Living in the Ruins

We arrived in Manaus well after midnight. I will not bore anybody by discussing why the plane was late. GOL Airlines seems worth avoiding as well. We were met at the airport by some German man — I am not sure I ever heard his name — who drove us to the hotel in a car that fairly reeked of cigarette smoke. But back to the Quality Inn. 

If you are traveling to Brazil for business or pleasure, I have only a few words of sage advice to give. One is to avoid the Quality Inn in Manaus. Or at least avoid room 401. The air-conditioner was placed directly opposite the bed and I froze under the flimsy sheet that was the old bed clothing provided. 

Completely sleep deprived, we had a wake up call at 7:00 for a 7:30 pick up. We slurped some coffee before we were put in a van by some man who looked like one of Santa’s Brazilian elves. They took us to to the Tropical Hotel, a large resort complex a little out of town. By this time it was raining quite hard. We waited a while for the rain to let up, and then more or less raced with our luggage to the boat moored to a sandy beach.

We were crammed pretty tight on the boat. It began to pour again as the boat left the shore, and the two members of the crew put down the thick plastic shade on both sides of the craft. As it rained harder and harder, they were forced to put down the cover in the front as well, This left the boatman completely unable to see where he was going. The woman in front of me put on her life jacket; perhaps she should have pulled out a rosary, too. Periodically the crew would open the shade slightly and try to figure out where they were and if they were headed in the right direction. 

Somehow, owing to either sheer luck or the intercession of the Blessed Mother, we actually made it to our destination, the Ariaú Towers Hotel. It was not quite as wonderful as it looked online. 

As it continued to pour, we raced up a rickety flight of stairs grasping our luggage. The hotel is actually a cluster of several “towers”, all on stilts, connected with elevated walkways. Almost all the towers looked like they were about to fall down, and the walkways looked just about as solid as the buildings.

We somehow made it to the reception desk where we had to fill out the usual amount of paperwork. It had some interesting decor

and views of the complex and the surrounding rain forest. 

Once the rain had begun to subside a bit, we looked around while we waited for our room. There was kind of a bar area

But mostly what we noticed were the monkeys everywhere! They were on the floors, on their railings, 

and sometimes on your shoulder.

Some of the mothers carried their babies.

Can you say, “Aww?” We certainly did for a few minutes. After that, we began to see just how aggressive these creatures were and how dangerous it was to try to walk around with any food. 

When we checked in, I asked for a room upgrade. They had Globo, their best little house available, and I decided that if it was going to rain like this for three days — and this is the rainy season — I would much prefer to be up in a tree house with lots of windows and a wraparound deck. In the picture below, you can see it nestled up high in the tree top above the silver roof.

Globo was not available right away, so we stuck our stuff in one of the regular rooms while we had lunch and went off on our first expedition.

Our first trip was to see a local settlement. Our guide was named Francisco. He spoke quite good English and seemed quite knowledgeable. On our way to catch our “motorized canoe,” he pointed out a tree with bark that looked vaguely like a sycamore with with a fruit that looked vaguely like a lime.

This was a rubber tree, and for a time it was the foundation of the entire economy of Brazil. Today only the fruit has any value, used by local fishermen for bait. This was our “canoe.” We boarded on one of the many creeks that fed into the Rio Negro. The river does indeed look quite black, but the smaller waterways are a muddy brown.

Along the way we saw a fair amount of bird life. Herons were everywhere. 

We left the inlet and entered the wide, slate gray river.

We noticed a few people living in houseboats on the river.

And more birds, too.

My new camera is fine, but I miss the magnification of the old one. Unfortunately, there is no amazon.com on the Amazon, so I cannot just order a telephoto lens and have it delivered later on the same day. Surprisingly, however, there is pretty a pretty strong cell phone signal everywhere. 

The “native village” we saw was actually just the residence of one extended family. Francisco explained that in the Amazon people make a distinction between “native” and “indigenous”. Native people are ethnically and culturally a mixture of pre-Columbian and European people. They speak dialects of Portuguese that combine native words and archaic Portuguese. They live in more modern houses, but in small settlements that are similar to to indigenous villages. These people were definitely native in this sense. 

