We’d managed to retrieve our eaten card only to find it had in fact expired. When we checked our backup we realized to our horror that it had coincidentally expired on the same day. We’d never felt more idiotic – neither one of us had noticed that both of our cards from different banks expired on May 1, 2013, exactly five months into our trip. We very suddenly had no way to get money.

After calling banks, my parents, my brother and our credit card companies with varying degrees of success, we decided we had to get out and see some of this country. We took a series of little buses out to the crumbling colonial adobe village of Tarata and were thoroughly charmed. Charmed until I bought a piece of flatbread in which was living one bee. It stung the back of my throat and I sprayed chunks of dry bread all over an antique alleyway, choking. I had to reach into my mouth to detach the bee from my tonsil while Magda looked on in alarm.

Then it started to rain.

Fortunately my throat didn’t swell shut, otherwise Magda would have had to repatriate my corpse – an ugly task under any circumstances, more so without money. We sat in a little cafe waiting for the rain to pass and I washed hot coffee over my throbbing tonsil. Somehow this trip was taking a turn for the worse, a fact that was no one’s fault but our own, except for possibly a bee’s.

When we returned to Las Lilas, we tried once again to turn things around. We wanted to take a trip to a place called Incalljata, one of the largest Incan ruins in the old Empire. Only, we couldn’t figure out how to do it cheaply. Buses didn’t go there and taxis were charging quadruple their supposed rates to make it there and back. Even a simple day trip was becoming an aggravation. Alex, the owner of Las Lilas, suggested we book a tour with a friend of his, a Dutch ex-patriot named Remy, and his tour company El Mundo Verde.

We hate tours and tour companies. We hate itineraries and traveling in a well worn rut. Remy’s tour seemed expensive by Bolivian standards and we had no money thanks to our defunct cards. Finally, how could touring with a Dutchman help immerse us in Bolivian culture? But we had no other options, so we set up the tour. So started our favorite day in Bolivia thus far.

Remy was slight and friendly with blonde hair and clear blue eyes. His imperfect English was perfect enough to have all manner of discussions about living in Bolivia, Bolivian politics, culture, the nature of touristing vs. traveling, South America and the history of the Incas, all while driving the rough back highways of Bolivia up into the hills of the Cochabomba valley. He’d come to Bolivia speaking no Spanish and having no sense of what the country had to offer. He ended up married to a Bolivian woman, having a Bolivian child and becoming Bolivian in his heart. We slowly realized there may be no better way to come to love a country than by following the path of someone who’s already walked it.

On the road he pointed out details we could have never seen and no Bolivian would think unusual enough to point out. White flags hanging above the doorways of houses meant they were selling ‘Chicha’, an Andean corn-beer that the people of Cochabomba still relish. He shed light on the history of the unusual style of hat favored by Bolivian women, how each style denotes a different area of the country. The iconic bowler hat belongs to the La Paz region, while Cochabambinas preferred wide flat sun hats adorned with fake flowers. If we were cautious in approaching locals for a picture or just to stay hi, Remy was gregarious, stopping and chatting, revealing to us what he already knew: Bolivians are incredibly friendly to strangers, opposite of the sense I’d gotten in the few bureaucratic encounters we’d been forced to have. The Bolivian government’s distaste for Yankees is well known, but when I introduced myself as an Americano to a rough looking farmer on a muddy country road, he shook my hand and said it was a pleasure. Then we discussed the shameful state of an otherwise beautiful cemetery Magda was busy photographing.

Once we reached the ruins of Incalljata, we walked amongst the broken walls, knee-high in golden grasses. It’s one of the largest Incan complexes in the empire, but is untouched by conservation efforts, meaning it has a ruined beauty, ripe for imagining the grounds in their former glory. We were almost alone. Unlike Machu Pichu with its incredible setting and reconstructed triumphs of architectural engineering, Incalljata is hardly overrun by tourists and well destroyed by both time and the Spanish Conquistadors. Despite this, its footprint is astonishing in its scale. A network of dormitories, defensive walls, a prison and the largest Incan building to have ever been found are still clearly visible. There are even the remains of an astronomical observatory that itself acts as an ingenious giant sundial. It is a site so pure and still so unexplored I found several stone and bone implements that looked suspiciously like they should be in a museum, but left them where they lay.

As the sun lowered between two hills and lit Incalljata with the same warm glow it had for centuries, we hiked back down the path to Remy’s truck. We took a circuitous route home, past little khaki colored adobe settlements and patchwork farms growing potatoes and corn. As we drove through the center of a dusty little pueblo, Remy noted a white flag hanging above a rectangular adobe house. We pulled the truck over in the miniature town square and stooped through a low door to enter the Chicharia. Two tiny old women were dressed in traditional Bolivian textiles. One had a rainbow colored satchel around her shoulders. Both sported weathered brown fedoras tilted roguishly on top of their long black and grey braids. They were surprised and seemingly thrilled with our arrival. We bought large half gourds full of chicha, the less ancient of the two women pouring for us. We all toasted each other in Spanish and Quechua, their first language. In my opinion, the Chicha was awful, but the square of golden afternoon light falling through the doorway, framing the little ladies where they sat beaming wide smiles was the most beautiful thing we’d seen in Bolivia yet. Magda asked if the ladies would come outside for a picture and they filed out of the little doorway together. I took the opportunity to give Remy the rest of my chicha. When Magda came back inside she gave me the rest of hers. Afterwards my throat burned a little like bile.

Our last stop was Remy’s favorite little pueblo, a colonial village frozen in time, isolated in the Andean foothills just as they begin their long march down to the Amazon basin. The one story buildings were a uniform warm grey, with red roof tiles being taken over by grey green lichens and collapsing inwards. Other roofs were thatch, some being taken over by wild cactuses. The little town square was designed to be converted into a bullfighting arena. A colonial church with no right angles stood solidly on one side of the square, partially hidden behind one of the town’s two trees. The few people we saw looked suspiciously European, though they wore indigenous Bolivian dress and spoke Quechua. It was all a reminder that history is only history in the context of the present – of which there was no sign.

We’d finally found Bolivia, with a little help from the Netherlands.

We finally managed to buy tickets on Bolivia’s TAM airlines, a military transport service who’s prices undercut the other commercial airlines by half. Word had it though that their quality was cut accordingly. The Frenchman disagreed, he noted that if the other airlines crashed, no one would come looking for the wreckage, when a TAM flight crashes, the whole Bolivian army is sent out. Obviously this put us at ease.

We waited for the plane at the most basic airport we’ve ever been to. We had been worried about flying again after the x-ray incident in Manaus, but needn’t have been concerned. There was nothing as complex as security at the airport or even as complex as a building with terminals. What it was was a big field. Passengers waited under a temporary looking open air shelter. A man behind a desk wrote the suspected take-off times on a chalkboard. These were at best estimations, at worst lies.

The aircraft control tower was a wooden shack sitting on a mound of earth. A man inside peered out of a window with binoculars. In the off chance he saw an approaching plane, he called the man behind the desk who updated the chalkboard. We’d checked into the flight in town, dropped our bags in the TAM offices, and then ridden a tuk-tuk out to the airstrip. We could see our backpacks on a large trolley sitting on the runway, the baggage handler sleeping in the shade beneath. At the time of our scheduled departure nothing happened. Our plane hadn’t arrived, indeed there were no planes at all, just tall grasses, palm trees and the encroaching Amazon jungle. Despite the shade it was very hot.

An hour after our flight was supposed to take off, the man behind the desk took a call, got up, and wiped the board clean. He replaced it with the current time. Sure enough, a twinkle of light flashed like a daytime star against the deep blue sky. A plane was approaching, the baggage handler woke up, the other passenger got in line next to an opening in a chain-link fence. It was an airport after all.

