Passing back around: Cuiabá, MT

I'm back in Cuiabá, a city I have previously described as "ugly" where "aesthetics are not necessarily a high priority." I stand by that assessment.

I'm back to see if I can't conduct follow-up interviews and round out my knowledge of these cases. So far, I've been only mildly successful. At this point in the trip, however, I'm satisfied with mild success.

It has been cooler here than it was during my last visit. That time in Cuiabá was probably the hottest visit "on the road," second only to the time around Christmas in Rio when it hit the low 40s. Cooler weather, which failed to last until Friday and won't endure through the weekend, can't disguise the fact that this is still not a pretty city.

That being said, the people are wonderful. I regret that I didn't get in touch with more of them, but my time here is limited. (Thursday was also Corpus Christi, which meant that many people have taken a four-day weekend.)

In any case, I encountered two notable sights.

First, I went running, and found my way up to a track open to the public but maintained by the Brazilian Army, and to Parque Mãe Bonifácia, a shaded park with a few kilometers of running paths. These two great running destinations are only about two hundred meters from each other, in the same neighborhood. I have to run one kilometer to get there.

On my way to and from the park, however, I noticed the following street sign:



This choice of colors strikes me as incredibly poor. Sure, the pale green is the official green color of Cuiabá, "the Green City." In my mind, however, they could not have picked a worse contrast, or have cluttered up the street sign more. I have no idea how drivers at night are supposed to read this at any speed. The use of white-on-blue and big names for streets in Fortaleza (and supposedly São Paulo) is a much better idea.

Oh, and that's the town symbol, with a touch of soccer ball because this will be a host city for the 2014 World Cup.

Second, I'm staying at the same hotel as I did previously. The neighborhood is changing slightly. The motorcycle shop across the street went out of business, and it looks like the car rental place next door is going to follow. But it's not all bad news. Down the hill, a boxing gym has opened.



This gym is only noteworthy in that the name is a transliteration of the English word "knock-out," as it would be spelled by a Portuguese speaker. Literally, one would say the word "knock-out-chee," with the stress placed on the last syllable varying according to where in the Lusophone world you happened to be. The word "blacaute" is used similarly for power outages.

It made me smile.

In two weeks and a few days, se Deus quiser ("God willing"), I'll be in São Paulo, home of the Museum of the Portuguese Language. I can't wait.

The Minarets: Cuiabá, Mato Grosso

In honor of my cousin in the Australian Army who's on a mission peacekeeping in an Islamic country for the first time, I present the minarets of Cuiabá. This town has a lot of radio towers, cell phone towers, electricity towers, and towers. I attribute these numbers to the remoteness of the city and the size of the state. There are 141 municipalities in the state, spread from Amazonian jungle to Pantanal swamp to dry sandy cerrado. The capital lies roughly in the middle of it all. I guess that cell phone towers are there to relay calls from pretty remote locations. (The latest Brazilian air accident was an Air Force plane that went down northwest of here. The survivors were rescued after a native tribe alerted officials in their bi-monthly meeting with government officials. That's pretty remote.)








The last photo contains a view of the Verdão (the Big Green), the stadium that will host matches in the 2014 World Cup. There are stickers plastered all over town celebrating the arrival of the tournament to Cuiabá; there are also graffiti saying things such as "Cup = trash" or "Cup out" or "A Cup for whom?"

I can summarize my thoughts about Cuiabá in with a contrast. It is not a lovely town. It has alternated between extreme heat and uncomfortable humidity. However, the people have been wonderful, warm, open, and friendly. Despite their kindness, I'm glad to be going home to Rio de Janeiro soon.

Aesthetics don't seem to be a high matogrossense priority. Below are photos of City Hall and the Municipal Cathedral. Judge for yourself.




I don't mean to suggest that there aren't flourishes of beauty to be found. In front of City Hall is the ambition of numerous Americans: a Ten Commandments plaque! Long ago, I was shocked to notice graffiti on public monuments, specifically on the statue in front of the Congress in Buenos Aires. This phenomenon is not limited to Argentina. (The oddest graffiti below reads "Thou Shalt Not Burn Alligators.")



There's also a bust of Marechal Rondon, an intrepid explorer who was the first to string telegraph lines across the cerrado (predecessors to the radio towers) and discover the sources of numerous rivers. His life is pretty amazing, and it's justified that the nearby (even more remote) state of Rondônia is named for him.