Francisco showed us the root of the cassava plant. Cassava is indigenous to the north of Brazil, but it is now cultivated throughout the world. The root is actually poisonous, but the toxins can be fairly easily removed by soaking after it is crushed into a pulp. 

The most common use of the cassava today in the United States is for tapioca, but it is a staple starch in the Amazon and in other places where the Portuguese brought it. Here it was made into a vaguely tasteless pancake which they served to us with far more tasty mango juice.

There is a huge market I think for cassava, but these villagers have found a cash crop:  açai. Until we came here I just assumed that this was sort of a generic name for a thick sort of Brazilian smoothie. I learned that açai is actually the fruit of a particular palm tree. This family was cultivating several dozen of them, and one of the boys climbed the tree and cut some down for us.

One of the Brazilians in our group joked he planned to take it back to São Paolo and open a chain of shops. 

The family also ran a small “pousada” or guest house for visitors who wanted to live a more native life. I suspect that most of the people staying here were probably German backpacker types.I doubt this would appeal to most Brazilians. 

We all watched one of the girls with her dog. The poor animal just seemed to put up with anything this girl did. 

After a bit more looking around, we returned to the boat and went back to the Ariaú Towers. 

By the time we arrived, Globo was ready. As they moved our luggage over there, we walked down to the shore. We found what had once been the dock for the hotel, but it was now, like so much that was there, pretty much unusable. But it was a lovely evening.

We had a dinner buffet that was pretty much a repeat of what we had had for lunch. I have a feeling that the Ariaú will not be the culinary high point of this trip. There are maybe 25 guests here, and supposedly the hotel once had close to 300 rooms. Francisco told us that most of the towers are not used any more.

After dinner, we went with Francisco in the boat again, this time to look for alligators. We another guide, whose name I never learned, who spotted the alligators and jumped into the mud to pick them up for us. 

They had to good sense to avoid the mature specimens and pick up only some of the young ones. 

As they walked through the boat with the poor creatures, the little Brazilian girls touched them and shrieked. And a couple minutes, the alligator was returned to the peace and quiet of the riverbank mud. And we likewise went back to the peace and quiet our new little house in the decrepit hotel. 

A Quiet New Year's Day

The celebration on Copacabana Beach continued long after we left. But it was not the only party in the city. There was quite the private party taking place on Ipanema right across from our hotel. It seemed to be a quite upscale crowd, and the tends in the middle apparently covered a stage with live performances. This party also continued quite long into the night, and it made it hard to fall asleep. But it finally broke up and we were able to doze off.



We would have liked to have slept in until noon after the long night of celebration. But only the young seem to be able to sleep in like that, and we up not too long after the sun came up. We went up to breakfast, desperate for a some coffee, and were greeted on the front page of Brazil’s largest newspaper with the photograph we wish we could have taken.



We will be flying to Manaus tonight to begin the last part of our adventures. We had thought at first about renting bicycles are riding around the lake, perhaps visiting the botanical gardens. But on only a few hours of sleep, and with the weather today supposed to be at least as hot as it was yesterday, we decided to forgo more sightseeing and just rest a bit.

After coffee, we went up on the roof. Even though it was barely nine in the morning, it was already in the eighties, and a dip in the pool seemed like the best thing to start the day.



We decided to spend the day on the beach. While Ipanema seemed like an easy choice, we knew it would be crowded. So we decided to catch a cab and go back to São Conrado where we had spent the last part of our favela tour.

It was a good choice. The water is cleaner there and the sand even finer. There were quite a few people on the beach, but it was not absurdly crowded.



I like the fact this this woman’s beach towel was the Brazilian flag.



We returned to the hotel around five and showed in the fitness center. Carlos, our driver from the first night, met us and took us to the airport, and made sure we were all set for our flight to Manaus. We should arrive there around midnight, and we will spend the night in Manaus before being transferred up the Rio Negro to begin our Amazon adventures!

Réveillon

Today we had no activities preplanned for us. We decided that this would be a good day to explore Rio’s historic center. And, had it been even a tiny bit cooler, that would have been a good plan. But more on that later.