A half an hour later the Amazon was disappearing behind us, a great unending sea of green. A grey-brown river meandered through it like an anaconda headed across a lawn. It was sad to see it go but ahead the earth was rippling, rolling, and jutting upwards. It was the Andes Mountains, our old friends from Chile, cousins of the Antarctic Range, brothers of the Rocky Mountains. Spine of the Americas.

We landed in Cochabamba and disembarked onto an asphalt airfield. Our first breath as we left the plane was like breathing for the first time. Fresh, dry, cool air filled our lungs, it was scented with a tinge of burning eucalyptus and mountain herbs. It smelled at once like spring and fall, approaching summer, approaching winter. It smelled not at all like jungle, dense vegetation, putridity. We’d stepped out of a greenhouse and into the fresh air of reality after three months inside.

The airport at Cochabamba was nothing like Guayaramerin. The two places were centuries apart. A baggage carrousel, like any other in the world, delivered us our backpacks. A neatly uniformed woman checked the claim tags. A poster reminded travelers to fight disease by washing their hands frequently. We were back in civilization.

Alex, the owner of the Las Lillas hostel in Cochabamba was waiting for us. If he was annoyed that we were an hour and half late he didn’t show it; our plane had been comparably on time by Bolivian standards. We piled into his big Dodge SUV and headed into the city. One of our first stops had to be an ATM, we were short on cash due to the lone, stingy machine in Guayaramerin. Alex pulled over to the side of the road and Magda jumped out to remove some Bolivianos. While Alex and I chatted, I kept an eye on the door to the bank. Magda had been inside a little too long. I was starting to get nervous when she came running back out, looking upset. As she dodged through traffic to reach us, she gave the thumbs down. I opened the door and she explained, uncharacteristically calm, the machine had eaten our card. It declared it expired, swallowed it, and cancelled the transaction. She’d talked with the bank tellers who told her there was nothing they could do, we’d have to wait until morning.

It was the beginning of a very long, stressful week.

We flew south to Porto Velho, but not before getting into an argument at security about Magda’s film. They decided it was too many pieces to be hand-checked and should be x-rayed, despite flying multiple times within Brazil having it hand-checked at security.

“It’s federal law” the officer kept saying.
“It is not.” We told him, again and again.

Eventually we had no choice but to send the film through a bombardment of x-rays for the third time in four months.

When we arrived in Porto Velho we waited an hour to take a local bus to the bus station. The ticket-taker understood that everyone on the bus was going to the bus station but she fell asleep and we all missed our stop. We woke her with our loud complaints. She listened with a blank expression and then returned to her nap.

At this point Brazil was driving us nuts. If all went well, we’d be crossing the border into Bolivia the next day. But only if all went well. Our plan was to take a bus to Guajará-Mirim, a remote frontier town on Brazil’s southwest border. From there we’d enter Bolivia, in Guajara-merin, the Brazilian side’s twin sister city, separated at birth.

But at the bus station in Porto Velho they’d already sold the last bus tickets to Guajará-Mirim, and we were faced with waiting a few hours for the next one. We were still in the Amazon basin and the forest was near. It was as humid as ever and no fans pushed the thick air through the grungy little station.

Something unexpected happened. When the sold-out bus arrived it turned out to be larger than expected. There were two more seats available. The agent at the bus company’s window arranged everything for us and was incredibly helpful and sweet. If Brazil had been on the operating table, it might have been flat-lining. Suddenly there was a pulse and we remembered how great Brazilians could be.

The bus ride was long and tedious. The road had been hacked through the jungle and then left to decay. We bounced and shuddered along until we came to an unexpected stop. Two trucks and a car had just crashed, sending one of the trucks plunging into anaconda infested swamp. We waited for an hour for the mess to be cleared.

Arriving after nightfall in Guajará-Mirim we checked into an overpriced hotel, one of two in town, and collapsed into bed exhausted from the long day of travel. From the bus we’d been able to see Bolivia across the river, tantalizingly close, but as we would discover, so very far away.

In the morning we showered and wore our best semi-clean clothes to visit the Bolivian consulate. It was above an electronics shop near the river, accessible through a door on the side of the building. There were some handwritten directions telling us where to go. The waiting room was big, dark and hot, lit and cooled only by some windows poked through one wall. The attendant looked small behind a large desk, but even the desk appeared small in the center of the giant waiting room. When an insane Bolivian finished lecturing the consulate, he came out and continued where he’d left off to us. We smiled and nodded until we were called in to see the man behind the door.

The consulate’s office was a slightly smaller room, again lit only by sunlight. He stood up to great us, friendly but formal, and gestured for us to sit. Behind him and his regal looking desk were portraits of Evo Morales, the current President, and two Spaniards I assumed were Simon Bolivar, liberator of Bolivia, and another somber looking gentleman. Cloth hair had been added to their pictures, so that their lofty bouffants and mutton-chops were black and cottony. All three images had begun to fade from sunlight, and all three had a cyan hue. Except for the deep black of the matted three-dimensional hair.

We presented our documents to the consulate, told him we’d like to visit his beautiful country and asked if I might receive a visa. As a Polish citizen, Magda needed no visa, and though we already knew it, he informed us of this. I on the other hand, he looked at me a little sadly, would need a visa. Yes, of course, all of our documents are prepared for you here.

It will take two months.

The room was silent. Against one wall was a tall stack of three boxed photocopiers, all with the label, ‘office of the Bolivian consulate, Guajará-Mirim.’ Evo Morales grinned down at me from the wall as if to say he’d gotten the last word. The man is not know for his love of yankees.

Magda continued speaking Spanish with the consulate. We’ve heard it is not an issue for Americans, our friends have crossed without problems! Is it not possible to apply directly at the border? The consulate listened politely, kindly correcting her grammar at times. He got up and took a three-ring binder off of a shelf filled with similar binders. He opened it and showed us why his hands were tied. America, he pointed out, was “group three”. For group three countries, it takes two months. Then, again friendly, he told Magda that Poland was “group one”, and that she was welcome in his country.

After more polite prodding, he agreed to do us a favor and make some calls. He called the capital, La Paz, and waited for someone to answer the phone. No one did. He shrugged and suggested we come back in an hour, maybe someone would have answered by then. Perhaps we could get some lunch.

Back out on the street we looked at each other. If it had been easy to get to Guajará-Mirim we would have given the country across the river the finger and headed for Peru. But it hadn’t been, and there wasn’t a feasible exit strategy other than boarding another riverboat and heading west for days towards the Andes and the source of the Amazon.

We eyed the river and the little boats shuttling back and forth to Bolivia. We turned our back on the consulate, boarded one of the little crafts, and crossed the river.

Guayaramerin, Bolivia

We got off of the boat and stood on Bolivian soil. Nobody asked for our visa, nobody asked for our passports. Taxi drivers asked if we wanted a ride somewhere. We were confused. We asked someone at the dock if there was an immigration office nearby. She said there was and told us it was ten blocks away. So we started walking into the city, illegal aliens in Bolivia.

At the immigration office, a converted house, we sat in what was once a living room, waiting for a woman behind an enormous table to call us over. She was young and her baby was sleeping next to her chair in a carriage. On seeing my papers, she told us curtly that we’d need to make copies of everything, get an exit stamp from Brazil, and return for my visa.

How long will it take? We asked. She shrugged, a few minutes. We looked at each other again, gathered our things, and hightailed it back to Brazil, careful to avoid walking past the Bolivian consulate.

We returned the next day with our bags, got my visa in under an hour and checked into a shady little hotel. Putting our bags down, hearing and reading Spanish again all around us, we realized we had left Brazil behind without saying a proper goodbye. There it was on the other side of the river, with all its crazy quirks, its spectacular parks, its friendly and talkative people, its nightmare highways. The Bolivian side of Guayaramerin had so far been a little dull, the people a bit curt. I thought of every time I glanced up at a tv screen in Brazil to see people dancing and clapping. There were whole channels dedicated to dancing and clapping. We thought of Rio, Brasília, Curitiba and Ouro Preto. Recife and Olinda and the boat ride up the Amazon. Dancing in the Sambadrome for Carnaval. Such a rich, beautiful country. And there it was just over there, forested, quiet.

