Albert visits Salvador

Albert (and Bethany) came to visit for my third week in Salvador. It was a working week: I ended up having three meetings and making multiple phone calls. The exhaustion of mono has passed. Meanwhile, Bethany had plenty of work on her own, and we had joint work to take care of. We have to apply for a mortgage, which requires gathering together every scrap of paper demonstrating that I indeed have money. We're in escrow on a house at 78 Raleigh Street, Rochester, NY, where we'll move after I come back to the States in August.

Above is a photo of Albert in front of the Lacerda Elevator, one of the famous postcard images of the city. Below is yet another photo in the series of views out my window. Like the view of Sugar Loaf and Guanabara Bay out of our apartment window in Rio, it never gets old. (My landlord stopped by the evening after Bethany left and guided me down the hall to show off the even more impressive view out the window of his larger apartment.)



We had a Monday lunch with the Vieiras down in Barra, and a later visit to Nosso Senhor do Bonfim Church and the delicious Sorveteria de Ribeira with Válmore driving. New slang Bahian expression: "O Pa' I!", a contraction of "Ohla Para Isso!" or "Look at that!" I could go into the nuances of where and when it should be used, but I'm still learning. I don't have many chances to use it in my relatively formal uses of Portuguese.

I have come to love and hate Salvador. I love Salvador because it's among my first experiences in Brazil and it's where I was made to feel like a member of the Vieiras' family. (Side note: They did an awesome job of making Bethany, despite her limited Portuguese, feel very welcome. We showed them pictures of the house in Rochester. And yes, as a side note, it's true that Bethany has done 99% of the work and I get to become a homeowner by default. I'm a lazy bum.)

But my dislike for Salvador grows every day. I don't mean for the people or the cuisine or the music or the sights. Those are all fantastic, warm, delicious, and welcoming. Instead, I severely dislike the city's layout and public transportation. Salvador is approximately the size and population of Los Angeles. It's enormous. The airport is thirty kilometers from the city center. The traffic is awful and getting worse.

However, while Los Angeles is more or less a grid or collection of grids, Salvador is a collection of loops and winding roads. To get to my doctor's visit yesterday, for example, I waited twenty minutes for a bus going to the main bus station and shopping mall, Iguatemi. I then took another bus down Av. Antônio Carlos Magalhães, which doubles back after it splits into Av. Juracy Magalhães Júnior (no relation, actually a political adversary of ACM). The bus ride home involved another twenty minute wait, two false starts of climbing onto a bus and asking if it passed Comércio and being told that it didn't, and sixty minutes in traffic. Perhaps I'm just in a bad spot for taking the bus. (Note: the touristy areas from Campo Grande to Barra to Rio Vermelho would be worse places.) A professor I met recommended that I live in Pituba, closer to the high-rises on Av. ACM and Av. Tancredo Neves. She has a point, but those local bus lines are even more confusing. (I got on a bus marked T. Neves to come and meet her office off Av. Tancredo Neves. It turned out, at the end of the bus ride, that Tancredo Neves is also a neighborhood. I took another bus and arrived late, after walking from Iguatemi.)

In short, I allow myself more or less 90 minutes to get to any work-related function in the city. And sometimes I still have to hop off the bus and flag a taxi.

The time wouldn't be extraordinary, except that it's consistently above 30 degrees and humid, and when the bus is stuck in traffic on a narrow avenue (I refer to Av. Heitor Dias in Sete Portas on the way to Av. Paralela as "Engarrafamento Avenue" - "engarrafamento" is the Portuguese term for traffic congestion, which literally translates to "bottling up"), I just have to lean forward in my seat and let the sweat and sunblock drip onto the floor so too much doesn't stain my shirt before an interview.

So, again, I love Bahians. And I hate whoever planned this city - which is no one; the city wasn't planned - with a passion. Salvador is very much like Los Angeles in that it's probably not a bad town if you have your own car, and an almost-impossible town if you have to take public transportation everywhere. (Finally, the taxi companies colluding and lobbying to guarantee that there's only one air-conditioned public bus to the airport, operating on an unreliable schedule every thirty minutes or hour, can burn in hell. Maybe hell for the taxi company owners - described here as in Rio as "mafiosos" - can spend eternity waiting in the sun and heat for a bus and fearing that they'll miss their flight.)