The town is walkable, but is hillier and more hot and humid than was Campo Grande. I took two weekend walks in search of food and happened upon two of the three main shopping malls in town. This was very fortunate, because malls have three key items: food courts, air conditioning, and drinking fountains. (New lesson: when out walking, always carry an empty water bottle. It saves money and is refreshing. Also, note that airports also have those amenities.) I could sit in a food court and read without being bothered. On Sunday, I went to the mall, armed with a camera – because I was eventually going to a museum, but it was going to be closed for lunch hours – found a bookstore, found the politics section, located some books I wanted to read, found some pieces of paper in the form of deposit envelopes at a nearby Banco do Brasil ATM, and sat down to read, take notes, and photograph relevant pages for entry later. Isn’t that how everyone spends their weekend?

I later visited the third shopping mall, Shopping Pantanal, because it's right across the street from the state government/administration complex. It's the best of the three; it even has an H. Stern outlet. I spent yesterday there, after my morning interview, reading a book written by the former state Secretary of Finance and preparing for my afternoon interview. The afternoon interview was a fiasco; no one at the Secretary of Infrastructure’s office knew anyone who would be prepared to talk with me. I left empty-handed.

It was not all work and no play. I did eventually reach the zoo on Sunday afternoon. The museum was closed. The zoo’s located at the federal university in town and admission is free. (The ice cream vendors out front, however, had many, many sales.) Brazilian families and I walked freely around the complex, and the animals behaved exactly according to expectations: in the hot Mato Grosso sun, they lounged in the shade and tried to sleep.

I’ll just dump a bunch of animal photos on here. There’s no order to them. One is of a capybara up close. There are some birds. There was a concrete dinosaur, and a monkey banging a nut against concrete to break it open. Oh, and the colorful parrots are native. Always remember that Brazil has an incomprehensible amount of biodiversity.












The last picture was taken especially for Bethany.

In all, an okay town. I certainly wouldn't vacation here. I think Campo Grande is a better entry point to the Pantanal than is Cuiabá. Cuiabá is closer to the national park in Chapada. The zoo and the malls are better here; the food and weather in Campo Grande were more to my taste.

A final note: both towns have the same taste for ice cream. There seem to be ice cream shops (sorveterias) on every corner, and with good reason. As the following billboard illustrates, intense heat is best addressed via soft serve:


"Thirty years refreshing the Mato Grosso heat."

I'll be back in Rio de Janeiro in 48 hours. Thank goodness.

Halloween 2009: Parque Nacional Chapada dos Guimarães, Mato Grosso

I should begin by noting that I'm currently in Mato Grosso, a state to the north of Mato Grosso do Sul. (Well, obviously, Adam. It's in the title.) The two states were previously unified as Mato Grosso, and before that were part of the Province of São Paulo. Two people have mentioned to me that the capital of the Province of São Paulo was moved from its first and present location to Cuiabá for at least a short while in the colonial period.

My thoughts on the state capital Cuiabá will follow. For now, a bit of tourism.

Recall that I arrived in Campo Grande on a Sunday and confirmed that Monday was a holiday. Cuiabá had to top that: my first Friday was Public Servants' Day, which closed all schools and government offices, and this Monday is Day of the Deceased (which follows All Saints' Day). So we're in the midst of a four-day weekend, and the city is closed. 15% of my weekdays have been holidays during this trip. Dammit.

I tried unsuccessfully all week to reserve a hotel room in Chapada dos Guimarães, a small town about an hour from the capital. Despite my failure, I resolved to make a day trip to the National Park, and was confirmed for a group excursion on Friday afternoon. I was told to show up at 9 AM, which meant getting to the bus station in time to buy a ticket for a 7:30 AM bus.

Either stupid me, or malandros Brazilians. Getting to the bus station on time meant skipping the hotel breakfast and eating something I will probably regret at the terminal cafe. It meant losing sleep, hustling down the hill, and arriving at the tour office at 9:01 AM. I was the first one. We left after everyone else took their sweet time, stopped at the ATM, went fruit shopping at the market, stood around chatting, at 11 AM. I should know better by now.