Near the Main Street, two little girls kicked a ball back and forth. It careened off a post and rolled out into the street. One girl started after it into traffic. I yelled out, “cuidado!!” Be careful! She stopped and came back. She looked up at me with big eyes and asked politely if I could get it for her, so I did.

Thus began our time in Bolivia.

I did my best not to panic.

***

A day earlier we’d lugged our backpacks off of Manaus’ floating docks and up into the city. As we neared the exit we found a tall, thin, blonde man with startling blue eyes and a sunburned nose, wearing blue shorts and a Russian sailor’s shirt, two sizes too small. He was standing in the hall, observing some point in the distance.

It was Pieter-Jan, and I think he missed us. He’d reconsidered wandering into the jungle alone, and it seems he preferred the company of aging, cynical backpackers like ourselves. Together we cut through the bustling city center on our way to the same hostel.

By the time we got there I was dripping sweat like I’d taken a bath. I was clamped between two heavy packs, and felt not unlike a vertical tortoise being boiled alive. The rest of our friends from the boat had chosen the same hostel and were already crowded around the attendant behind the counter, peppering him with questions in at least three languages.

We wandered Manaus, once a bizarre, gilded city shining like a jewel in the forest. Out first stop was the opera house which remains a stunning example of neo-classical opulence. Along with Pieter, we took the English language tour and confounded our guide with obscure questions and irrelevant observations. In return she invented facts and embellished reality. When we asked if we could see the locked governor’s box seat, she attempted to force the door.

It’s hard to describe the feeling of entering this city after days of river travel through the jungle. It feels alien. During the rubber boom, fortunes were made and lavished on the architecture of the city, carved out of one of the most inhospitable places on earth. Hundreds of European artisans were employed to create a little Paris deep in the jungle, and they appear to have worked with some enthusiasm until the money ran out.

At the end of the rubber boom, the eggs spilled from Manaus’ single basket. Like the other booming cities in the Amazon, Manaus atrophied and then slowly started to decay. Since the end of the boom Manaus has been designated a tax free zone in an attempt to spur the growth of more diverse industries. This has helped save a few of the treasures of its gilded age, but time, the climate and the 80′s have stripped Manaus completely of its former glory.

Despite the distance from the era of its wealthy aspirations, Manaus continues to grow, creeping outwards, chewing away at the surrounding forest. Unfortunately the forest is its most attractive aspect. The tragedy of the destruction of the ‘lungs of the world’ isn’t only environmental, its psychological: the Amazon is one of the last vestiges of wilderness mankind as yet hasn’t been able to destroy. But every day, Manaus tries to change that.

In order to fully appreciate the forest before civilization fulfills its destiny of wrecking the earth, we signed up with a tour company at our hostel, one that promised various prepackaged spontaneous experiences. Being on the budget side of jungle tours, the next morning we found ourselves on a public bus, driving north from the city to the Urubu river. After three hours on the bus, we boarded a flimsy outboard from a wooden plank that served as a dock. With Pieter, Magda, myself and two Australians aboard, we chugged slowly upriver until any sign of urban encroachment had fallen away.

As travelers who take pride in not following the most touristy route (or trying not to), we felt a little uneasy about this trip. Photos of Europeans smiling next to captured caimans haunted my thoughts.

We’d planned and executed our own trip to Fordlandia, this seemed like an excursion for anyone with a yearning for a neatly presented version of the wild. What I didn’t fully grasp yet though was that there’s nothing neat about the Amazon. It isn’t just a photograph. Nobody can package it. It’s alive and it wants to eat you. Or at least lay eggs in your skin.

***

The river was as still as polished obsidian. The only disturbance was our long dugout canoe cutting a ridge of wake through it. Cristobão seemed completely unconcerned that the water was pouring in faster than we could scoop it out. Or that piranhas could well have been swarming in the dark waters beneath us. He was a man of the jungle and its rivers, and he knew what few of us gringos do: the legend of the piranha has been slightly exaggerated, which is the reason we were off to eat them instead of the other way around.

It turns out that counter to our idea that piranhas instantly reduce to a skeleton any and all creatures who dare enter the water is a little incorrect. They rarely attack humans, only if you happen to be wounded. They do smell blood, and they do eat everything they can with their powerful little jaws, but mostly they hang around under trees, waiting for fruits to drop in the water. That is correct: the infamous man-eating fish prefers to sit under trees eating fruit. And nuts and dead fish and hatchling alligators and the occasional wounded human. They are also suckers for raw chicken.

The boat still sat uncomfortably low in the water, but now that we’d stopped moving we had a chance to overtake the deluge. We floated amongst sunken trees, a flooded forest where we sat in the gathering twilight holding primitive fishing poles, chunks of raw chicken dangling in the water. The first spot hadn’t yeilded anything greater that a few spiders dropping from the branches so we’d broken out the paddles and pushed ourselves further into the flooded thicket. At the next clearing, near where a tree was losing its fruits into the river, we stopped again, threw in the chicken, and waited. Something tugged on my line within seconds. I pulled backwards and out popped a glassy eyed piranha, is jaws clamped tightly around a morsel of flesh. It wiggled and jerked, but was firmly stuck on the end of my line.

I had no idea what to do with it. I sensed that very soon, this piranha would give up on the chicken and leap onto my face. Thankfully Cristoboã grabbed the line, smashed the creature over the head, and then nonchalantly tossed its corpse into the puddle at my feet. He repeated this with the other catches, until five or six mostly dead creatures were floating near my toes. I examined them and came to realize they looked a lot like normal fish. One that hadn’t been killed quite enough came back to life and thrashed around my bare feet, I danced them out of the way, mindful of the delicate boat’s balance, and asked Cristobão if I could borrow his machete. I drove the point into the flesh eating fish zombie’s little brain and he died again.

I asked Cristobão if any of his guests had ever been bitten by a Piranha. In his usual, monosyllabic manner, he replied, “Yes.”

And then allowed himself a little smile.

Cristobão had been raised in the jungle, like most of the guides working for the company. He knew every tree, every sound, where to find food and what to avoid. Unlike the other talkative Brazilians we met, Cristobão preserved energy by staying very quiet. His father was a Peruvian Indian, his mother was Japanese-Brazilian. In the evening, after walking three hours into the jungle, we sat around a crackling fire and asked him more about his life. Without an ounce of emotion he told us his father was an itinerant rubber tapper who was killed by a jaguar when he was young. My mouth opened and closed like a dying piranha. I have a habit of attempting to respond to a person’s troubles by offering a similar story, as if to demonstrate shared experience and thus, understanding. But after a tragedy of such dramatic impact, it was better I follow Cristobão’s lead and keep my mouth shut.

Our trek yielded no big animal sightings. Unlike an African safari, the dense forest hides everything. It’s impossible to say what we passed. Occasionally Cristobão would gesture for us to stop and we’d all stand still and silent, listening. Whatever he’d heard had usually just left. Once, something large jumped into a stream near us creating a big splash and a lot of ripples. But the bush was too dense to see what it was. The jungle was full of sounds. Monkeys, parrots, parakeets, toucans, frogs, woodpeckers, cicadas, crickets and a half a million other insects all chimed in to create a pulsating chorus unlike any other song. It never stopped, just changed pitch with the night or a sudden downpour. On top of it all was the tinny whine of mosquitoes. Our repellent was working, it better have, it was 100% toxic and capable of melting plastic. The mosquitoes stayed just out of its range, repulsed but desperate for our blood all the same.

Our little camp was by a stream bubbling with fresh, sweet spring water. But it was the color of tea, containing the acidic tannins of a hundred different trees. Mosquitoes preferred to nest elsewhere because of its acidity, leaving us mostly unmolested in the night. With a layer of repellent on, I slept in my hammock without a mosquito net and slept just fine. Except at one point I must have rolled in a manner that exposed just one cheek of my backside and the waiting beasts attacked mercilessly.

