4/28/08 Nighttime on the Cezar Brelaz back from Obidos

I think it was around 4 AM this morning. I was splayed out on a wooden floor, face first with my ankles uphill and my head down. I was hurting with, as a summary, exhaustion.

It was the lower deck of a passenger ferry that was docked in Obidos – the Ana Beatriz. Mike had seen some of the dock workers go up there to sleep, so I had gone to take the first shift of sleep. There was a handful of dock workers sleeping around me on the floor. My mind, so in need of sleep, was in survival mode. Where was my backpack and my water? How would I be sure to wake up? Should I worry about any of these guys lying around me? At least there were no bugs crawling on me there. I didn’t want to think about what may have happened on the wood floor I was laying on, but those thoughts did occasionally enter.

But I did somehow sleep. The phrase “heavy sleep” describes what it felt like. My body and my eyelids became so heavy that nothing could go fast.

Mike woke me up at 5 AM. The Lider do Mar, going to Santarem, just arrived. The guy sitting next to us for hours before I slept was getting on – it was his boat. It was not ours, but at least it was a chance to get to Santarem.

By this time, though, people’s priorities had changed – from going to Santarem to getting to sleep. There was nothing we had to be in Santarem for. Yes, we confirmed the boat was going to Santarem, but it was going to Monte Alegre afterwards. Could we get on? They let us jump on. With the chaos of one of these boats and bad Portuguese, we walked upstairs, saw a mass of humanity and hammocks but no one in charge. Back downstairs, Steve found someone authoritative who was working on the lock for a camarote (sleeping cabin). He was saying something and Steve was asking for my help.

“What did you ask?” I wanted to know.

“Nothing,” Steve said, in lingering but lesser frustration from a long night.

I redirected to the person apparently in charge, “Can we use these tickets to get to Santarem?”

“That’s not this boat,” he responded after looking at them. It didn’t answer my question exactly. He then continued working on the lock, so I took it as a “no.”

Behind me, Mike and Mary stood amid a nest of hammocks going every direction, more packed than any boat we’d seen before. There was almost no room to stand, much less sit or lay down and sleep. The decision to make was clear – take this boat to Santarem for 6 hours of standing or wait some more, with a clear finality of seeing Paulo, our host, in the morning and getting his help. It was a pretty easy decision for me, despite some inner instincts saying to always push on – I wanted to wait it out on the dock of Obidos. So did the others.

I didn’t go back to my wood floor. With no one left but us, the benches were available to lay on. Laying there counting the minutes before we could do something to find Paulo, that’s when I really missed my wife and kids. With this story, the kids will never want to travel with me again, but I’m glad I get to go hug them when I get home.

With a little coordinated scouting, we left notes for Paulo in places we thought he might see them (we didn’t know where he lived because we stayed at his parents’ house). He came to get us at around 6:15, having seen the note on his car. The engine on our boat, the Cezar Brelaz, had stopped working, blah, blah, blah. All I wanted to hear was that I could sleep on a bed for a while and for Paulo to assure us that we’d get back to Santarem sometime. I heard both and then crashed.

Monday After Sleep

Upon waking, Paulo said we’d actually go back to Santarem on the Ana Beatriz, the boat whose floor I was sleeping on a few hours earlier. He made no guarantees of a camarote. Lunch at 1 PM tasted exceptionally good after a night of really no dinner beyond lots of beer.

We then rested at home until Paulo got another break from work. Mary and I went with him to a store, then his school (with a nice air-conditioned computer facility with broad band), then to the Obidos museum. It had pictures of his dad and grandfather, both of whom having been mayors. As we walked out of the museum, he got mayor treatment. Lealberto (a Rotarian who ran the store we had gone to) rode up on a motorcycle and told us the Cezar Brelaz was coming! In 15 minutes! We walked faster, Mary struggling to keep up. I told her to get Mike and Steve ready as we went by the house toward the travel agency. A guy on the street told us the boat was leaving at 5:30 – half an hour. The travel agent echoed the same thing. But everyone in town seemed to know of the Americans who slept outside all night waiting for the boat.

We gathered our bags and raced to the dock three blocks away. We would be the only passengers, the boat having transferred all the others last night when it broke down (probably to the Lider do Mar, which was so overfull). On the boat was us, the crew, and about 30 motorcycles.

We pulled away from the dock at about 5:45, just before sunset. Party music sang from an amplifier upstairs and a couple kids were grabbing their clothes from lines strung across the top deck. They would dance in between each set of clothes they picked up. I looked ahead to the endless horizon of the Amazon River. I walked to the aft and wondered about the story of the boat last night. I remembered staring upstream frequently last night looking in the dark for this boat. Finally, I looked back at Obidos. The colorful angular buildings cut a small swatch out of the surrounding jungle. The structures climbed from the white boats at port up the hills, but none towered over the surrounding jungle. They stood out, but not over.

That made our stay in Obidos a total of 61 hours. “All you do in Obidos,” they had told us in Manaus, “is eat, drink, fish, and sleep.” Yeah, that is about right, but it is also the short version…

Saturday, Our First Day in Obidos

Our first morning in Obidos, Saturday the 26^th, was hot. The sun, like everywhere else around here, was direct, but here it was God Light, making the land a bit more colorful, reminding me of Guanajuato in Mexico. The sidewalks, lojas (stores), praca (square), houses, and churches all beamed their own identities amongst each other. Photos came easily.

That afternoon, we piled into Paulo’s green 4-door sedan on our way out of downtown Obidos to get lunch in Curucamba. The state road of 8 km turned into a state mud pit obstacle course at around 5 km. A dog took a mud bath on the right side of the road as we navigated the left side a good 2 meters lower.

Paulo’s English isn’t great. He is one of those people I like speaking to in Portuguese because he finds it a lot easier to speak Portuguese. But does like having people to talk to in English, so he was also a good guide for us. He could say things that we’d understand, but they wouldn’t have the full connotation. For instance, he said we were “going to Curucamba for lunch.” That was like saying we were going to the Super Bowl just to get a bag of peanuts. Yeah, we had lunch, but that wasn’t the main attraction.

We pulled up to a wooden bridge, the stream running under it and forming the restaurant. A couple tables at partially submerged in the stream. A wooden walking bridge also was partially underwater. Roofed shelters had tables high and dry but with obvious openings to go in and get out of the stream. No one was there but us and the help! For 5 reais (about $3) a plate, we got a few plates of (very good) fish and rice, some chicken, and some beef for “Stevie”, as he is called here and as we have started calling him.

