Trip to Brasil - Photos | Itinerary & Memories
Hello friends and family!
So I'm just back from Brazil and waiting for a bus to Madison in O'Hare
- though I don't imagine I'll finish this before it leaves.
Truthfully, I'm writing mainly to keep my composure after just leaving
Danielle:
S-A-U-D-A-D-E-S. In short, the trip was fantastic!
The rough outline for the trip was two 'working' weeks in Belem - the capital of the state of Para' (with two weekend trips) and two weeks of vacation/travel with a rough itinerary of Foz do Iguaçú, Salvador, Morro de Sao Paulo, Salvador, Recife, Porto de Galinhas, Rio de Janeiro. The trip started and ended on a new moon with a beautiful full moon in Salvador (and a more spectacular one in Morro de S.P.). I haven't counted the rolls yet, but there are about 10-15 rolls of film in my bag. I'll try to get them developed, scanned, and up on the web.
Simultaneously building up to a full-blown day-by-day account of what we did and offering an abbriged account thereof, let me summarize the two chunks of time.
In Belem, Danielle showed me around where she lives, introduced me to some friends (most notably, her roommate Luciano), took me dancing, introduced me to a lot of wacky eating experiences, and showed me Imazon , the institute where she works. At Imazon, she introduced me to her advisor Carlos and showed me her work identifying logging roads in the Amazon basin. We spent some time on that and made some progress culminating in the 'Quasi-local Hough Transform' - how 'bout that for a name? I spent about half time on my particle physics research using my little laptop (named Beija-flor which is Portuguese for Hummingbird). The first little trip we took was to the island of Marajo' in the middle of the mouth of the Amazon. The river is so wide there you can't see the other side! We took a 2 hour boat ride out of Belem, an hour cab ride on dirt roads, a 45 min flat-bottomed boat ride to finally arrive at a little 'fazenda' (farm) with no power other than a generator and the water buffalo. That trip was the most genuine taste of the interior of Brasil, it's flora and fauna, and life in the third world. It was there I spent my 24th birthday dancing Brega and Carimbo' under a sky overflowing with stars from pole to pole and splashed with the milky way.
On July 2nd Danielle and I took off for two weeks of travel. The first stop was the magnificent waterfall Iguacu - imagine five Niagra Falls linked together - at the border of Brasil, Argentina, and Paraguay. Next we traveled to Salvador do Bahia, the birthplace of capoeira and the arrival point for most of the slaves taken to Brasil. We stayed in the old town called Pelorino (literally "whipping post"). Pelorino busseled with live music, capoeira classes, church ceremonies, samba schools, drum vendors, and anything else loud and Brasilian. The colors of the buildings were as varied as the cobblestones in the roads and the schemes to get money from the tourists. Supposidly, there is a church for every day of the year in Salvador, though the most prominent religion appeared to be Candoble (a blend of the saints of catholicism with the gods and ceremonies of the Yoruba people). Next, we spent a couple days on the car-free islands of Morro de São Paulo. No shoes for three days, sun, and beach will do wonders for your soul! Then it was off to Recife (which means 'reef' in Portuguese) for a night in the old town Olinda (literally "Oh! Beautiful") and three days in Porto de Galinhas (literally "Port of the Chickens" where slaves were smuggled in ships pretending to have only chickens as cargo). More beach, a little bit of surf, and a lot of sun - what a hard life! On Danielle's birthday we left for Rio de Janeiro. We took a full day biking around the city and seeing where Danielle lived a couple years ago. We walked the beaches of Copacabana, Arpoador, Ipanema, Lagoa. That night we took a gondola to the top of Pão de Acucar (known as Sugerloaf, that crazy looking rock/mountain jetting up out of the sea across the way from the big statue of Christ) and had a spectacular sunset and watched the city light up. The last day we spent on the beach before a heart wrenching good bye at the airport. That was yesterday.
The trip was really fantastic. It was somewhere between tourism and living there. Danielle knows Brasil well and already knew of good places to stay, restaurants, regional cuisine, and things to see. She is also fluent in Portuguese - everyone we asked for help asked "Brasilara?" (Are you Brasilian?). The trip seemed very genuine, very unfiltered view of what Brasil is like, though we were certainly tourists. To tell you the rest about the time, I'll resort to brainstorming and photographs which will go up on my web page as soon as I can get them there.
Love,
Kyle