No matter. I joined a group that comprised four paulistas (people from São Paulo) who largely kept to themselves, two friends, Sérgio from Belo Horizonte and Leyde from Cuiabá who used to live in Minas Gerais, and Faisal the guide, a Portuguese and literature teacher from the local high school who guides on the weekends and also runs a campsite in town. (It understates the problem to say that public school teachers are not paid well in this country.)

We set out for the Caverna Aroe Jari, the longest cave in the country at 1.2 km.

This was my first introduction to the Brazilian cerrado.

Brasília lies in that direction, about 850 km away.





The region is a massive mesa that is bordered by the Atlantic Forest to the east, the Amazon Basin to the north, and the Pantanal to the west. On some maps, it's termed the Mato Grosso Plateau. The most remarkable features are short, stubby, fire-resistant trees. A lot of the cerrado is currently being cleared, or has been cleared, to plant three crops: wheat (milho), cotton (algodão) and soybeans (soja).

The sheer vastness and harshness of the cerrado impressed me. (New trivia point: Brazil has more land area than does the continental United States. This is a big region smack in the middle.) There are multiple river systems throughout, but many are seasonal and distant from one another. In the area immediately surrounding Chapada, some rivers flow south, into the Pantanal and eventually into the River Plate Estuary near Buenos Aires. Other rivers, not five kilometers away, flow north and eventually end up in the Amazon Estuary near Belem.

There are forests, but they aren't shady, and the underbrush is thick. When the first bandeirantes (Brazilian explorers from the southeast in search of gold and Indians to enslave) pushed through into the interior, the going must have been extremely difficult. Teddy Roosevelt explored this region at the beginning of the twentieth century, after his presidency, and cut years off of his life. Even with modern conveniences, it's not the most comfortable area. (Or maybe I'm soft and spoiled.) We traveled with leather shin guards to protect our calves against the spiny, sharp, or stubborn brush that lined the trail.





Faisal remarked that Chapada dos Guimarães is not named after a Guimarães family or person, but is instead named after the city in Portugal. No one lived here when the name was chosen. You see, we're west of the Treaty of Tordesillas line. This should have been Spanish territory. However, bandeirantes representing the Portuguese crown, in order to establish a series of claims, ran around hastily giving everything in the territory Portuguese place-names.

We did explore the cave, and a nearby crystal blue pool, but the pictures from both aren't very good. It was very dark, as caves are wont to be. They were both cool with slight breezes, which was refreshing. Here are three of the best photos:







Last, we stopped at a nearby natural waterfall with an artificially-created swimming hole. No one seemed to mind that, in my rush out the door in the morning, I had forgotten to pack a bathing suit and had to swim in boxers instead. The water was cold, which was a welcome refreshment despite the onset of a thunder storm.

I was offered a ride back to Cuiabá with Leyde and Sérgio, and gladly accepted. We dropped Faisal the guide off at his house after a stop at a storied ice cream parlor (new fruit: buriti), and made our way back. It was another "huh" moment; speeding through the dark with two Brazilian strangers. They are very nice people.

Before we left, however, we stopped at the geodesic center of South America, which is perched on the edge of the mesa with a view over the valley below and toward the Cuiabá skyline. The point is equidistant from the extreme east and west, and north and south, limits of the South American continent. I presume that this measure excludes Panama. I now have a new answer to what's in the middle of South America.

I'll conclude with a photo of myself from the Geodesic Center, because I was raised with the idea that landscape pictures without people are dull. If I had included myself before, I would have left out all of the weird natural details.





Hope everyone had a scary Princeton Parents' Weekend.

"O que acontece?"

"Brazilian coffee - It's more delicious!" I can't deny or confirm this; the coffee is pretty good, but I don't normally drink coffee and thus can't make a comparison. Sadly, the photo I took left out the exclamation point. Also note that this ad is on the outside wall of a public school. I don't know why.

So this is my final day in Campo Grande; I'm leaving tonight for an overnight bus ride to Cuiabá. I don't have profound thoughts about Campo Grande. I largely enjoyed my time here, and the people were wonderful, though it was harder than my time in Porto Alegre. I felt a bit more lonely, bored, and depressed at times than I was in the South. It's harder to go out and see things and experience a city when the sun is blazing hot and the city is so spread out. (Although the city is walkable and easy to navigate, it's at least a one-kilometer walk to the nearest decent restaurant. That trip - down the same streets, past the same stores, under the hot sun - gets tiresome after a while.) Oh, and my stomach was a little upset for a few stretches of time.