Shoes off, we walked on the partially submerged bridge to our shelter. We ate, drank, and floated down the stream – all repeated over and over again. It was Mike’s birthday, so we sang for him. We played Uno, told jokes, and told stories. We drank 14 bottles of Nova Schin beer, each one probably a liter. We talked about books, politicians, and health care. Mike and Stevie picked on each other. We talked about movies and music. I translated some of the craziness for Paulo. Some of it didn’t need translation. It was 4 or 5 hours doing what you’re supposed to do when surrounded by friends, nature, and a supply of alcohol. We drank two more bottles of beer on our way to leave. Mike wrote in chalk on the pool table, “For a good time, call Steve Molitoris at 215-555-BALLS.”

A couple hours later, we presented Rotary pins and a district flag to Paulo and three other members of the Obidos Rotary. We didn’t hide our sophomoric stories of the afternoon, but our sophomoric selves were a little tired. In fact we talked of business, family, and philosophy. Paulo’s wife, Marilene, particularly passed this on: “Tudo vale a pena se a alma nao e pequena – Everything is worth it if your soal is big enough.” She spoke of the special Carnaval in Obidos – Carnapauxis, the “pauxis” part being a special reference to the povo (people) of the area. It was her favorite Carnaval and all spoke fondly of it. There is much pride in Brazilian people and I could tell that Marilene had much pride for the povo of Obidos particularly.

Sunday, Our Supposed Last Day in Obidos

After 29 hours in Obidos, it was 9 AM on Sunday. Things began again. We tried to tour the downtown, only a couple blocks from the uptown we toured the day before. But the fish processing plant was closed. They had two large catfish with remarkable patterns in them. We looked at them for five minutes, pinched ourselves for the opportunity to enjoy standing around looking at two dead fish in the middle of the Amazon, then moved on.

The People’s Market was a decrepit wooden structure on the edge of a little inlet off the river. Inside was a market of meat and meat and fish and maybe some other things. It wasn’t the cleanest, but what struck me was that the end of the market away from the street – it was flooded with water. People went on.

We got a little tour in a little boat on the little inlet. The driver had a little issue bring the boat to us through a not-so-little tangled mess of floating plants piled up along the side of the inlet. I had the distinct impression that no one had ever gotten a boat ride from there before. But I also realized that no one did exactly the same things there every day. Nature and nurture forced people to improvise every day there.

“Just one” was Paulo’s way of ordering beer all day the day before. As we got out of our little boat ride, Paulo was there with another beer. I helped him finish it. Then we were off with his wife, daughters, and two Rotarians, Mario and Celeste.

Mike and I were in the back of Mario’s homemade truck. (The thing shifted gears like I have never seen before with no obvious logic to how he did it.) Mike tried surfing the bed of the truck. I got used to jumping as a good way to get out. It rained on us, at times pretty hard, but the heat and the wind were enough to keep us from soaking.

The Swamp

The first stop was Paulo’s uncle’s house, about 7 km down the 8 km road to Curucamba. He had gotten electricity for the first time the day before. They already had a TV and a TV guide. They were cutting up a turtle for a churrasco when we arrived. Chickens ran wild all over the place. Birds that walked like ducks, talked like ducks, but only kinda looked like ducks ran with the chickens.

One of his uncle’s workers led us out across the fields to hike. Marilene was dressed up in dressy platform shoes, short skirt, designer sunglasses, large bracelets and ankle bracelets, and a jeweled belly button ring. As the trail became an elevated wooden path, she continued. The bridge ended and we had to walk through water to another elevated wooden path. She walked through the water with the heels on! The image was so contradictory. She did turn back when the wooden path became unstable, but most of the rest of us continued.

The path led through a swamp. The wood creaked, cracked, and sometimes perilously slipped around. The swamp made eerie sounds. My god, there had to be some kind of dangerous man-eating creature in there or Hollywood has no credibility. We walked for 5-10 minutes and no one fell in. At the end was a larger platform on the edge of a stream, the stream that actually comes from Curucamba. The wood still was about to fall apart and Mike almost ate it when a very loose board popped up as he stepped on it. Rusty nails were everywhere. I decided that swimming was safer than walking on the platform for very long. People seemed to watch me from the platform as though I was a circus performer sticking my head in a lion’s mouth.

Of course, it was all fine. Walking back on the same elevated wooden path over the swamp was the bigger deal. You just can’t count on Uncle Sam rules of safety and handicap access in such places.

Curucamba, The Second Time

How you arrange your seating is such a big deal in situations like this. Paulo and I are the primary intermediaries in the group – the two who speak both languages. When we arrived at Curucamba for Round 2, we didn’t get the seating quite right. I was at the end tucked in with the GSE team. Paulo was better positions but alone in trying to build interconversation. We moved shortly to another location and mixed far better.

It was also easier there to play Uno. A game played on as Marilene and I engaged in a second philosophical conversation. Her depth of thought and of Portuguese easily outshone mine. I did have to protest her fatalistic belief that Brazil would only be treated as a colony, especially by a nationalistic America. With similar underlying beliefs – “peace and love” as she said in English – we did differ in extension. And maybe it is my longtime inability to adopt any simple philosophy. I don’t think that all people or even most people are one way or another. They all emphasize different emotions, thoughts, drives, and abilities. Building a philosophy or moral code without explicit understanding of human variability seems to lead to generalizations that people take too far too often. I couldn’t express that in Portuguese and I apologize to whomever it harms. Marilene and I may not have seen eye to eye, but we sat and discussed face to face some things that did make me – at least me – think. Whether you agree on how much your head or heart should rule – something we disagreed upon – it was good to use a little of the head.

Nightfall

After many more “just one’s” and more swimming, we only had a few hours before our schedule 8 pm boat back to Santarem. Before then, we wanted to give Mike an opportunity to drop his clothes and soccer balls with needy kids in Obidos. Not just “drop”, but actually interact. Paulo led us to the part of Obidos to do that. We jumped out of the back of the truck and it began.

The people knew they weren’t saved by knights on white horses. They got a few things to help out. The kids would smile, the parents were quietly appreciative. A couple kids loved their stuff. Some kids didn’t seem to know what to do, especially one little boy with his soccer ball who had very subtle expressions of joy, fear, and confusion. “I just wish I had more,” Mike said. You can always say that, though, about a lot of life.