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Enough complaining.


On Saturday, after a week of afternoon rains that ruined chances at beach excursions, Albert, Bethany, and I headed off to Praia do Forte. It's a (quite touristy) beach town about ninety minutes by bus outside of Salvador. The sand and beach were nice, and the opportunity to swim (pretty much the first sustained physical exercise I've done since my mono diagnosis) were lovely. The ocean floor was sharp and rocky, however, and I scraped two of my toes when coming back into town.




The visit was a good break from Salvador and life in the Pelourinho. (I live right on the Praça da Sé, which has its ups and downs.) We had a chance to walk around the little town, and found the rarest of holy places on the main street: a Mexican restaurant. Of course we ate there, and it wasn't as disappointing as I had expected. Mexican food is hard to find here, despite the fact that the only ingredients that need to be added to rearrange mainstream Brazilian cuisine into Mexican cuisine are tortillas and avocados.

Praia do Forte is home to two interesting sites, of which we only saw one. We didn't get to see the ruins of the castle of Garcia d'Avila, a Portuguese settler granted an enormous land grant by the Crown in the 17th century. We did get to see the Tamar Project, which is an environmental group dedicated to repopulating sea turtles ("tartarugas marinhas") off the Brazilian coast.

Sea turles are fantastic.





As depicted, they had live turtles living in tanks, surrounded by educational materials about the turtles' lives, the project to save them, and tips on sealife preservation. I recommend Praia do Forte for the Tamar Project alone.

Tamar has other locations along the coastline. It involves local families, usually those led by fishermen, in turtle preservation and new economiic activities that help protect turtle ecosystems. The project claims to monitor about 1,000 km of coastline, which is quite impressive.

There was other sea life in the tanks, but it was most interesting to wait for a turtle to surface and breathe.




We made sure to buy lots of merchandise on our way out, to support Tamar.

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Albert and Bethany left on Monday. After they left, I made one call and received another, both of which declined to schedule interviews this week. It's Semana Santa, with Easter on Monday. Tomorrow is Holy Thursday. I'm instead working and planning for the next stage of the trip.

I have a plane ticket for a flight to Belém do Pará on Monday afternoon. (In an either foolhardy or brilliant move, I scheduled a layover in Guarulhos Airport in hopes of getting a São Paulo area code SIM card for use later in the project. We're now scheduled to visit São Paulo in late June and July, and it would help move things along if I could secure a SP phone number ahead of time. We'll see how successful this idea is.)

It's going to be six weeks on the road. I take "on the road" to mean living in hotel rooms, without all my luggage and without my printer-scanner. I've scheduled two weeks each in the capital cities of Belém, Pará, São Luis, Maranhão, and Fortaleza, Ceará. This will be the longest "on the road" period of the entire year, and we'll see how it goes.

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Oh, and my opinion of the Brazilian press fell a little lower. I was in the checkout line at the supermarket yesterday, and all three national weekly newsmagazines - Veja, Isto É, and Época - had dramatic front-page covers about the verdict in the Isabella Nardoni Case. Veja even had to write on the cover: "Condemned. Now Isabella can rest in peace."

The case is the equivalent of the Laci and Scott Peterson case in the US. A father and stepmother were convicted of dropping their five-year-old girl out the window of their high-rise apartment in São Paulo. They claimed that she accidentally fell. The event was tragic and gruesome, and the press coverage was overwhelming and nauseating. Only the public access station had the sense to wonder aloud why the press had instantly condemned the couple, and whether public opinion had been driven too far against them for a fair trial. (There was also an explanation of how jury trials, of which this was one, are conducted.) The rest of the press behaved as Nancy Grace, a loathsome human being, would have acted. If you want to know every gruesome detail of the crime, every speculation on motives, and every horrible description for the convicted, even before they were convicted, they're not hard to find.

Really, this didn't need to be a cover story. But I guess it moves sales. Had one of the three big weeklies tried to differentiate themselves with a different cover, I would have purchased it out of gratitude. Blech.

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.