Would I recommend someone visit here? If you're en route to the Pantanal or to Bonito, or overland to Paraguay or Bolivia, yes, of course. (I find our proximity to Bolivia strangely fascinating, given that, in my mind and memories, La Paz and Lake Titicaca are in another world entirely. Trivia point for the next time you're on Jeopardy: the only two South American countries that do not border Brazil are Ecuador and Chile.)

The expected temperature in Cuiabá tomorrow is a high of 37 degrees. That's pretty hot, especially without an ocean breeze, at only 15 degrees, 35 minutes from the equator. I have to adapt by learning to wake up early, get my tasks accomplished, and be content with spending the afternoon inside in the air conditioning. I've learned that behavior in Campo Grande; now I just have to live by it.

This morning, I retraced a route I ran yesterday evening. The street photos below are an attempt to give a sense of what Campo Grande looks like, and why I made the observation that it seems more Latin American than Brazilian. It's an attractive city in a certain sense, but I'll leave that certain sense to each of your particular tastes.

These views look east down Rua ("Street") Dom Aquino, toward the center of the city. This is my hotel's neighborhood, Amambaí.






As noted before, this city is the jumping-off point for the Pantanal. And if your city has one main attraction, and that attraction is spectacular, by all means you should play it up. So they did.

While running yesterday, I heard and then saw another blue and gold macaw. It was not as large as the ones below. It did, however, sound like a human. I thought someone had shouted at me, and turned to see the macaw in flight. She hadn't spoken in English or Portuguese, but the sound of her squawk certainly recalled a macaw or parrot's mimicry of human voices.

It was nowhere as large as these are.







Unfortunately, I don't have a photo of the phone booths that are encased in large parrots. Someone else has photos here. I do have a photo of an animal-pomorphisized trash can, from Indigenous Nations Park:



Some spare thoughts:

1. The title of the post is Portuguese for "Then what happens?" Almost all my interviewees have used it as a rhetorical device. I think there were one or two exceptions. You can hear Faustão (Big Fausto, host of a Sunday variety show for the last twenty years) use the expression here about thirty seconds in. He then goes on to discuss his recent weight-loss surgery. I don't mind the phrase; I just find it charming. I do get mildly annoyed at people asking "entendiu?" ("did you understand?") at the end of every sentence, but I stifle my annoyance.

2. Cuiabá will be one of twelve sites that host games in the 2014 World Cup in Brazil. Campo Grande will be left out. This is a sore point here; some of the campograndenses have mentioned it without prompting. I replied that I felt their pain, but that I have no influence over FIFA or CBF decisions.

3. Today marks the beginning of antimalarial pills! Hooray! My run yesterday went toward the airport, past the air force base and the general hospital. As I approached the airport, the roadside trenches filled with water grew larger and larger. I decided to turn around early; I had no idea what type of (possibly-dengue-carrying) mosquitoes waited on the surface and would take flight in the quickly-falling dusk.


So tonight I take a ride out of this bus terminal, for the first overnight bus ride in Latin America since my trips in 2005. (My description of bus rides can be found halfway down here and here.) Lonely Planet describes the area thus: "The bus station in Campo Grande is an eyesore, rife with prostitutes and shady characters" (426). Yeah, my hotel is there, and I walked past this station daily to get into the center of town. As they also note: "Most budget accommodations are clustered around the bus terminal, but this is a seedy area with no shortage of small-time crooks and prostitutes" (426).

Judge for yourself. (Prostitutes most likely not pictured.)





Then there's this sign on the south side of the building (find it in the above photo!), which I found amusing.



The sign reads "This structure was the number one shopping center in Campo Grande and it was the postcard [image] of Mato Grosso do Sul." I don't know whether this is a protest, a boast, a lament, or just an observation. It certainly makes good use of the past tense.

In the city's defense, they're building a brand new bus terminal elsewhere, which is set to open in about one month. (In typical style, they already held the inauguration ceremony months ago, when the station was not yet operable. This same series of events happened with the Siqueira Campos metro station in Copacabana, Rio.)

Two more weeks until I return to Rio.

Lost in the Center-West: Campo Grande, MS

It has been a mildly frustrating week, in that calls weren't promptly returned and it looked as if I was going to be stuck only interviewing myself in the mirror, at best. Things have turned around since, and I have a healthy schedule next week.