We arrived at 7 pm at the docks for our 8 pm boat. At the bar right next door, “Just one” rang out at least 8 or 9 times as Paulo, Steve, Mary, and I drank beer as it got late with no Cezar Brelaz showing up. At 9 pm, I suggested Paulo bring his wife home. The DVD music video wasn’t entertaining anyone any more. Marilene, Mike, and Mary all got rest in the car. Paulo, Steve, and I shut down the bar approaching midnight. I walked around to stay awake. The boat, Cidade de Oriximina, was in port, I noted.

Finally, Paulo said his good-bye, leaving us on the dock under shelter with 15 or 20 other people. That was midnight. My water was running low, as was my energy. A TV was on and showed various shows from Garden State to some vampire movie to random Brazil novelas. Stevie, Mary, and Mike mostly sat and tried to sleep. Stevie never tried but sat patiently. I walked – or paced – looking up into the dark of the up-river Amazon for boats. I sat on the ground for a while and slept for maybe 15 minutes, the bugs creeping around my ankles and anything that got near the ground.

At about 3 am, a boat came in. It wasn’t ours. A guy asked where we were going – I said Santarem. He said we should have gotten on the Juli Bel, which went by at around 12:30 or so. Mike was getting testy, Stevie was losing patience, Mary was frustrated. Somehow there was an effort to get on this boat, regardless. It was not going to Santarem, I already knew. Mike kept trying to talk to people and I had gone back to shelter to stay dry. He said he needed me because he didn’t understand what people were saying. “They are going to Oriximina!” I said, not calmly, wanting to make clear that getting on a random boat was not a good option. I talked to the guy who told me I should have gotten on the Juli Bel. He at least told me that the Cezar Brelaz hadn’t gone by. Where was it? They didn’t know. Steve complained about, “Don’t they have a radio? Is this how rock stars get treated?” One of the few people remaining with us was also trying to go to Santarem, but on the Lider do Mar. That sounded like an option for us.

That was when Mike saw the dock workers sneaking up to sleep on the Ana Beatriz. I don’t know why I was the one who went up there. I remember finding out that the Ana Beatriz would leave at 8:30 pm the next day. Then I remember entering survival mode.

We survived. In the big picture sense, calling it survival seems overly dramatic. We’re now in a camarote, almost alone on a boat to Santarem. The boat had to perch itself on a little island to wait out a big storm. Not doing that would have been more dangerous than anything we endured since 8 pm last night.

4/25/08 7:15 PM

After days of being a tourist, thinking like a tourist, and having the excitement of a being a tourist, a long enough trip wears you down so that you have to live. You can no longer just thrive on the highs and ignore the lows of being there. You do have to take care of needs.

Like sleep, for one thing. I slept very little in Manaus and felt fine. Even the first couple days here, I slept a little more, but not meeting the natural quota of 7-8 hours per night most nights. The last two days have been life catching up.

On Wednesday, Mike was off, way off. Awaking hourly through the night to vomit, he spent the day in bed. He got a shot in the butt from some cute nurse named Evelyn, we heard, at around 10 AM and after too many hours of massive heaving. But the nurse wasn’t cute enough to keep him awake. He slept through most of the day, occasionally drinking from rehydration salts by his bed. The cause of his pain was never clear, but we guessed it was 3 glasses of milk the night before and maybe the malaria meds.

For me on Thursday, I think it was more the heat. I awoke Thursday morning feeling just hot and not quite with it. It was the first night we had no rain to cool us off. I may have dehydrated over the heat of a few days, too. I persisted through our excursions of the day, but misery was my company until returning home around 4 pm. Then I had about 14 hours of sleep, awaking every couple hours to douse my head with water and to drink water with vitamins in it. By morning, I had heartburn, but felt a lot cooler, literally.

Mary seems to have escaped the drag that Mike and I felt. Steve dealt with stomach cramps for a few days until Mike and I started feeling ill. Maybe we all are now here long enough to say we’re living here.

Wednesday

Alas, we are living, but we still play the role of tourists. Mike’s day off was a trip to the Bosque, a preserved secondary rain forest owned by Steve Alexander, an American living in Brazil for 30 years. (Xará is the Portuguese word for namesake, so I will call him Xará to avoid confusion with Steve.) Part of the excitement of this visit was definitely the journey. Rain-soaked state roads forced us to drive down what usually is a bike trail. A large truck passed us going the other way and got stuck in the mud and plants. We could do nothing to help him and were not sure if he would get out. As Xará explained about the roads, “State planning to maintain the roads is good, but execution is very bad.”

The Bosque itself is mostly a huge battleground for nutrients. His trail winds through trees and plants and fungi and insects and vines, all on top of each other. The ground is filled with organic material recently fallen off something. Each living organism thrives on the excrement or the death of another. The sounds of birds, howler monkeys, falling branches, bugs, rain drops, and just plants brushing against each other give the jungle the feel of tension. It’s not a peaceful walk. Life is battling fiercely and I could feel it.

This was quite separate from the area around his museum. There, he had more isolated plants with labels and separate planting areas. It was like a zoo for the wild plants in the jungle. Please Don’t Feed the Acai.

Xará established this place to be a haven. The area around it is getting bought up by gauchos looking to take down the forest and plant crops. We passed by a large field of soybeans on our way. He never mentioned the phrase, but Xará epitomizes it: “Think globally, act locally.” We in North America think about preserving the rain forest, but it does take locals to act upon it.

Back at Fundacao Esperanca (FE), Ron is a local acting upon some of the local needs. FE was established as mostly a health clinic. It is a non-governmental organization, or an NGO, that gets money from various sources and does work to benefit the community. NGOs are what big foundations talk about as implementers of the big ideas of big foundations. But FE is a small NGO, one that, as Ron puts it, “can’t get the fly-on-the-mouth picture” to draw big funds. They survive through organizations like Rotary, and from fees from students at IESPES and some patients. On the other hand, they are struggling to fill their new medical ward with equipment because they got a grant to pay for it based on a 2-to-1 exchange rate of Brazilian reais-to-dollars, but the dollar has gotten so weak that they can’t get the stuff. So even acting locally requires thinking globally.

