The Blaus - South America and Europe

8 do Julho - Manaus, Belem, Sao Luis (BRAZIL)

We were quite anxious to see Brazil beyond the Amazon region after our boat cruise. When we set foot in Manaus, the capital of the Brazilian Amazonas State, at 5am we went directly to a travel agent and planned to wait patiently for the office to open to inquire about flights. We didn´t think that we could bear to get back on another cargo boat to complete the journey to the mouth of the Amazon River. We´d had a sleepless night and were looking to kill some time and muster some energy that morning, so we splurged on a buffet breakfast at a Best Western Hotel in Manaus. This was our first meal off of the cargo boat and it was our introduction to Brazil´s cafe de manha (breakfast). Generally every hotel provides a buffet breakfast for its guests, and this important meal-of-the-day includes things like cakes, juice, eggs, breads, fruits, ham, cheese, coffee, cereal, yogurt, milk, etc. (and is always included in the price of a room no matter how budget the hotel or hostel is). At home we would have thought of the Best Western as basic accomodation, but after being on a cargo ship for almost a week, the Best Western in Manaus seemed like a 5 star hotel to grubby traveler´s eyes. We ate a gigantic breakfast there while waiting for the travel agent´s office to open at 8am.

When we met with a travel agent we were able to book reasonable flights to Belem and we were relieved that we could travel the next leg of our trip by air. There was a small detail that we didn´t notice about our flight, which we discovered the following day at the airport. Our flight was scheduled for 3am that night instead of 3pm the next day, so when we showed up at the airport at 1pm the following day, we were informed that we had missed our flight by 12 hours. We were very disappointed to learn that we would have to pay extra to take a later flight and we would be stuck in Manaus for another couple of days. Our first hard lessons about Brazil taught us that everything is in military time, flights do leave at all hours of the night, and Portuguese is not an easy language (even if you think you know Spanish pretty well).

Yes, Brazilians talk funny. Oi bom dia means good morning in Portuguese, and it sounds nothing like it is written. Oi bom dia is about the only thing we can understand or say in Portuguese, so it makes sense that we might confuse an important detail like a flight time. We´re still not accustomed to speaking in Spanish and being responded to in Portuguese. We hope that conversing here will get easier after a few Caipirinhas (a strong Brazilian cocktail made with lime juice, sugar, and sugar cane alcohol)...we´ll give that a try and report back.

So, we missed our flight, but this turn of events seemed to be quite fortuitous for us in the end. Over the next few days in Manaus we happened to meet a fellow San Franciscan who had just traveled from Sao Luis to Belem by bus, and he had some very useful information about that leg of his trip. We were planning to travel that same route by bus going from Belem to Sao Luis (the opposite direction) in a few days. Sam recounted the story of his bus ride and begged us not to take an overnight bus, so that we could avoid a similar fate. He said that the road was full of potholes and slowed down almost to a stop very often, and at one of these occasions three men jumped on the bus with guns and robbed all the passengers at gunpoint. No one was hurt, but all valuables and cash were taken from the passengers. This was scary news, and we were glad to have met Sam to glean a piece of timely advice from him. The funny thing is that we thought Colombia would be the most dangerous place to travel, but we have heard more stories like these about Brazil than about any other South American country. It is a strange paradox, because Brazil is the most prosperous of all South American countries. Sao Paulo (the 3rd largest city in the world) is the financial capital of the entire continent. To give you a better idea of just how prosperous it is, a Brazilian economist that we met in Jericoacoara told us that Sao Paulo´s financial standing compares to that of California.

With a few days to kill in Manaus before our next flight, we did our best to avoid the heat of the days (Manaus is the hottest city in Brazil) and wandered around the historic center at night. We mentioned how strange it was to pull into the port of this city after seeing little more than huts along the Amazon for 5 days, but it was even more bizarre to see women strutting around in high heels, modern skyscrapers, and a sophisticated cultural and social environment here in the middle of the Amazon.

Our journey to Sao Luis began at 1am with a trip to the airport to catch our 3am flight. We arrived in Belem just in time to get on a 15 hour bus to Sao Luis. This was the longest day in the history of our travels so far. The road to Sao Luis was very poor (exactly as Sam had described), but we had no trouble with hijackers, and we were too tired to worry about it anyway. We were more concerned with the price of our bus ticket, which was astronomically high compared to what we have paid for bus travel in every other country here. We spent hours just staring out the window of the bus at the landscape outside, which was tropical jungle green dotted with bright colored houses with bicycles parked outside. When we finally arrived in Sao Luis, we were all too happy to get into bed and catch up on sleep after a marathon journey.

Sao Luis is a very quaint French colonial town that was once a center of the slave trade in Brazil, so it is rich in African culture. We will try to paint a picture of the town. Imagine a French colonial style building tiled and painted in bright colors. Beautiful porcelain tiles from around the world adorn the buildings here, which were once cleverly used as a building material to keep houses cooler inside. An Afro-Brazilian man rides by on a mule-drawn cart carrying palm fronds to the Reviver section of town (the colonial center that is half crumbling and half restored) where tonight there will be a public festa (party) for the dance festival called Bumba-Meu-Boi. There are music and dance performances every night beginning in mid-June through July in Sao Luis for this festival. We really enjoyed Sao Luis, even though we only had two days there.

In Sao Luis we met two guys from New Zealand and a girl from Denmark that we traveled with to Jericoacoara...these guys were heaps of laughs. They told us that New Zealand rugby players drink their shots the following way--they squirt a lime in their eye, snort the salt, then they down the liquor to kill the pain. Point taken...Kiwi rugby players are tougher than American football players. When we first met Grant (one of the cave guiding Kiwis) he told us that he once had to defend his reasons for traveling to an older American guy who presumed that he was a spoiled kid on a parent-sponsored trip around the world. Grant explained that he was `investing in himself` by traveling on a budget in foreign places...this is part of his education about the world. Later when we were making the 4 hour journey to Jericoacoara in the back of a pick-up truck with 26 other people, we asked him if this was all part of his investment plan.

A few initial observations about Brazilians...they have a very healthy obsession with cold beverages and loud music. Brazilians have shown us how to drink beer at an acceptable temperature, and we are convinced that the rest of the world will eventually catch on. Now when we talk about measurements of cold, we say Brazilian cold to define the freezing point. Brazilians love their hand signals. We have happily adopted the thumbs up signal to communicate that everything is good (ta bom) and the hand to mouth gesture to signify eating. We may not speak a word of Portuguese, but we are becoming adept at Brazilian sign language.

posted by The Blaus @ 12:36 PM