It is hot. Oh my, is it hot. I imagine what this is what summer in Texas feels like: hot, dusty, occasional lightning storms, then hot again. There are breezes, but they're coming straight off the Chaco. I think they both help evaporate the sweat from my forehead, and heat me up to produce more sweat. I've walked to two interviews so far, and arrived a little sweaty. Nothing too bad. We'll see if that changes.

I now understand why I put so much effort into buying synthetic fabrics and breathable clothes. Good planning, and thanks mom! After the new year, I'm moving progressively closer to the equator, as spring turns to summer. It's not going to get colder. Consider this a first exposure to interviewing-while-sweaty. (I've been informed that Cuiabá, the next stop on the trip, is on average two or three degrees Celsius hotter than here in Campo Grande.)

I saw the following sign on my walk today and had a "We're not in Kansas anymore" moment. In one direction, civilization and the biggest city in the hemisphere. In the other, well, the road goes on.



I took the advice of an interview subject I previously met in May in Rio, and planned to leave "bem cedinho" ("very early") to walk to the Parque das Nações Indígenas, the largest enclosed urban park in Brazil. (This designation probably excludes the Floresta da Tijuca in Rio for being a) a national park and b) not completely enclosed by Rio's urban areas.)

Early, it turns out, has a different meaning here. The sun rises around 5:15 AM, and by the time I left after breakfast at 6:45 AM, the sun was at about 20 degrees in the sky, and it was hot. I was also walking eastbound, trying to snatch all the shade I could. Campo Grande could use more shade.

My mission was to photograph capybaras, the largest rodents in the world, who don't like the mid-day heat and only come out of the water from the late evening to the early morning. As I walked and baked, I understood this habit. I also started planning when I would have to come back; surely there wouldn't be any capybaras left when I arrived (6 km and an hour later).

But no; success!

An elderly couple paused their run - by an odd set of circumstances, I was the only one in the park not running or in a running outfit; weird, right? - to tell me that there was a capybara family on the other side of the bridge. And there they were.

I don't know how they fight off predators. They look like large, juicy, stubby-legged morsels to me. They're like warthogs without tusks, or beavers without tails.







There was also a juvenile capybara, who scampered away from the pack and into the sun to get his Kodak moment.



And birds, including two that made a sound akin to the whirring sounds that old CPUs, back in the days when a 486 machine was faster than a 386 machine, used to make. Two bright blue-and-yellow macaws flew out of a tree alongside me, but I wasn't fast enough with the camera.




I thought of the excursion and park as a poor man's visit to the Pantanal. To the west of here is a giant swamp/grassland, which contains some ridiculous amount of biodiversity and is great for sightseeing. I won't see it on this trip, and I'm still only toying with the idea of an excursion to Bonito, an ecotourism destination in which abundant lime deposits in the soil make the water crystal clear and host a number of beautiful, exotic fish. Still to be determined.

More park below. I thought, "oh, it would be nice to live alongside the park here, and go running on the many paths and see capybaras!" Then I remembered that there are many other nice places in Brazil where I'd rather live, most of which have beaches. Still, parabens (congratulations), Campo Grande.






In other news:

1. There is a large Japanese immigrant community here, mainly from Okinawa and the north of Japan. (They mostly arrived at the beginning of the 20th century.) A large central market about one kilometer away offers soba and yakisoba, which is a refreshing change from the typical Brazilian rice-and-beans-per-kilo-or-buffet places. I went there for dinner last night, and may go again for lunch today. That means I can probably have sushi tonight - there are sushi joints that are less pricey than the places in Rio.

The central market - Feira Central de Campo Grande - also has a faux-Asiatown entrance and stores with every knick-knack you could find on Canal Street.

2. The Brasil-Venezuela game played here in Campo Grande was hard to watch. It was almost as awful as Argentina-Peru the previous week. So much disorganization, so many missed chances. I looked into buying tickets, but they started at R$115. I passed, and watched it on the hotel TV alongside yelling Brazilians.

3. Brazil also lost to Ghana in the final of the Under-20 World Cup yesterday. I pass the TV every time I enter and leave the hotel lobby, and I can usually hear it from my room. There is almost always football on TV here; it just never stops. On Thursday, lacking a live game, Globo instead re-broadcast the US - Costa Rica match from Wednesday.