Thursday

The Beatles reunited on Thursday to continue our tour. But I will say that this Beatle would have preferred to be back in bed or in a cold shower.

The major destination for the day was to be the Hydroelectric Dam about 80 km out of Santarem on the Curaua River. But normal bureaucratic rules applied (and I won’t say Brazilian, though it may be fair to be that specific) and made this rather difficult. It took a while to get in the gate, then it wasn’t clear where to go as multiple people told us multiple things until we ran into the security contingent that said we shouldn’t be going anywhere without them. So they let us then drive without them back to the downstream end of the dam, where we met them again. Upon getting out of the car, they said that only Everaldo and I – the two of us wearing long pants – could go in for a tour. They were very apologetic and even put up with our request for a picture of all of us wearing hard hats. Mike, Steve, and Mary all stayed outside and played soccer with the snakes while Everaldo and I visited the inside of a small dam. I won’t go into the details of what I saw inside, not for any bureaucratic reason (if I tell you, I have to kill you), but just because it’s something to see, not to describe.

No one was hungry for our planned stop at Vila Esperanca for lunch. Others drank as I tried to find the position that least bothered my ailing body. The others got a soccer ball and played with the town residents. Their days often involve sitting in front of the store waiting for something. Our group brought a lot of smiles and the people thanked us for it. When the rain came, I got out and soaked myself in it, feeling much better.

Random side trip: Right before we left the village, a guy offered a ride on a truck, not any old truck, but what looked like a hand-made truck, cobbled together with various parts, the motor sitting in the very front with nothing to hide it and sitting partially in the view of the driver. It had a rip cord to start the motor and a 5-gallon red plastic fuel tank above it. It felt like a giant go-cart, with me sitting on the front left wheel well, hanging on to the roof and the engine block to keep from falling out.

In our own rented and much more boring Fiat, we then proceeded on to Permatec. We didn’t know what they did there when we arrived. We were the ignorant ones who, maybe due to my lack of Portuguese skills, remained ignorant for much of the tour. But I really don’t think it was my Portuguese. Either they assumed we generally knew or they intentionally kept us in the dark. Not knowing, though, made it better.

I’ll make it short because it really isn’t that complex, but the tour took a good hour as we tried to figure out what they were really making. They start off with plants, Curaua, related to pineapple. The leaves contain fiber that they strip out, dry, sort, cut, bale, and weight. Guys walk around wearing face masks to avoid getting too much fiber in their lungs; we walked around without them because we were tough, stupid, and/or not there long enough to worry about it. Then the fibers get mixed with polypropylene fibers according to different recipes. These are liquefied, pressed, folded, pressed again, cut, trimmed, then heated and pressed before rolling. The final rolls contain fiber mixtures- black or red or pale red usually – about 1-2” thick to meet their clients’ specifications. These are then cut to the sizes their clients require.

So what are these fiber pads? You’ve seen them often. They’re in your car seats, roofs, trunks, and doors as padding and insulation. The natural fibers are much cheaper than polypropylene, so the blending really shaves cost for some cars.

With a stop at the supermarket for food for my newly-hungry friends, we were almost home so that I could sleep, drink, and be weary. If anything else happened on that Thursday, I missed it.

Friday

Today was the day of our boat to Obidos. I sit now on the boat, a couple hours into the voyage. Upon awaking this morning, we heard that the boat was leaving at 1:30. So we had to wrap up our morning tours by around noon. Then we heard – after coming back from our tours – that the boat left at 4pm. Upon arriving at the boat, we heard it would leave at 5:50 pm. Once on the boat, we didn’t leave until 7pm. We are now scheduled to arrive in Obidos around 5 am. We’ll see.

In our rushed morning agenda, then, we saw a wood mill and the Museu Dica Frazao. The wood mill you can imagine. The museum you may try, but you will only get a partial sense.

Dica Frazao is a woman of nearly 88 years of age, but full of life and very talented, being unique in her ability to take wood and make clothing, elegant, colorful, unique clothing, clothing that a pope or a queen would wear. When she dies, the ability dies with her. That ability has been featured in articles and expositions around the world. She goes to NY in a month or two. Mike asked her to marry him. She turned him down by never answering but still led him around by hand from exhibit to exhibit, stealing a kiss on the lips when Mike thought it would be a kiss on the cheek. Just another woman in another port, we joked.

We now head to our next port – Obidos.

4/23/08 6:40 AM

I realized yesterday that much of my Portuguese is either positive or neutral. I didn’t know how to talk about negative things. I didn’t know how to ask whether Everaldo was “concerned” about environmental issues. I didn’t know how to say “argue” or “hatred”. I could say “pretty flowers” but not “disgusting bathroom.”

Now I’m a bit torn about looking such words up. How much would the new vocabulary also change the way I was thinking and feeling?

This morning, I awoke at 5 am to Mike vomiting (vomitando or provocando in Manaus, words we ironically did learn before). He said he had done it five other times already that night. He’s probably going to be ok – some reaction to food or milk, we’re guessing. But it may be time to at least learn the word for “sick.”

4/22/08 10pm Santarem, Fundacao Esperanca

Don’t be enchanted, enthralled, or infatuated. Enjoy and experience – the enchantment lasts longer.

I remember writing up Australia being too excited, too anxious to chase the next adventure, not letting the experience serve on its own and satisfy my day. It was like having a great date and so desperately awaiting the next that it can’t live up to it, leaving things to seem hollow afterwards.

I fell asleep last night starting to dream of the next adventure rather than replaying the last one in its true color. Documenting either just facts of our trip or just emotions does injustice and I try here not to get carried away with either. But it is sometimes hard to convey the quality of the day.

Today was such a day. It was a quality day, one of tremendous positive emotion. I was bouncing around as much as yesterday, but why? I really don’t know. There was no adventure and there was no single destination that mattered. It was all a series of almost unrelated little visits, conversation, comfort, and discomfort. Maybe you’ll get it

• First, we got on a bus with Everaldo, who was our guide for the day. Everaldo is an administration student, a Mormon, and someone who can’t swim and doesn’t eat fish. What is he doing living here? His family came here recently and he followed them here. Anyway, he got us on the back of the bus. We stood there, not having paid, a cashier sitting with a cash box in front of us. When we were to leave the bus, we’d have to go through a turnstile and pay him. Odd system.

• We nearly got plowed over by various cars and motorcycles.