The longer you are in the jungle the more fascinating in becomes. Fueled with unlimited fresh water and the blazing sun, the concentration of life astonishes. It is in fact far too dense, so rich with life that every species inside lives life locked in an unending battle for resources. The tall trees shade the forest floor, sucking up as much sun as possible above, a vast root system borrowing for water and nutrients from the soil below. Vines that are themselves as thick as trees fight the monopoly by creeping around the mammoth trunks, reaching for the sun and strangling their competition in the process. Amidst this scaffolding mammals, reptiles, birds and insects avoid the tight competition on the forest floor, living their whole lives in the canopy. The forest floor is left to the omnivores and predators, the aardvarks hunting for ants, the armadillo hunting for insects, the anaconda and jaguar hunting them all.

Into this natural struggle wanders the tourist. Unequipped on even the most basic level it is likely we would die within days of being in the forest on our own. Not just from lack of food, which is surprisingly hard to find, but from the incessant attacks from insects like mosquitoes, biting flies, larvae, and worms. After enough time, you’d crave the sweet sleep a jaguar, alligator or anaconda might deliver with relative swiftness. And yet, when we walked out of the trees back into the sunshine, I was disappointed. The forest sounds were gone. The comforting shade was gone. We’d been bitten by more than mosquitoes and ants, the jungle itself had infected us with the romantic notion that something giant, untamed and untamable still exists. It’s an idea that effects humans like the smell of blood to a mosquito. The jungle’s extreme danger its only repellent, and its lure.

As we made our way back to Manaus, the jungle receded, replaced by tract housing and warehouses. Once in the city though, it was possible to see a host of vines, shoots and roots threatening to demolish civilization the minute it turns its back.

Our last night on the Amazon River, back at the hostel, we hugged Pieter goodbye. My hug was half-hearted though, since I suspect we’ll find him again sometime very soon, waiting just around a corner sporting a bright red nose and his indomitable smile, ready for our next adventure.

Post script:
Type in “Urubu River – Amazonas” into google maps, the point that comes up is probably an hour southeast of where we stayed. From the river north, the jungle stretches, unbroken, for a long, long time. The Amazon basin, meaning all of the areas that drain ultimately into the Amazon River is as large as the contiguous United States. This is almost impossible to fathom. Much of it is unexplored. In some parts, tribes of indigenous people live without any contact from modernity – apparently by choice because it would be impossible to miss airplanes or the occasional Brazilian wandering past. The fact that it is possible to live un-contacted in the Amazon is a testament to its size, density and its abundance – for those who know how to access it. Some anthropologists have declared the jungle a “false paradise” meaning in its extreme clamor of life, all sustainable methods of survival have been snuffed out. This theory is counter-intuitive and most likely wrong. Archeologists are finding evidence of the jungle having supported not just thousands, but millions of indigenous Americans. This topic is covered compellingly by Charles Mann’s books, 1491 and 1493, essential reading for anyone interested in Pre-Colombian history or the history of the Americas. The Lost City of Z by David Grann is also a gripping, heartbreaking tale of the Amazon and the obsession it inspires.

And again we met our friend Pieter-Jan, the friendly, funny Belgian who’d accompanied us on our Fordlandia mission. Within minutes of boarding he was grinning ear to ear, having set up his hammock next to an attractive Russian.

The boat had come from Belém, and over that three day journey various cliques had formed. We joined the one most resembling gringos, a table full of Spanish speaking passengers from Spain and Mexico. An itinerant puppeteer from Seville caught us up to speed on the activities of the boat’s prostitute, the priest who had disembarked at Santarém, and an insane Costa Rican prone to long, loud lectures.

Pablo, the puppeteer, was a magnetic personality who claimed to be exhausted by cycling around South America with no money, giving puppet shows. He showed no signs of exhaustion though as he joked and teased the other passengers, prodding them into outbursts of laughter.

One evening as we sat around a plastic table, watching the landscape roll past, the insane Costa Rican appeared, his arms laden with broken gadgets. He dumped them in front of the puppeteer, declaring they were gifts for him and his friends. Pablo looked at us and started to distribute the heavy, useless items, the Costa Rican stopped him. Not these people! He shouted in Spanish, the puppets!

For the rest of the evening Pablo created games in which the loser and or winner would receive either a weak, oversized flashlight, with “friend” stenciled on the side, or a giant broken Swiss Army knife, half its functions useless as it was wrapped with packing tape. As the games went on, other passengers were dragged in and flummoxed when awarded unwieldy gifts for no apparent reason.

I took a trip to the bar to refresh everyone’s drinks, the beer aboard the Cisna Branca was incredibly cheap. A Brazilian from Salvador, his eyes red and runny from drink was leaning heavily against the wall, and began a monologue about friendship when I appeared. He insisted on buying my drinks, which I politely refused. I knew where this game led, I’d had my share of half understood conversations with drunks aboard the Liberty Star. It ended with us as great friends, brothers really, and brothers buy brothers whiskey. I tried to sidestep, I tried to tell him I didn’t speak Portuguese. Eventually I wormed my way back to the table, but eventually my new friend joined us, and began a long lecture about love and friendship.

With me and Magda cornered, nodding uncomprehending as he became sad, then slightly belligerent, our new friends gradually called it a night. One by one they excused themselves, until only Pieter was left to try and derail the Brazilian’s increasingly aggressive train of thought.

Then Pieter, our last translator, left too. Without a word.

I told Magda she should try to leave as well, I’d plead ignorance and tell him I in all honesty I simply couldn’t understand, but he was sitting inches from her, and seemed insistent she understand his point. He began saying something about the US, how it should do more to help Haiti (Haiti?). How we could come to his country, but he couldn’t come to ours. We wasn’t professing his undying friendship anymore, and his look was getting mean.

Out of the darkness Pieter reappeared, three glasses of water in his hand. Cheerful as always, he offered one to our captor and artfully steered the ‘conversation’ towards himself. Soon he was receiving the full force of our friend’s attentions, and he nodded to us to slip away.

Back at our cabin, I hatched a plan to come to Pieter’s rescue. I came back outside to find them gone. It turned out the Brazilian had asked if Pieter was tired. He’d said yes, and that was it. It seems the easiest way to end a conversation is if you speak the language.

When we reached Manaus, the cliques broke up and scattered on the docks. We said warm goodbyes to Pieter who planned on disappearing into the jungle straight away. We struggled with our bags, dragging them down ship ladders and across the gangplank, onto the floating docks of Manaus.

Before he could go on I stopped him.

“Actually, where we would really like to go is Fordlandia.”

He raised his bushy grey eyebrows and looked skeptical.

“Do you mind if I ask why?”

We’d heard of Fordlandia before we left for the trip, its peculiar history now intertwined with the story of Brazil and the exploitation of the Amazon forest. As connoisseurs of industrial ruins and failed Utopian projects, we knew we had to try to visit. We told him all of this, and described our project for the New Yorker.

His face broke into a weathered smile. He knew well what the ruins of Fordlandia would mean to a photographer.

Until the invention of synthetic latex, all the rubber for all of the tires in the world came from the Hevea brasiliensis, rubber trees native to the Amazon basin. A small contingent of companies worked to monopolize the rubber trade, forcing a nascent automobile industry to pay dearly for the last but most important four parts of the car, the tires.

Henry Ford, the prototypical American industrialist, decided to break the back of the rubber cartel. In 1928 he devised a plan to build his own rubber plantation in the Amazon jungle and set to work finding the perfect location. He hired a Brazilian named Villares to search. After some time, and probably very little searching, Villares proposed a location on the Tapajós River. It was prime land and was available to purchase from a very amenable owner, who was coincidently, himself.