I found what seemed to be a pretty good walking tour of center on National Geographic Traveler. I copied it to my phone and off we went. The eight block tour was to begin at the Palaçio Tiradentes. We explained in simple English where we wanted to go to the taxi cab driver and even pointed to its location on Google Maps. He nodded like he understood.

Apparently he did not. He drove about a half mile past the Palaçio and announced that, “Here is praça.” And we were indeed on your standard Latin American square with the obligatory equestrian statue.



It seemed useless to argue, and as we were not all that far and the neighborhood did not look unsafe, we figured we would walk.

One of the first things we saw as we left the square was the sight of the “Presbyterian Cathedral.” This gothic structure seemed almost comically out of place in tropical Rio.



The interior was as spare as the name might suggest.



But walking only a couple blocks away, we found that the sacred had not displaced the profane in downtown Rio.



We saw some of the oldest buildings in Rio, such as the monastery of São Francisco, right next to temples to banking and commerce.



We marveled at some of the detail on the older homes and businesses.



But it was starting to get pretty miserably hot and Google Maps kept giving us weird directions to get to the Tiradentes Palace and they kept changing every time we moved a few feet. I was getting frustrated and John, who has minimal tolerance for heat, was starting to get really cranky.
We stopped in a church that had once been the chapel royal. After independence from Portugal, Brazil, unlike most South American countries, did not immediately adopt a republican form of government. Instead, they had their own emperor for several decades.



We finally asked somebody where exactly the Tiradentes Palace was and he pointed us to a building that we had already passed at least two or three times.



By this time, it was pushing 100 degrees and John was just done with wandering around looking at old buildings. He stopped in a little snack shop in the train station and he drank a couple of big glasses of coconut water. That helped a bit, and I agreed that we should just head off somewhere and get a real lunch.

We decided that we would catch a cab to Rio’s trendy Santa Teresa neighborhood, and have lunch at the Santa Teresa Hotel. Both the hotel and its restaurant are on just about everybody’s list of the best places in Rio.

The Santa Teresa neighborhood is on a hill overlooking downtown and the port. It is nowhere close to a decent beach, but the guests have a great pool.



The meal there was probably the best we have had on the trip so far. The restaurant was filled with European tourists, and French seemed to be the dominant language I heard.

We had a walking tour of this area in one of our guidebooks, but John did not want to go far in the heat. So instead we just explored a few blocks around the hotel. It reminded me a great deal of San Telmo in Buenos Aires:  gritty but colorful, obviously fashionable yet still quite rough around the edges.









On the taxi ride back from the hotel, John kept telling me how hot it was. And, indeed from the dirty window of the taxi, he found proof.



For those of you who do not have a calculator handy, that translated to 98.6 degrees Fahrenheit. And that’s pretty hot when it is accompanied by near 100 percent humidity.

The rooftop pool was crammed, so we retreated to our air-conditioned room and napped to get ready for New Year’s Eve. Now, Rio is one of those famous places like New York or Sydney where New Year’s Eve is a big public celebration. Cariocas — that is, if I have not mentioned it before, the name for the residents of this city — hold a huge fireworks display on Copacabana Beach. The hours preceding midnight are filled with local and international musicians playing on two enormous stages on different ends of the long beach. And people traditionally dress all in white for the occasion and rush into the surf at the stroke of midnight. John definitely wanted us to go local.



We had read that it can be pretty insane on the holiday and that you should not bring money, jewelry, or cameras to the beach. We followed those directions, but decided that the warnings were completely overblown. It was crowded, but it was overall a pleasant family event. Just about everybody there had cell phones an were busy taking selfies and snapping pictures of their friends. People were drinking, but we saw nobody drunk or aggressive.

Many people had brought flowers with them, generally gladiolas. They walked into the sea and threw them in as a sign of letting go of the old year and asking for good luck in the new. I wish we had brought some, as I spent much of this part of the trip learning to let go of some pretty painful memories of my own. There were half a dozen cruise ships lined up to watch the fireworks. I rather doubt they were throwing glads into the waves.

At midnight, the fireworks began. And while I have seen better displays in the United States, it was a pretty good one. Oh, that I had brought along a camera to take some snapshots of it. But I did not. And when it was over, we walked the two miles back to our hotel.