• We met Jane (pronounced Janey and maybe spelled some other way), Everaldo’s niece and a tourism student at IESPES. I said some greeting in Portuguese so fast that it shocked me.

• We saw the Museum of Sacred Arts. The guy spoke English but I had a hard time understanding him the whole time. I think I woke up stupid.

• We visited the blue church next door. I read the story on the placard saying why it was there and then started conveying it to Mary. Apparently, we were just told that story over in the museum. As I say, I woke up stupid.

• Steve desperately wanted to call his wife. We stopped in a place to buy a phone card, but they didn’t sell ones to call internationally. Frustration levels rose and fell as we came up with various options to allow him to call home. Mike bought him a toy cell phone to make fun of him or make him feel better. I think it did both.

• We walked through the old part of town to where a cross marked the early establishment of the city. The side story was that the area was now a haven for prostitutes at night. As we walked out toward the pier, Everaldo said that we passed several prostitutes on our way. They must not have been very good looking or trying very hard because I didn’t notice a one.

• A fisherman caught a piranha off the pier and held it out for us to look at. Both Steve and I had seen the movie “Piranha” as kids and been a bit traumatized. It was kinda nice to see the fish get what’s coming to it.

• Jane, as I said, is a tourism major, but she spoke very little English. I was rude at one point and told her she should for the benefit of getting good jobs. It was one of those times where I started saying it with confidence that I could say it in a positive way. But, hell, it was in Portuguese and I think it came out badly. Oh well. She thanked me at the end of the day for helping her with English. She was probably just being nicer than I.

• We climbed a huge staircase to get to a good view of the city. It was a two-story viewing tower with a spiral staircase to the top and a very unfriendly guard watching all who went up. Apparently, he mainly keeps people from making out up there, but Mike tested him by climbing on the railings and threatening to write his name in the wood. I was shocked that the guard took our picture, though without even a hint of a smile. At one point, he buried his head in hands, seriously tired, seriously bored, or something else serious.

• Back down the stairs, two Brazilians were making out on a bench. Mike was then desperately looking for someone to make out with – Everaldo, Jane, Mary, Steve! – just to be art imitating life. When Steve fell and hurt his crotch trying to play along and I had to explain the abbreviation “PDA (public display of affection)” to Jane, we found ourselves laughing a lot.

• Lunch. Jane explained “Galinha” as a synonym for a guy with lots of hens. This is the local nickname for someone like Mike. Mike said he wanted a “cheap massage.” Everaldo, who insists he only speaks one language – Portuguese – knows enough English to be dangerous. Upon hearing a “cheap massage,” he whispered to me that cheap massages here are given by gay men. I got to translate that one and we laughed.

• Somehow, we decided to walk all the way back to Fundacao Esperanca (FE) in the bright sun of early tropical afternoon. Everaldo said we were crazy and we thought he’d leave with Jane and have us do it on our own, but they both came. Mary and Jane had heels on. It was the hottest most humid day we’ve had and it was about 4 km back. Crazy.

• Marcia told me before I came to buy a hammock, called in Portuguese a red. On our jaunt back to FE, several merchants had them, so I looked around and found a blue one. In the end, then, I bought a blue red.

• Mike bought a machete in a leather sheath. We all thought it was crazy, but what’s new? He asked to take a woman’s picture while gesturing his arms and holding a big knife. She said ok. Everyone laughed.

• The streets of Santarem flood every couple years. It’s not like New Orleans after Katrina because they’re more ready for it here. They do have berms to try to protect against it, but the river sometimes rises too high and merchants are forced to carry their stuff to higher ground.

• Everaldo and I walked ahead of the rest of the group. We’d hang out under the rare shade tree. Mike would be running around like a cartoon character looking for pictures. Steve, Mary, and Jane marched toward us in the blazing fury of midday sun, right next to the world’s largest river.

• There was a boat called “Filadelfia.” There was a boat for cows and we had to imagine whether cows get seasick and what would happen if they did. There was a boat called “Karolina do Norte.” Nearly all the boats were owned by different people. We had to help a guy push his car into a parking spot.

• There was a huge yard of giant cut trees, stacked 15-20 ft high. These were illegally cut but then the criminals were caught and the wood stashed to be given away slowly to people who had to cut it and use it.

• The countdown of blocks to FE – 6, 5, 4, 3, 2, 1 – was really long. We looked for shade every chance we could. Upon arriving, we bought drinks for Everaldo and Jane for torturing them. After hearing all day that Mike speaks “portunol”, a mix of Portuguese and Espanol, Everaldo just blurted out, “You speak really bad espanol, too.” We all laughed.

• We got an internet connection in our rooms. We got pictures from Mary’s camera on different machines. We emailed friends and family. Steve got giddy when he actually connected his laptop to the internet.

That could have been just an ordinary day. Or even a boring one. It was far from it.

4/21/08 7:45 PM Dia de Tiradentes

We prepared for today. We really did. We bought sandwich preparations, apples, eggs that we hard-boiled, and lots of water. We got two bottles since Mary and I both had bottles we could fill, plus a huge 5 L bottle. And Mike brought his camelbak, filled with water. We were going to the National Forest. That’s what it was called on our schedule – National Forest of Tapajos (Flona).

Now erase any picture in your mind of what a trip to a National Forest would be. I have a hard time even now. I see evergreen trees, something like Yosemite or maybe the Olympics in Washington State. I should have known it was a National Rain Forest and imagined that. Hot, humid, green, leafy, acid raining from trees, body paint, snakes, that kind of stuff – I didn’t imagine that. “National Forest” will forever now have a little different connotation for me.

The bus arrived at Flona at around 10:30 AM alongside the Tapajos River. There was a little community of “River People” there, the only people allowed to live on National Forest land. There was a two-story schoolhouse, but the bottom story was completely open to the air. It had a blackboard and five or six wooden chairs haphazardly spread around. And, until a month ago, it had wireless internet access upstairs, but a storm knocked out the connection and it was yet to be repaired. These are people who make a living selling little artifacts, making rubber balls and purses, and just living. Not a bad setup.

Our GSE group of four would blend with the 35 tourism students from IESPES and slowly coalesce for a 10:45 orientation and 11:00 departure. In the coalescence, we met Vandria, the primary student among them all who knew English. Mike learned of her skill earlier on the bus when he desperately needed to get off the bus to pee because, well, the on-board banheiro had a watermelon lodged in it. No one knew why it had a watermelon in it. It just did and Mike wasn’t sure what to do when he walked in and saw it. So he begged for a stop and Vandria became his translator to guide him to a house where he could pee.

