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.

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.

Being the Adventures of Albertus Pinguinus Lacinus

Bethany came to visit for a few days, and for a few days I didn't have to feel so alone or stay quiet. (Bethany is a good listener. I had many, many things to share.)

We split our time between Curitiba and Florianópolis, which warrants a longer post to come. Thanksgiving was in Florianópolis with Chris, a friend from Rio - who now lives in Porto Alegre but is moving northward soon - and at a local bar for chicken, beans, rice, salad, and farofa.

For now, some pictures of Albert, the intrepid world traveler. For example, here's Albert in Defence Colony, Delhi, India. Albert is Bethany's companion for the moments that I'm not around. He was born in a toy store on College Avenue in Berkeley back in 2007, though how he got there from the Antarctica has never been fully explained.

In Curitiba, Albert accompanied us on a visit to the Oscar Neiermeyer Museum, which is named for and was built by the famous architect. I had passed the museum earlier on a trip to interview the head of the state sanitation company board, who has a fantastic office in a ritzy neighborhood that reminds one of Torrance, CA. We took the same bus route, transferring for free through a system of tube-shaped stations. The focus of the museum is contemporary art, but it didn't appear when we got there that the exhibitions warranted the entry fee. It was much more interesting to watch the crowds of college kids, families, teenagers, couples, dog walkers, and tightrope walkers that lounged around the museum on a quiet Sunday afternoon.





The Museum closed at six, but the sun is now setting much later this far South, so we walked back through the Centro Cívico, which is a pleasant part of town. We stopped to walk through the Passeio Público, which houses a zoo-in-miniature. This public zoo, located in the center of town with free admission and cool shade, is one of the luxuries that the city of Curitiba offers its residents. There is another, larger, zoo somewhere else in town.

However, recalling Hobbes's advice to Calvin that one might as well visit a prison after visiting a zoo, we had an angry penguin on our hands.

Albert and I know why the caged bird sings.


The pigeons and cranes that flew freely about the park did seem to taunt the caged exotic parrots and toucans.

The next day we visited the Jardim Botânico (Botanical Garden) of the city, which was nice but lacked two things: better labeling for the plants, and more shade. It was a warm, sunny day, and the sun wearied us. The plant names were given in Portuguese with their Latin names below, but neither were very helpful for understanding more about the plants. At the Passeio Público, the signs for the birds listed what they ate (e.g., seeds, fruits, leaves, small animals) and had a darkened area on a map describing where they could be found. The Jardim Botânico would do better to add something like this. It is a lovely space, capped by a greenhouse that seems to be a symbol of the city. (An interviewee has corrected my assertion that the greenhouse is the symbol of the city; the stately columned facade of the Federal University is the symbol of Curitiba.)

In any case, Albert posed in front of the greenhouse.



The next day, we left for Florianópolis, a town of 700,000 that is the capital of the state of Santa Catarina. Santa Catarina (SC) is wedged between the breadbasket state of Paraná (PR) and the southernmost, cattle-raising state of Rio Grande do Sul (RS). It features the most luscious coastline this side of Rio de Janeiro.

The state and city also have a history of settlement by German, Italian, and Eastern European immigrants, which is reflected in local architecture. On Thanksgiving Day, we all took turns sitting on the steps of the metropolitan cathedral. Identifying various influences on the cathedral is left as an exercise for the reader.





We stayed in Florianópolis until Saturday, and returned to Curitiba for Bethany's flight out. After a few relaxing days of sun, sand, and relaxation, we both have to return to work. Albert asked for a last photo with Curitiba's fascinating and fun tube bus stations, which are located at multiple points around town. The tube system and the interconnection of bus lines around five central trunk lines were the pioneering work of urbanist Jaime Lerner when he was mayor here. I hope to interview him this week about his two terms as governor. See him talk about urban design and Curitiba here (in English).

Albert is depicted here with the bus tube at the airport, right before he caught his flight to São Paulo, Houston, and finally San Francisco as a stowaway in Bethany's luggage. Traveling as a stowaway comes with a qualified endorsement; the space is tight but the price can't be beat.




Postscript: Photos of Albert at the cathedral were taken exactly two years after he was denied entry to the Taj Mahal.

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.