Despite what should have been a red flag, Ford purchased the land and began sending shiploads of supplies, factory parts, and prefabricated buildings. The jungle was cleared and burned, a city grid laid down. Sewers and water pipes were installed with custom manhole covers reading ‘FMC’. Wood-framed Middle-American style houses were erected in neat little rows, along with sidewalks, lamp posts, and regular rows of trees. A team of engineers began planting acres of rubber trees, not a botanist amongst them, but at this point science was incidental: Ford’s career as a rubber baron had begun.

It ended soon afterwards. The trees were planted too close together, and the gentle slope of Villares’ land was the perfect incubation sight for rubber tree blight. The plantation failed. The invention of synthetic latex and the success of Asian rubber plantations were the final nails in the coffin. Fordlandia was sold to the Brazilian government for a loss without ever producing a single tire. As the Americans packed up and left, the forest closed in on Fordlandia.

We found ourselves skimming across the remarkably placid surface of the Tapajós River, the wake of our outboard longboat distorting the otherwise perfect reflections of the Amazon Jungle. Magda was perched in front, shooting scenery in the crisp morning light. I was next in the line of single seats, behind me was our friend Peter, a young Belgian and a much better speaker of Portuguese than us. He wore a small cap with a vestigial bill, had a bright red nose and puffy cotton pants, not unlike those worn by that other intrepid explorer of Belgian origin, Tintin. Behind him, manning the powerful outboard motor that propelled us along, was our guide through the wilderness, appropriately named Moises. Moises was a sharp witted Amazonian with chestnut skin, a small mustache and a baseball hat. He wore a look that said he found us all perpetually amusing. Occasionally he leaned the outboard away from a clump of river weeds but it otherwise would have been hard for him to chose a more direct path, he drew a straightedged line with the boat from point to point on the river. He knew the river very well having grown up near Fordlandia and we were saving a little money by spending the night at his mothers house.

The jungle was for the most part an unbroken stretch of forest. For hours the dense foliage unrolled beside us, only occasionally dotted by a palm-roofed shack. The outboard droned on all day.

That the Tapajós River isn’t one of the biggest in the world astounds me. At points it was difficult to see the other side and resembled a vast inland sea. That I’d never heard of this river wasn’t unusual either, five of the fifteen biggest rivers in the world empty into the Amazon. The Tapajós is just one of many magnificent waterways paying tribute to the biggest river on earth.

In the late afternoon, a familiar looking water tower appeared, levitating above the forest. It looked exactly like a water tower you might see in Dearborn, Michigan. As we approached, more buildings broke the monotony of the forest and collected to form a little town. Our ideas of a lost American town in the jungle evaporated as a neat little city park appeared, a well tended lawn surrounding a freshly painted church on a hill. It seemed that someone was living in Fordlandia.

As was Ford’s habit he imposed “American” values, working hours, religion and even cuisine on his Brazilian employees. Not just the architecture of Fordlandia was American, its very heart was as well. Workers who didn’t appreciate the Baptist church, hamburgers, or a prohibition on alcohol were welcome to leave. The harshest condition was the American work day, which coincides with the most brutal heights of the equatorial sun. Locals usually worked before dawn and after sunset to avoid the heat but this was counter to American values, thus the nine to five work day was strictly enforced.

Before the fall of Fordlandia, the Brazilian workforce rioted, protesting the conditions imposed upon them. They ran their American overseers out into the river, where they waited for reinforcements.

When the Americans left, that chapter of Fordlandia was finished. But afterwards the Brazilians who had worked there settled into the incongruous American houses and carried on. And here they were, the descendants of Ford’s workers living in the barracks built for their parents and the rows of suburban houses built for the American management. Some of the houses sagged from neglect. Several had fallen down altogether. But many had been well cared for, even to the point of having freshly mowed lawns*.

The forest had reclaimed some of Fordlandia. An old hospital was more tree than building, vines having pulled down much of its structure, leaving empty hallways filled with broken ceiling tiles. Shafts of sunlight filled empty rooms where crisp white sheeted hospital beds once lined the walls. We explored the old building with a guide from the town, and he waited patiently while Magda and Peter crawled through the unsteady ruins. I stood nervously under a sturdy looking beam, calling out for them to be careful. Rusty nails stuck out like stray hypodermic needles and fallen beams lay haphazardly across the floor. I held my breath until they returned, our guide was entirely unconcerned, though he said he agreed, caution was warranted.

Just as we exited the building between tall bushes, there was a loud crash. The trees behind the building shook and it was clear something had given way. We all looked at each other, I glanced at our guide, worried he might want to call it a day. He looked back with a shocked expression, eyebrows raised, and then laughed out loud. We hopped into the back of his pickup and drove on in search of the next historical monument to destroy.

We stopped for a long time at a row of houses overlooking the town, the water tower and the river. It was from here that Ford’s engineers must have watched their project failing, even as their children rode bikes on the newly minted sidewalk, between the rows of mango trees. Some of the ornate street lamps had fallen over, all had empty, rusted sockets. A swimming pool yawned open, dry and full of lichens. The first house in the row had collapsed.

A grouping of factory buildings are the only part of the complex off limits to visitors and our guide drove us all over town looking for the government official with the authority to let us in. We drove past unmistakably American made barracks, a Baptist church, an elementary school, its old name obscured. We also drove by new buildings, the town was growing despite its remote location. Small wooden houses with tile roofs sat with roosters strutting in the front yards.

The sun was getting low by the time we made it into the factory. Giant machines imported from the U.S. with embossed logos of companies from Chicago, New York, and Detroit still dominated the floor. They had been in use after Ford left, but it was unclear for how long. A dusty old Ford truck from the 70′s stood in the rear of one building, along with much older trucks of Brazilian make. A mesh fronted cabinet stuffed with piles of documents gave some clue. The latest date I could find was from the 80s.

How piles of documents several decades old could have survived the extreme humidity I can not guess. It crossed my mind that the scene may have been staged somehow.

A locked cage held more fascinating artifacts: cubbyholes stuffed with personal documents and the metal ID tags each worker was required to wear. Each was rusting and hard to decipher, but I recalled reading that workers needed to pay for their own tin badge out of their first month’s pay.

In the back, near the old trucks was a grizzly detail. Stacks of painted white metal bed frames were discarded here, rescued from the collapsing hospital. Next to these was an empty coffin unceremoniously placed beneath a window. Though the viewing panel was open, the lid was bolted closed, to better preserve the body of any American who died in Fordlandia. All victims of tropical disease or other maladies were posthumously sent home.

A great empty hall greated us upstairs, the walls were made if mildew-stained glass, the floorboards of thick Amazonian hardwood. At some point dozens of people had spent a lot of time shelling Brazilnuts up here, hundreds of empty shells sat in great piles around the room.

When the sun passed behind a ominous looking cloud we headed back to meet Moises at the docks. On the way I noticed one last descendant of the North Americans who had shipped out sixty years before: a big tom turkey stood below the church, puffing its chest out and surveying the grounds. We could not have been sent off with a better metaphor.

The evening was spent around Moises’ sister-in-law’s kitchen table. He told us of his passion for local products, his pride in the fruits of the Amazon and his sorrow that his people were fast forgetting their traditional foods. He also described his favorite recipe for caipirinhas, which was the usual formula, minus the limes, sugar and ice. It was a tiny house. A miniature toy store was being run out of the front room, a few dozen items of Chinese make tacked to the walls.

After dinner we swam in the dark river, washing off the day, reveling in the scenery of the remote little town, the forest beyond and an Amazonian lightning storm crackling on the other shore. We didn’t see, and didn’t want to see, a single caiman.

Magda and I set up hammocks in a room with a dirt floor, Peter strung up his hammock in the toy store, swinging amongst pale skinned, empty eyed dolls. Just after the lights started clicking off, there was a huge crash from the front, the sound of Peter moaning, and uproarious laughter from our hosts. His hammock had come unstrung and he’d crashed to the ground. Grinning, Moises retied the knot with a practiced hand, but Peter was shellshocked for the rest of the night, anticipating another plunge.