Once the hike began, making fun of the gringos was in order. A tree whose bark could be shaved off to obtain a type of dye became paint for our faces and fingernails. This wasn’t comedic face paint. It was splotchy it-looks-like-you-stuck-your-face-in-the-cake-batter face paint. Maybe that is comedic. The guide then came across a plant used to make thatched roofs, but he used it to make a grass skirt for Mary. Fortunately, it didn’t really have to cover any important parts because it definitely didn’t. Next it was a tidy grass bracelet for Mary, as though the guide was preparing her to marry his cousin Guido.

At some point in here was one of the strangest things we saw. The one picture of it that I’ve seen seems to glow, but it didn’t glow when we were there. It looked like all the spit that 20 men could muster all frothed and stuck on the end of some vine. Apparently, it came from a tree and was so acidic that it would take your hair off. Losing enough hair on my own, I stayed away. But what the hell is the use of that for a tree competing for nutrients in a forest? I really don’t know.

Then the guide earned his keep. He made an external frame water-resistant backpack in front of our very eyes in about 11 minutes, using palm fronds. Some guys impress women with words, some with palm reading, some with grass skirts and bracelets, but, damn, that was a good trick. Instead of giving it to Mary, the guide gave it to Vandria. Usually, such backpacks are used to carry food gathered in the jungle. Vandria used it to carry her other backpack, but she was impressed.

Walking in the back again, the group was fairly far ahead when Vandria put her arms out and said, “Careful!” There was a very poisonous snake in the bundle on the side of the trail. It had passed in front of her, probably thinking the group was gone. Instead of being careful, she gave me a stick to prod the bundle and expose the snake. I guess she was careful for herself, but not for Mike and me. The snake was small, maybe a foot long, but bright orange with yellow and black. I know that there is some snakes for which these colors are just warnings and not harmful, but I was convinced that this guy deserved its space. I do feel a bit more satisfied now that I can say I saw a snake in the Amazon.

We had a muddy hill climb, which officially got me dirty. Mike was proud of at least one of us getting dirty. There were a few huge trees as we entered the primary forest. One Brazilian swung on a vine and someone commented that he was trying to be like Tarzan when someone else said, “More like Jane.”

At lunch, the guide made flutes from surrounding plants and, even cooler, he had the bark of a tree that was flammable. Not just flammable like ordinary wood, but instantly lighting with a simple flame and putting out a bright light. With a piece the size of the end of your thumb, he got 15 minutes of bright flame.

The way back was, at times, a death march. Many people were tired, some were out of water. There was a steep descent back down the mud hill and, after I fell again while trying to go slow, I just ran down the whole thing. Mary tried to stop me on the way down by grabbing an arm and some were worried I’d wipe out, but the guide came up to me afterwards and congratulated me for it. If in doubt, go fast. It applied in that situation.

Upon being back at the bus, much of the group jumped in the river. After hours of walking through heat and humidity, it felt really good.

Our bus ride back was relatively sedate, people sleeping from the day’s adventure. Our ride to the park that morning had people cheering when the bus made it through big mud holes or barely past big trucks on the narrow road. It was like a roller coaster. The way back was just as muddy and treacherous, but all the riders were asleep.

A couple other notes:

• We ate a fruit called a pupunia. Just as “National Forest” had one connotation in my mind, so did “fruit.” Pupunia didn’t seem like a fruit. Fruit should have juice in it. This didn’t. It was more like a potato wrapped around a seed. Steve thought it was the worst thing he’d tasted. I thought it tasted like a slightly bitter potato.

• Vandria told us of her working on the Jungle Marathon. It is a 200 km, 10 day race through the jungle. She was told to keep an eye on the sky and on the ground the whole way. She saw numerous snakes and one giant scorpion. Two racers were followed by a jaguar. Many people were more defeated by the heat and humidity than by creatures. Some woman who could barely walk as she approached the finish line did manage to break into a samba when she actually crossed it.

• Vandria and Steve were having a conversation behind me on the trail when I overheard this: Steve asked whether there were any “indigenous deer” in the forest. Vandria’s English not being perfect and especially not understanding the “deer” part, she answered, “No, they all speak Portuguese here.” I’ve got to wonder how often I’ve done that kind of thing in Portuguese.

• We stopped briefly at a little place where locals turned rubber into products like balls, rubbers purses, and rubber hats. It was interesting to see and not all that complex, basically involving heating with ammonia and stirring, then allowing to cool. For something that seems as synthetic as rubber, it satisfied my engineer’s soul to see it being made from something natural.

4/20/08 7:00 PM

Our first full day in Santarem and we went to Alter do Chao, a small town on the water – North, South, East, or West of us, I dunno. I need to figure it out by map. Ronaldo has an apartment there on the third floor. It overlooks the water and the walk along it. It has a loft and an interior of beautiful wood. They got it because it has two bathrooms, not just one as their previous apartment did. It just happened to come with a great view. They used compact fluorescent bulbs there, too, with fluorescent lights seeming pretty prevalent in general. There were pictures of his kids that looked a little like HS graduation pictures. The boys looked dark and Brazilian. The daughter was lighter but could pass for a lot of nationalities. After hearing stories of “the golden steamroller,” as Ron described her, it was interesting to put a face to the name.

Garoldo showed up with his family, which is my opportunity to speak Portuguese, as Ronaldo speaks English – he’s an American who has been in Brazil for 31 years (a story worth telling). We told stories in the apartment as we waited for the rain to stop.

OK – brief intermission. At some point on a trip, you gotta make sure you have two clean jokes to tell. I have one standard and one that I haven’t used. The standard is this:

A boy is born to a really poor family. They are really poor, like splitting the beans at dinner time to make it look bigger. When the boy is born, he is born with just one eye. The doctor tells his parents that they can give him an artificial eye. The first one is really fancy. It moves like a real eye, has coloration like a real eye, and can almost hardly be noticed. But it is very expensive. So the boy’s parents ask about the next option. The next option is a glass eye. They can match the color and it can kinda move. But that, too, is more than they can afford. Finally, the doctor says that they can go with a wood eye, a round piece of wood with an eye painted on it. They can afford this and, well, it’s better than nothing. Growing up, the boy is terribly conscious of the eye, hanging his head, hiding his wood eye, staying out of social situations. In high school, he finally goes to a dance. He stands on the wall, hiding his head, looking around. In a corner, he sees a girl with a hook nose. She’s kinda cute, but has a hook nose and no one is asking her to dance. The boy slowly works up the courage, edging along the wall toward her, still hiding his wood eye by hanging his head. When he finally gets there, he kinda looks up and smiles just a little, “W-w-would you, uh, like to dance?” “Would I? Would I?” she says. “Hook nose! Hook nose!”

