early morning crew in Belém


The Belém skyline behind us.


The view of the riverbank, once we left Belém, looked pretty similar.


At certain points, there were no islands to pass and nothing but fresh river water to the horizon.


Our ferry boat line, going the other way. The blue tarps keep out the intense sun.

Two days before I left, I had an interview with a former Secretary of Transport, who proposed that one could get rich (and should get rich) building a hovercraft/hydrofoil factory in Brazil. Most rivers are large, but not all of them are navigable. The river depth varies, preventing the movement of large (cargo) ships. My interviewee has been part of a group that's trying to dredge the rivers and thus create a northern outlet for the crops of the Center-West (read: soy, wheat, and cotton from Mato Grosso). If they could manage to move cargo ships from the interior through Belém - and the rivers do extend that far - they could drastically cut costs. Belém is far closer to US, European, and Asian markets than are the ports of São Paulo and Paraná.

He didn't really know much about the environmental impacts of such a project. He probably thought they were exaggerated.

In any case, we arrived in Camará on the island about 10 AM, and were herded loudly onto buses going to various destinations. I was headed to Salvaterra, the middle city (only three cities are open to independent tourists; most of the island's interior is preserve or swamp) with stingray-free beaches and a few hotel options.

It's unfair to say that Salvaterra is a one-horse town. There were multiple horses. And multiple buffalo. And multiple really hideous black birds.




One of the horses. And note the ongoing football game behind him.




After arrival, I took a walk to find Praia Grande, the beach of some note and the place, according to Lonely Planet, where one could eat lunch cheaply. (The buffet at my hotel looked rather unappetizing, sitting there for a while in the heat.) I did find the beach, and found some buffalo cooling themselves in the confluence of a small creek and the (fresh water) bay (pictured above).

For lunch, I ordered buffalo carne asada. It came with rice, beans, farofa, buttered spaghetti, and mayonnaise-based potato salad. My hypothesis is that fresh fruit and vegetables (besides mangoes) are costly to import from the mainland, thus the dearth of them. My later visit to the town supermarket, which lacked a produce section, supported this hypothesis. Lunch was, unfortunately, pretty bad. The buffalo was close to carne de sol, and so was pretty salty. The rice, beans, and farofa were standard, but I didn't take a second bite of the spaghetti or the potato salad.

However, it was reasonably priced for a touristy place. It's also not the first time I've ordered a dish meant for two while eating alone.

On the walk back to the hotel, I passed the same buffalo grazing just off the beachfront road. I hoped they would stay there while I went to retrieve my camera.

Of course they did not. I had to wander down the long beach to take pictures from afar. I won't say that they're disappointing, because they can't choose their appearance or species. I will say that they look (and pretty much taste) like cattle.


The aforementioned ugly birds.







I did get a chance to go swimming in the fresh water. The river washes down, as you can imagine, tons of debris from the rainforest. Not all of it rots or is consumed before it reaches the ocean. As a result, a swimmer moving through the water will encounter seeds, leaves, twigs, and even large branches floating on the surface. I have a splinter in my right index finger from my attempt to throw a rough piece of wood out of my way.

The water is also choppy in the afternoon, when the wind picks up. It was much more tranquil when I went swimming the next morning.

I ordered a veggie pizza (with very thinly-sliced vegetables) for dinner and had a vegetarian prato feito (beans, rice, vinagrette, and farofa) for lunch the next day. The hotel breakfast was fruit-less, which is a first for me in Brazil.


An attempt at still life.




"The years you have seen only one set of footprints, my child, is when there was a water buffalo."

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In the end, however, despite the bad food and the fact that there was nothing much to do, I accomplished all my goals. I most likely won't go back to the island, except perhaps as part of a pampered package tour or if I happen to be stationed in Belém for an extended period of time and want to swim.

I can, however, say that I went swimming in the delta/basin/mouth of the Amazon, which is something.

No, there were no piranhas.

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I`m back in Belém for another week, and my luck in getting interviewees has (slightly) turned. I might have a chance to see more tourist sites here in Belém, and I've found a cheaper hotel.

Next Monday, I have an overnight bus trip to São Luís, the capital of the neighboring (corrupt, underdeveloped) state of Maranhão. I've already had two email responses from Maranhão to my letters, which portends good things.

So it goes. Or, as the Portuguese version of Kurt Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse-Five translates that phrase, "Coisas da vida" or "E assim por diante."

Follow-up: Sea Turtles

As noted in the previous post, sea turtles are fantastic. The TAMAR Project gets its name from the Portuguese words for sea turtle: TArtaruga MARinha. There are five species that visit Brazil and are protected.