During our long journey back to Alter de Chão, we stopped at an indigenous rubber tapper’s village where we hiked into the jungle, rowed around a sunken forest and spent the night swinging in well fastened hammocks, in a big stilt house perched over the river. On the sandy beach just outside of the house, and all around the village, were rubber trees, the source of so much wealth and grief for the people of Brazil, and for Henry Ford. The people of Jameriqua still tapped the trees, selling the latex and making crafts from it to sell to tourists like us. Generations had accessed the tree’s sap, dozens of diagonal scores decorated the bark, some fresh, some long healed.

Rubber was a much sought after commodity at the turn of the 20th century, it sparked an economic gold rush in the Amazon and was the foundation for cities like Santarém and Belém. Artists from Europe helped build Manaus, a second Paris in the middle of the jungle with money from the rubber trade. But the tree itself is humble, small, and can be tapped repeatedly for years, making it a fantastically lucrative renewable resource. It was one of the few natural resources that did not require wholesale destruction of the environment and could have been sensibly harvested by the native people of the area.

But for an giant of industry like Henry Ford, that would have been too simple.

*the lawn, that most American of concepts had also been imported to the jungle.

“What if it’s pirates?” She asked, in a whisper.

All of Belem seemed to know that a group of motorcyclists were aboard the Liberty Star, their very expensive bikes in the cargo hold. Was there a ship alongside us? Unloading motorcycles? Then I remembered the blackout I’d turned a light on during. In fact we had read, come to think of it, of captains dousing the lights on board to thwart Amazonian river pirates. Here I’d come along, telegraphing our position. The engines have started again, we seem to be underway. The walls are vibrating gently, occasionally sending a more violent shudder through my bunk. I guess we’ll see on the morning if our hold has been emptied or not.

Ok so no. That’s the problem with noises in the middle of the night and overactive imaginations. Our hold was not emptied and the morning light brought nothing more unusual than the scenery of Amazon jungle constantly rolling past. Sporadically, stilt houses with crumpled docks and half submerged canoes appear. Colorful clothes hang drying on clothes lines like prayer flags. The serious faces of little children follow us from the windows. Often other children will hear our engines and run to their canoes, wielding oversized paddles and struggling outwards into the river. Children of five or six or seven, further miniaturized by the long dugouts, paddle and splash to get within shouting distance of the Liberty Star. If they’re lucky, a passenger onboard will have prepared an inflated plastic bag full of cookies or sweets, and will hurl it their direction, into the chocolate milk water of the Amazon.

Sometimes there are no houses for miles, just empty, impenetrable jungle, tree trunks wading in the high water of the wet season. Birds flit from branch to branch. Without the shanties we’re alone on the river, a little floating community of Brazilians and foreigners, dozens of hammocks strung up on the open decks, swinging gently with the rocking boat.

We opted for comfort. Our cabin is a tiny space filled with a twin bunk bed. We have our own bathroom, which is in itself an overstatement. We shower with river water. Flushing the toilet is like pulling the pin on a water grenade, you have a second or two to jump out of the little closet before it sprays everywhere sending a torrent rushing across the floor.

We miss out on the famous camaraderie of the river boat while staying in a cabin. People hanging side by side in colorful hammocks often say it’s the best experience of their time in Brazil, getting to know their neighbors on a intimate level. The hammocks are often triple stacked, so that every level is intimate indeed as your neighbor’s rear end is inches from your face. But there does form a hammock brotherhood that we’re missing out on. We make up for it by receiving lectures from drunken Brazilians in the bar.

Our days are spent wandering the decks, finding a shady spot from which to sketch or photograph the passing landscape. The heat of the day chases most back to their hammocks, but as the sun lowers passengers start to reappear, nourishing themselves on overpriced beer and conversation.

One evening an impromptu soccer game started on the roof deck, players kicking a crumbled plastic bottle too and fro. I watched as a goalie dove to protect his goal, fully outstretched and landing with a metallic boom on his side. No goal! The crash prompted the bartender to run up and chase everyone away, a typical Brazilian confrontation that began with raised voices and ended in laughter.

Occasionally the boat is boarded, not by river pirates, but by small time entrepreneurs, paddling like mad to intercept our trajectory, then using a hook and rope to attach themselves to the tires that acts as bumpers. Stuck on like a barnacle to a whale, they climb bare footed up the decks, a bag of fruit for sale clutched between their teeth. When they’ve sold their goods, they climb back down, cut the rope, peel off and ride the wake of the boat until they join the other tiny specs far behind us on the massive waterway.

And it is massive. For the first two days we travelled up little channels in the great delta, cutting between islands that made the river appear narrow. When we reached the main body, those of us who’d never seen it before let out a collective gasp. A green curtain of jungle was pulled away to reveal a great brown plane of water, speckled with giant logs, floating grass islands, a fisherman in a long tail outboard. The other side was visible, but was a pencil thin line of trees on the distant horizon. It’s still possible we weren’t seeing the entire width of the river.

Of wildlife we’ve seen disappointingly little. Magda spotted some river dolphins, a guy from Vancouver claimed to have seen the elusive Amazonian pink dolphin. But you know Canadians, they’re always making stuff up. Once we spotted a beautiful waterbird and asked the rotund first mate its name. He scratched one of his chins and declared, sagely, “PATO”, which in Portuguese, like Spanish, means “duck”.

On the last evening of our trip to Santarém we sat on the decks watching the sunset over a break in the jungle. Acres of green wetlands stretched away, cut through with little channels and occasionally a water buffalo. A crescent moon appeared, accompanied by Venus. The boat hummed on, again the captain didn’t turn on any lights, just occasionally flashed a spotlight towards the dark waters ahead. Deciding to get to the bottom of the mystery of the imaginary river pirates, I asked permission to enter the bridge, darkening by the moment as night gathered. Receiving permission from the Captain, a stocky young man sitting rigidly upright on a wooden stool, I entered and asked in fractured Portuguese,

“Why have no lights?”

He clicked on a powerful spotlight that illuminated a narrow hallway of visibility before us. Piles of lily pads and islands of foliage took on a guilty aspect, caught in the act of floating harmlessly downstream.

“I have a light” he said. And switched off the beam.

A blanket of darkness returned, total blackness except for only a small gash torn by the crescent moon and a growing number of pinpricks poked through by stars.

These were the dunes of the Lencois Maranhenses. An epic sprawl of rumpled bedsheets, the origin of its name: 900 square miles of white and golden sands shifting and reforming as infinitely slow rolling waves, flooded by pools of fresh rain water. We visited at the beginning of the rainy season and already the pools were deep enough to swim in, a crisp refreshing contrast to the baking sand around us. In August, the peak of the rain and of tourism, the water would be three times as deep.

In order to reach the dunes we first had to take a bus from São Luis to the tiny town of Barreirinhas, a four hour drive. The owner of the Pousada we’d arranged to stay with picked us up in a boat from a sandy beach at the end of the little town’s main street.

From the Pousada, which was accessible by river or rutted sandy road, a 4×4 truck picked us up. It had been converted to an open sided bus. With a half dozen other tourists, we drove through deep sand, splashed through puddles that threatened to be lakes and were tossed around in the back like a cement mixer.

From Barreirinhas, the Rio Preguiças slices through sand dunes and mangrove forests and is dotted with picturesque shacks of straw and palm leaved made by fishermen.

At the mouth of the river, some 15 miles downstream, sits the even smaller town of Atins. If we’d felt isolated in Barreirinhas, it was here at the mouth of the Rio Preguiças that felt like the end of the earth. There were very few tourists were here to share the handful of brick fishermans houses and sandy little farms. It’s here by the sea that the Lencois begins its journey inland. We climbed to a dune overlooking a freshwater lagoon and the miles of desert stretching away from us. With the sun setting the white sand turned blue, then purple then the color of white before complete darkness.