The other is one I got from my dad in around 2002:

The movie Gandhi portrayed the man well. He walked around in no shoes, ate little and became weak physically, but had spiritual visions to lead his country. Because he ate little, he rarely brushed or flossed, but still had a bit of bad breath. So one concept of a subtitle for the movie was, “Super-calloused fragile mystic hexed by halitosis.”

Back in Alter do Chao, when the rain stopped, our walk began. Yes it is pretty hot here, consistently in the 80s, but both Santarem last night and Alter do Chao today had breezes that made it all feel great. The concrete and sand walk along the river is really small here, 100-150 m long, that’s all. There are riverside plastic tables from the restaurant across the street, tall mango trees hovering well above and providing shade. There were a few tens of people about – a happy number, not crowded and not dull. A few teenage kids were playing by the river. A couple boys climbed on the railings and jumped 10 ft down to the water. A couple girls walked gently down the stairs into the water. Now you need to know that the Tapajos River (a feeder into the Amazon that Santarem lies on) is about at its peak height. By November, the river will be another 5-10 m lower. Where the boys were landing in the water – they’d land on white sand 15 ft lower in 6 months. The stairs the girls were descending would go to a beautiful white beach, not the dark water of a river after only a few steps. And an island we saw out a couple hundred meters, it clearly was fundo aguas (underwater). You could see just thatched roofs sticking out of the water in places. Those would be shaded huts for merchants 6 months later. Life on a river with such dramatic shifts must be remarkable. Your brain and emotions probably shift with the rise and fall of the river, though in different ways for different people. Our trip is a tiny snapshot of a vibrant life.

But we do try to make our snapshots count. Victor a friend of Garoldo and Ron, probably about 29 years old, walked with us for a while telling stories – in English as he teaches it here. He wore braces on his teeth, turquoise-colored. Braces seem to be common and a fashion statement of youth here. Many women proudly wear theirs and seem to have no problem having men around. We went to a shop of girl clothes, little gifts, and big art. The art and the gifts seemed expensive. The clothes were better prices and might be good for Marcia – some good colors, but I do feel like I’m someone who can buy a sarape or something that can accent a woman’s outfit (like jewelry), but not an outfit itself. So I just looked at the hammocks – prices at $R 85. Not very colorful though, so I will keep looking.

Lunch was feijoada at the hotel. We made fun of Steve for his hesitance to eat fish. Feijoada was very good for him.

After lunch, we walked to a tree where Garoldo used his key to cut into some of the bark. Slowly some white stuff started leaking out. He called it “latex” and I assume that meant rubber! It was a rubber tree! (“Oops there goes another rubber tree plant” always goes through my head when thinking of the trees.) We felt it and it felt and looked a lot like Elmer’s Glue. I just thought it was beleza (cool).

From that tree, we improvised a ride in a boat for all of us but Ronaldo. We walked through the water and climbed in, trees growing out of the water around us. The tour took us around the inlet. People lived in little houses, most of which floated on the rising or falling river. Some used large drums to float. One used huge nets full of plastic bottles – now that is Reusing! It was mainly birds that lived back in that area. They once saw a large jacare (alligator) but it was unusual. But then the boat went across a little more open water. I was looking around until I saw what we were headed for – the higher part of that submerged island with more thatched roofs, all operating and serving food and beer to people in bathing suits at plastic tables and chairs, some half in the water. We swam and sat and drank and talked and played dominoes. We learned words like vencedor (winner), roubando (cheating), and chato (annoying). What a life.

Back at the dorms now, I’m writing, others are resting, working on the internet, and we prepared food for traveling tomorrow at 7 AM. Before then, I need to do some work to figure out why the Nuggets lost. Maybe I can do something, maybe not. But I still gotta do some player eval.

4/20/08 10:10 AM in Santarem

My tank really hit zero last night. For the first time on the trip, I got tired – just 7 hours of sleep over two nights and a little break in our schedule did it. No meetings, meals, shows, tours, just an arrival in Santarem and chill time. We walked along the pier in Santarem where the breeze comes in and women in short skirts flirt with guys playing music – it was relaxing. And at 10 PM, I was out. I don’t celebrate sleep much, but that was a good one.

Other notes:

• Best meal so far, just beating out the first Rotary meeting or first dinner, was last night at Casa Nostra (I think, or maybe Nossa Casa), a fish restaurant. Marta is the owner. I had pirarucu that was outstanding. The catfish (suribim) was also beyond excellent. Bolinhas de aviao (sp?) were tremendous. Farofa de camarao. Best restaurant in town, they said. I believe it.

• Geroldo (sp?), his daughter Carol, wife Celia, and son Larry (sp?) joined us. Only Carol had sufficient English skills, so I got to speak a lot of Portuguese, which I liked.

• Ron Bertignoli and his wife Vera are our hosts here at Fundacao Esperanca. They have three kids, all living in the US. That’s tough, Ron said.

• We don’t look like good travelers because we brought so much luggage to accommodate Kicks for Kids, Mike’s personal charity to bring soccer balls to kids. In this case, the also brought roupa (clothes) and mosquito nets, so Mary brought extra suitcases and Mike had HUGE duffel bags. They barely fit into Ron’s truck that he picked us up with and he commented on it. The bags cost extra money because we were only allowed 25 kg TOTAL between all bags, plus another 5 kg in carry-on. That’s just Brazil now, but you gotta wonder about the future in the US.

• Our orientation here was useful. We got schedules in English and, more importantly for us all, those schedules had built-in rest time. Now I need to study it a little.

• There was a basketball court at the pier! And people were playing. Not very well, but these were older teenagers playing.

• Two guys were walking on the outside edge of the railing of the pier building different ends of a net. At the end, Garoldo asked to see the shrimp they were getting. These were 2 cm long transparent thin creatures with barely visible legs – aviao (sp?) that we ate for dinner.

