Part Five: Brazil: As Close to the Sun as We Will Ever Get

(¯`v´¯)
`*.¸.*´
¸.•´¸.•*¨) ¸.•*¨)
(¸.•´ (¸.•´ .•´ ¸¸.•¨¯`•.


Last night at pre-port we got the you-know-what scared out of us. Brazil is apparently a terrifying place. The doctors told us about parasites like tapeworms and all other sorts of stuff that enters through your skin or that you get from drinking water. On top of that, the expert slipped up and said, “when you get help up at knife point – I mean IF you get held up!” Ill spare you the statistics. I woke up this morning to find myself yet again in a strange and unfamiliar place. Its summer here and hot and humid. The sky is gray and it looks like rain. Large groups of people are headed off to the airport for their trip to Rio.

Brazil is the only place in the world where the poor live above the rich. They live in Faveleas, which are communities built willy nilly into the hill sides. They have spectacular views, but going into them is literally like entering a war zone. I saw a few favelas this week. From a distance, they are gorgeous. They look like brightly colored doll houses stacked up above the river. Upon closer inspection, it is clear that they are the slums. The entrance to the community is heavily guarded and tours through them have been known to be held for ransom. Many houses are on stilts and look unstable; some houses are missing walls.

favela

Our first day in the city I took a 5-hour walking tour with a guy and girl from the ship that I didn’t know. We went to the street market and found a little park and saw some weird stuff like a guy cooking a fish the size of a pillowcase on a grill on the street. Apparently the group that went out on the jungle tour saw even weirder stuff. They ate bug larvae and swung from vines and also ate fried piranha on a stick. The heat turns 8 hours of energy into 4 hours pretty fast so I took a nap on the deck in the afternoon.

Dominica spoiled us. No one here speaks English. If you are lucky, you can go into a hotel and try your best to remember your Spanish. It’s such a helpless feeling to be standing there with someone and not be able to talk to them. I ordered a hot dog from a street vender and tried to communicate that I wanted it plain. It took a crazy long time and at the end of the exchange I got really weird looks from the vendor and I knew she was talking to her friend about me because they kept staring, but I had no idea what they were saying. Portuguese is close enough to Spanish to be annoyingly just out of reach, but at the same time, it won’t really get you anywhere.

lots of trash

I know of four separate people who were robbed in broad daylight our first day. Three of them had their cameras cut off their wrists and didn’t even notice. One girl just plain old had it pulled out of her hand. At night in the bars people were pulling hands out their pockets every 15 minutes and I kept getting the feeling as I was walking around downtown that I was being followed a little too closely. I kept stepping over to the side of road and letting people pass me. Its not just the men, the women go for pockets and bags just as often.

I went out in a riverboat on the Rio Negro (or the “Negro River” and I horrifyingly heard someone call it yesterday) at night to find alligators. They are actually camions, there are no alligators in the Amazon, but they look just like them. We took a motorboat way out into the darkness. There was no moon and the stars were spectacular.  From there we got into these little river boats that left us inches above the black water. We were so close to it that a fish actually flopped into the bottom of our boat. It was pretty big too, bigger than my water bottle. Our guide caught a camion with his bare hands and brought it to the center of the boat for us all to see. We each got to hold it, it was pretty calm and then they showed us their double eyelids, teeth, and how they fall asleep if turned upside down. It was a baby and we named it Steven. At first it was very cool but by the end of the night I was feeling so sorry for the animal that I didn’t want to be around it as it was passed around anymore. I kept thinking about what we had just learned in psych, that animals feel stress, and ours was just a baby.

me and an "alligator"

The next day was dolphin day. It was a three hour boat ride to place, which none of us knew, so it felt like it took a year to get there. When we did get there, we were so sketched out by the facility that I didn’t want to take my shoes off let alone get in the water. All it was was a floating dock with a shack on it and a bunch of shirtless Brazilians with buckets of dead fish. The water was crawling with bugs, including spiders, and all I could think about were the snakes that I know are in there too. Not to mention the water is black and when your legs go into it, you can’t see them. I’m proud to say that I did get in, which was the right choice because the experience was great. The dolphins are truly wild, they are attracted by the bloody fish that the guides dangle in the water. Unlike the dolphins from Nassau, these guys are hideous. They are pink and gray with fat heads and sharp noses and tiny, tiny eyes. We could feel them brushing by our legs and when they were jumping up to get the fish we could stroke them. They did a lot of thrashing around and were actually pretty scary. While we were in the water, the guides who spoke English thought it would be a good idea to tell us horror stories of the people who have had fish and worms enter their skin or swim inside them from this river. “Not to worry,” they told us, “it only happens about once a year.”

After our time in the water we got back in the boats and went to this nearby island community that just three weeks ago got electricity. It was “fixed up” by the Brazilian version of Extreme Makeover Home Edition and all of the houses were all freshly painted in bright colors. The population of the community: 40 persons. They had food prepared for us, some of the best fish I have ever eaten, and then we got a tour of the town. There was this adorable little girl that followed us around and some of us played with her while the others learned how to get rubber off of a rubber tree.

rio negro

The day after dolphin day I got lost going to the Opera House, which was worth seeing. It looks like it was taken out of France and plopped down in Manaus. The design on the inside was inspired by the Eiffel Tower. Our tour corresponded with a rehearsal so we got to see a bit of the show in progress. We had to put on these cloth booties over our shoes to walk on the floor of the display rooms. After the Opera, I took two dance classes: Brazilian Dance Fusion and African Tribal Dance. Both were great but the latter was the best. The woman who took us to the studio is going to be sailing with us to Ghana. She is excellent. She told us all about how dance is a necessary part of life and how every morning she wakes up happy just because she is alive. She has been to Haiti every three months since the earthquake to do dance with the children to help them cope. She studied dance as a survival mechanism and all throughout our classes she kept reminding us that it was supposed to be therapeutic. I wish I had more of the classes on tape. Parts of it are recorded, but not the best parts. My dance partner for Samba was a really attractive Brazilian man, but unfortunately I don’t think I have documentation of that. After dance I went out on a boat that a couple of SASers had rented for the night. It was essentially a house party on the boat but dancing was much more difficult because the boat was moving and slanted. Props to the girls in heels.

opera house

I’m not sure what I think of Brazil. I can definitely appreciate it for what it is, but I’m not sure I would want to come back. Its feels a little unsafe and its hotter and dirtier than any place I have ever seen. It has its own kind of beauty and I met a bunch of very nice people, but I didn’t really connect with it. Maybe it was the language barrier but I don’t think so. I enjoyed the time I spent out of the city the most, and by that I mean my time on the river. The dolphin experience was one of the wildest things I have ever done, getting in that water felt like enough thrill to last the whole trip and just breathing the air and knowing that it is coming from the trees of the rainforest, the lungs of the Earth, is wild in itself.