We caught a truck back to Barreirinhas. Filled with locals it followed the one sandy road it could, through rivers deep enough to reach the windshield, over the shifting sands. At one point a dune had encroached so far over the road that the truck threatened to turn over as it attempted to cross. We held on tightly at an angle while the driver negotiated his sliding vehicle and finally pulled us over the hill.

Once back in Barreirinhas we made our way The dunes at Laguna Bonita which are high enough to get an overview of the flooded desert. We rented a quad bike this time, and led by a guide and his friend, roared out over the sandy roads, sliding back and forth, never quite pointing straight towards our direction. It was a challenge not to plant ourselves face down in any of the rivers we crossed, and indeed as I approached a bridge, my left tire seemed to want to leave its edge. There was nothing as sophisticated as a guardrail, so I yanked the handlebars back to center as hard as I could and stayed out of the stream.

Once atop the dune overlooking Laguna Bonita, the rest of the world fell away. We contemplated the scene before us. Untouched faces of sand, rolling into the distance. After we had our fill of the vista we ran down to the pools, the wind whistling in our ears, sand avalanches racing below our feet.

I might not have chosen Recifé, even knowing what I know now about the city I wouldn’t have thought about it as a place to spend a week puttering about on one’s own.

The beaches are lovely to look at but where they aren’t polluted by sewage runoff, they are plagued by shark attacks. I’m not sure these two things are unrelated. Fortunately Recife has Olinda. Olinda once was a more important city than neighboring Recife. Unfortunately the Dutch, of all people, burned it down in 1654. Don’t ask why these pot smoking clog wearing northmen did this, at a certain point in history the Dutch were real jerks. At least they were before they laid the foundations for the greatest city in the world: New Amsterdam.

Olinda never quite recovered after the sacking. While Recife went on to become a great trading city, Olinda quietly rebuilt, but it wasn’t enough. It would be absorbed into Recife’s suburbs eventually but not before reforming into a quiet 18th century village on a hill and then for a century, left alone.

I spent three days in the Recife neighborhood of Madelena with a Couchsurfing couple, Zé Cahue, his wife Cecelia and a cat with a taste for human flesh named Tigrinho. From their home I explored what little of Recife Magda and I hadn’t already discovered, which wasn’t much.

The couchsurfers were kind enough to invite me to Cecelia’s brother’s wedding so the three of us piled into the car and made a road trip into Pernambuco’s countryside. The wedding was in the bride’s hometown of ’Lemon Tree’ (Limoeiro). It was a standard ceremony, complete with syrupy English love songs like ‘Wind Beneath my Wings’ and the unfortunate choice of ‘Beauty and the Beast’. At the reception a great amount of alcohol was on offer. A waiter was passing out glasses full of Jack Daniels and coconut water. After a couple of these I decided it was a waste of both beverages.

At some point the live band, which had been playing an excellent mix of regional favorites, started in on Diggy Diggy Doo. Right then, perhaps predictably, the whole wedding took a bit of a turn south. Cecelia’s father got into a scuffle with the band and some things were broken. There was some shouting and some tears. The next morning, some cousins asked me if this ever happened during American weddings. I told them it happened all the time. In fact we don’t consider a wedding complete without first scuffling with the band.

I was risking getting too comfortable with Zé and Cecelia. Even Tigrinho had started biting me, which meant we’d become fast friends. I decided to pack up and move to Olinda, to see what life was like it this old village, and what the famously relaxed residents there did all day.

In Olinda I drew, swam in the little pool in the Pousada, sat in shadows eating ice cream, and was introduced to ‘Tapioca’, a savory meal of tapioca flour, cheese and shredded coconut. All this was mashed into a paddy and plopped onto a coal heated pan. Tapioca became my new favorite thing. The little dish was a speciality of a place called Alto de Sé, the site of the original settlement. Strategically situated on a hill, Alto de Sé overlooks the rest of Olinda, the Atlantic Ocean and in the distance, downtown Recife. No longer a fortified town, several ancient churches crowd the hill along with an absurdly out of place lookout tower that despite its horrific profile, offered incredible views. More attractive than the viewing tower was a silo shaped observatory that looked like it had been closed for a century. The view from the top might have been remarkable if anyone was interested in opening it.

The town below was a maze of little stone streets and alleys, tree filled plazas, and stately churches. It was almost as old and regal as Salvador, but felt infinitely safer – possibly because nobody could be bothered to commit a crime. Stores were closed all day. Some restaurants never opened during the week I spent there. I frequented an ice cream parlor where the proprietor snoozed soundly behind the counter. I tried to wake him to pay, but couldn’t, so I waited and watched the shadows crawl across the cobblestones outside.

On my last night in town, feeling a bit lonely and sad to be moving on from a week of extreme quiet and relaxation, I stopped by a little bar that served liqueurs made of local fruits. I opted for a caipirinha and sat on a stool outside, watching big bugs orbiting the orange glow of the wrought iron street lamps.

Amidst the voices of the patrons speaking Portuguese, I picked out some English words. One voice said to the other, very quietly,

“Would you like to join us?”

The other voice corrected the pronunciation, and then someone tapped me on the shoulder.

“Would you like to join us?” Asked a young man in heavily accented English.

I joined a table of four kids in their early 20′s, two of whom were English teachers and two who were their students. By the time we were through with introductions, we were laughing about various peculiarities in Olinda and admiring the number of beer cans they’d emptied. At some point the discussion turned to the beaches in the area and I admitted I hadn’t yet been to Boa Viagem, one of the most popular places to be eaten by sharks.

In a few moments time, we were in someone’s grandmother’s car, driving to Boa Viagem, the one sober English student at the wheel, the rest of us sloshing around in back. It occurred to me that this wasn’t the greatest idea and I may have become a victim of a typical South American kidnapping. Sure enough I was forced to drink several more beers on a dark sandy beach, under a blanket of stars. One of the English teachers went off with one of her students for an impromptu make-out session, while the rest of us stood down the beach jeering like 20 year olds and toasting their fledgling love.

I woke up with my face in my pillow, humid mid-day air pressing down on my back. Somehow I’d made it back to my pousada in Olinda, my pockets full of bottlecaps and my head full of hot cotton. In the afternoon I repacked and walked down to the bus stop that would take me back into the bustling streets of Recife, back to stay a final few nights with the couchsurfers. The uneven cobblestones were sun bleached and silent, as usual.

When Magda came back from New York, I took her to Olinda and gave her a tour of the little streets I’d spent my time roaming. I bought her tapioca at Alto de Sé, and we sat on the wall overlooking the town, dusk falling across overlapping red tile roofs. We noticed a light on in the observatory and stopped by for a look. It was actually open and we climbed to the top to look out on the orange glow of Recife and the black sea beyond.

The next day we said goodbye to Zé, Cecelia and Tigrinho, Olinda, Recife and Boa Viagem, and made our way north to the state of Marenhoa.

We questioned the wisdom of crowd sourcing though the moment we got off the bus. The nearby beaches seemed nice enough, but the area was typically modern urban Brazil, with new buildings that had been liberated from anything as quaint as design principles and plenty of chipped white tile finishes. The hostel itself was a warm little old house that had successfully staved off the challenges of developers, but had been taken over by artists who had painted every inch of it in vivid hues and folkartsy murals of Salvadoran life. Multicolored streamers hung from the bars in the windows.

We were shown a room by one of the hostel owners and, perhaps because we were so hot and tired after our trip from the airport, plopped down into it despite its darkness and general murk. There was no glass in the windowpane, only bars. The thought crossed my mind that this might make it rather easy for mosquitoes to get in, but I was too happy to unload my backpack to pursue the thought further.

We explored the beaches which would have been lovely had they not been strewn with trash. The vendors who relied on visitors to the beach for business sat under umbrellas and chatted while plastic bags that had recently held their wares rolled in the surf. As the sun set, a lighthouse situated on top of an old Portuguese fort was wrapped in orange light. It was lovely except for the two dozen multicolored straws washing back and forth across the sand.

At night as predicted, the bars on our windows failed as to stop an invading swarm of mosquitoes. I pictured a Brazil that would someday discover the pleasures of window-screens while tossing, turning and slapping at invisible attackers, all while watching night turn back into day.

When Brazilians talk about Salvador their eyes wander skyward and they smile. Ah Salvador, they sigh. We were excited to see what elicited this reaction so we hopped on a bus that would deliver us into the old town on our first full day there. As usual getting onto a Brazilian bus is akin to crawling inside of a tumbledryer and we clung on tightly to stay upright.

One enters Salvador via a huge elevator that takes visitors from the port directly up a hill into the center of the old town. The port sits just below the city and is filled with massive antique 18th and 19th warehouses that have been hollowed out by time and neglect. I lowered my expectations for the rest of the city. The elevator is famous in Brazil and is sort of an attraction unto itself. It costs 32¢ or some ridiculously low amount, but only two of the four large cars worked. Once the crowded car reached the top of the hill, we spilled out into a colonial plaza surrounded by stately buildings representing architectural eras of the last several centuries.

Salvador’s old town was beautiful. Plazas like the first one we stepped onto, lined with breeze-whipped palms, overlooked the Bay of All Saints. Dozens of narrow streets lined with stout mansions and arched doorways curved around hilly terrain and disappeared from sight. Wrought iron second story balconies protected wood slatted doors, closed against the heat of the day. Paint chipped and peeled revealing older generations of coats that had done the same.

This city, like Ouro Preto, was hardly the withered corpse of a once brave colonial outpost, it was alive with music and drums and vendors selling regional delicacies. The population was overwhelmingly of African ancestry which was apparent not just by the people but by the colorful clothes, elaborately wrapped turbans and giant hoop skirts that many of the female vendors wore. We’d seen almost the exact outfits worn in Namibia.

Troops of drummers roamed the stone alleys, pounding out complex rhythms and shaking the old roof tiles.

We found a few hostels in the center of town that looked really comfortable, had air-conditioning and windows filled with actual panes of glass. One even had a pool. We kicked ourselves. Staying in the center of Ouro Preto had been one of the nicest stays of our time in Brazil, and here we were scared out into the suburbs by rumors of the old town’s shadiness. We considered marching back and retrieving our bags, but the thought of the effort of pulling everything onto the bus stopped us short. Instead we grumbled while climbing up an down cobblestone streets, occasionally catching a glimpse of the sea through the wide open windows of a crumbling, charming townhouse. The tattoo of drums thumped from some unseen plaza.

Feeling down about our hostel, we decided to turn our day around and make the most of its location. We suited up for the beach, determined to overlooked the waterborne rubbish. Of the three main beaches at the base of the old sea wall, one was oddly empty. The sand was comparatively clean and spindly, picturesque palms leaned out over the water. The towers of an old section of fortress were silhouetted against the evening sky. The sea was thick and salty and we floated effortlessly on its surface. Suddenly, from the low of regret we were enjoying Salvador immensely. Then someone on the beach let the breeze catch a white plastic bag and it sailed away, skipping across the waves. My mood darkened again.

In the evening we returned to the old town, attending a hyper-touristic ‘spectacular’ where the highlights of the region’s Afro-Brazilian culture were sampled out. Capoeira, Candomblé, and a guy juggling bowls of fire were the thrilling highlights. The fire juggler had me glancing around for the emergency exits, of which there were none. There were plenty of flammable materials though hanging from the ceiling.

It was prepackaged and extremely entertaining. We walked out of the theater into the orange light of wall mounted lamps and glanced around. Except for the tourists leaving the theater, the streets were empty. Except for the crooked road leading back to the main square, the streets were dark. Policemen with thick vests and automatic rifles blocked the smaller alleys that during the day led to charming squares and hidden churches. Now they led only into darkness. Salvador at night was in lockdown and we started to realize why few people recommended staying in the center. Even if the streets were safer than they appeared, the presence of guards wearing little black berets and no-go blocks just next door might be disconcerting.

On our final night in Salvador our hostel arranged a trip to an actual candomblé ceremony. These are a popular attraction in town as there are dozens of ceremonies per night but it would be very difficult for a tourist to find one by themselves. Unlike churches, Candomblé rituals are performed in homes, in outbuildings and in the favelas that ring the old city. In brief, candomblé is a mixture of African and Indian religions with a dusting of Catholicism for good measure. The Yamja ceremony we saw in Uruguay was a kind of candomblé, where the faithful gather to pray and hopefully slip into a trance. The lucky ones become possessed by spirits, who for an evening return to earth and enjoy pleasures of the flesh. That sounds sexier than it is, as far as I can tell these earthly pleasures mainly involve smoking cigarettes.

We went with two Americans from Tacoma and a self described Candomblé scholar (Our driver called him “professor”) He described what we’d be seeing as we were driven around in big loops, perhaps to make it seem like we weren’t just going over the hill. He talked about adults reverting to childhood, and one delightful incident where a ‘child’ threw jelly at some tourists.

The woman from Tacoma, who seemed a bit nervous about the whole evening in the first place perked up.

“Jelly?”
“Yes Jelly!” Laughed the professor. “And things like this, it can be very funny.”
“But what does jelly have to do with it?” She pressed.
“Nothing!” The professor snapped. “Forget about the jelly!”

When we arrived, rolling down the narrow favela alley, we approached a lopsided door punched into the side of a low whitewashed wall. Our guide knocked and a woman wearing white answered, ushering us in. We were led past little rooms where candles burned, shadows dancing against plaster walls. At a doorway through which we could see more white-clad figures laying on the floor, the woman indicated we should take our shoes off and enter. Magda and I were separated as the men took a seat on a bench against one wall, the women took a seat across the room.

The majority of the faithful were black people with two very metrosexual looking men with big silver watches being the exception. They beat drums along with the rest of the group. Other than their race they seemed not at all out of place. An old gentleman, dressed as impeccably in white as the rest of the room, led the prayers. Call and response. Call and response. The faithful circled the room, shuffling. A young man who looked to be a bit mentally challenged spoke out of turn at one point, and the old man threw him to the ground, shouting and cuffing his ear. The drums continued. The shuffling continued. Two young women lay on the floor side by side, their eyes wide, their mannerisms theatrically childish. I waited for them to start throwing jelly.

The professor leaned over and whispered, “They are like children.”

I leaned back, “I got that.”

The professor checked his watch.

The evening continued like this. The air was as stifling as the inside of a locker room. Candles guttered in the corners near makeshift alters to Indian and African gods. Strips of flammable white paper hung from the low ceiling. Once again I scouted the exits. There were two. A number of Jesus statuettes crowded a shelf, arms outstretched, fighting each other for a better view.

Then the possessions began. Like the first kernels of popcorn to pop, one then another member started grunting and stumbling. A young man adopted a swagger, and someone lit him a cigarette. He strutted about, approximating the gait of an older, wiser man.

The professor leaned over again, “He’s possessed.”

“Thanks.” I said. This professor certainly knew his stuff.

Soon some very old women who had been sitting with Magda, popped up off of the bench, rejuvenated. A lit cigar was given to one of them. They twirled and danced, bare feet making a pleasing rasping sound against the concrete floor. They circled the room, hugging the spectators. The woman from Tacoma, who’d been looking intently at her feet for most of the night, looked uncomfortable and confused when it was her turn to embrace.

The drumming continued. The metrosexuals seemed to avoid possession but some of the other drummers were carried away by either the rhythm or a rhythm loving spirit. I might have asked the professor but he was texting someone.

At some point, maybe when the professor decided it was too hot, he stood up and motioned for us all to leave. The five of us filed out of the front door and shut it behind us, the drums still reverberating within.

On the way home, four of us discussed interesting aspects of the ritual and some strikingly similarities to black churches in the States. The woman from Tacoma commented aloud that her feet were atypically swollen. I really wished someone had thrown some jelly at her after all.