• A lot of people came up to Ronaldo (I’ve taken to calling him by his Brazilian name and it confuses the team, which I’ll try to avoid doing) or Garoldo and greet them warmly.

4/19/08 1:15 PM Leaving Manaus

It is Saturday. I have to remind myself in English so that it kicks in that I’m here and it’s a weekend at home.

We just came from saying good-bye. I’ve done it a lot in my life and hardened a bit by the experiences. I know because I still feel it inside. I stayed with Mirza who apologized for anything that she did wrong while staying with her – it was her first time doing this. It was my first time doing this, too, so I should have apologized for all I did wrong. Unfortunately, it’s hard to have good timing in a language you don’t know well.

I said good-bye to the other host families as well, all of whom were around a lot. I wonder if I’ll see them again. Rotary provides good business and personal reasons to do so. I think it’s more likely. That would be good.

Yesterday was Friday, again forcing myself to say it to remind myself of the connotation. “Sexta-feira,” as Friday is called here, doesn’t hold the emotion of “Friday”, happy hours, getting away for the weekend, going out, seeing friends, just relaxing. Words do carry a lot of the connotation and I really try to understand that underlying meaning when I speak. It changes with context, tone of voice, and expression, but that’s what gives it all depth. Of course, precision of words is not vital. I have held meaningful conversations in Portuguese while probably sounding like a third grader with a deep voice.

One was last night on politics with a dark-skinned man named Nery. When he recognized me as American who spoke Portuguese, he came over and began his conversation with a serious look and the question, “My skin is dark. Do you think a dark-skinned President is possible?” The words were as harsh as his look. This was not a friendly start. It was accusatory. He called Americans racist, not in entirety but as a generality relative to Brazilians. I became a diplomat in a language I barely know in a way barely knew I could be. To detail how wouldn’t do justice to it because I don’t know exactly how. I general, I told the truth and I provided my opinion about the country and people I love and the administration I don’t respect for the job it has done, which I think was fair. By the end, Sergio was an ally, an honestly won-over person, someone who shared his opinions, respected mine, and very much interested in bringing me back.

The potentially difficult relationships – with Mirza who is very smart and independent, and with Nery – that have gone so well are tremendously rewarding to me. I search myself for reasons why, but I’m perhaps not the best at self-psychology. Probably just Hollywood – potential conflicts with happy endings. And, oh yeah, Mirza told blonde jokes – Vicitra probably would have loved them.

I talked to Nery at the tail end of a birthday party for Mike’s host mom – Ana Cristina. I have the benefit of living with a Brazilian wife, so I get Brazilian birthday parties all the time. They are a lot of fun, not different in huge ways from an American birthday party, but maybe more spirited. And the Happy Birthday song has a party where they say, “a biggie, a biggie,” that just makes me laugh every time, in the same way that watching the Three Stooges make a 6-year-old laugh.

Mike and Ana Cristina’s daughter, Sascha, who Mike has seriously flirted with since Day 1 (more later), prepared a fine buffet dinner, cake, and got drinks. For Mike, it was tough because, as he said, “this is such a girl’s apartment – it needs to be manned up.” Once he found the big beer cooler, he seemed to forget about that.

Mike opened the bar by creating a Molitoris Cocktail from rum, Sprite, and peach juice. It was called that because Mike and Steve (Molitoris) have been joking back and forth about being “fruity,” as in gay. They hug or put arms around each other and turn it into a joke. “You’re the fruta!” The Molitoris Cocktail was just raising the joke a little higher. If we could have found some 150 proof alcohol, it would have been a Flaming Molitoris Cocktail. I don’t know what is politically correct in this world anymore – especially having gay friends who make fun of themselves and of straight people – but it’s humanely correct to enjoy life like this.

At the start of the party, we chased down Francisco Barros, our “motorista” who drove us around on our excursions. I spent more time with him than I did with anyone else in Manaus. He spoke no English and never really before drove around non-english speakers. He said it was hard. It was good to hear that I helped. He taught me things – words, directions, the nature of his job (6-7 days per week), class differences, he showed some distaste for living so much lower. I learned a little about how to talk politics in talking to him, which came in handy in talking to Nery later. He had a good spirit, smiling often but not so often that you think he just smiles at anything. I gave him instructions to email me so I can send him pictures of the US – which he knows almost nothing about. He doesn’t have email, but I told him it was easy and gave him money explicitly to get on and give it a try. We all gave him big hugs after forcing him to stop. He’s got his kids and grandkids, but it’d be cool to hear from him.

Our day trip on sexta-feira was the Meeting of the Waters, “Encontro das Aguas.” Along with the opera house, this is what Manaus is known for. The Rio Negro and Rio Solimoes come together and don’t easily mix, one being colder, one being faster, one having more suspended sediment, one being denser. Their meeting is then a stark line of black and tan (yes, I did think of a Guinness). That line jags a bit back and forth and, when the boat goes over the line, it spawns pockets of floating tan in the black. And that was it.

Fortunately the tour company knows this and doesn’t spend too long just looking at this. Instead, they took us up the Igarape (stream) Janauarias. It is one of many little inlets that drain over the course of the dry season on the Amazon, of which we are supposedly entering. That dry season drops the water 15-40 ft, but sometimes the rainy season is really rainy and the dry season is really dry, so the river can drop 100 ft in rare years. (“In the dry season, it rains every day. In the wet season, it rains every hour,” said Mirza.) We arrive now at the end of the rainy season, the water being high. The boat could proceed quite a ways to a restaurant where we ate lunch, including suco de graviola, my favorite juice so far among acerola, cupuacu, and maracuja.

Before reboarding the boat, the passengers split into three different longboats with little outboard engines. We got our tour of a forest that is slowly draining. At points, it was only a couple feet deep, points where I thought that the airboats of the Everglades would be better. We saw few animals – birds mainly. There was, as the guide put it, a “trunkodile” – floating tree trunk that looked like a crocodile. Actually, there were many as it was easy to be deceived. Gators, snakes, piranha, and other less hazardous creatures abound in there, but we were well entertained by enormous trees, rushing water as it drained, twisting plants, the abrazo da morte, and just riding around in a boat through a forest. It felt a little like riding around through the Ewok Forest in Return of the Jedi.

We got our alligators after the boats stopped and we walked on elevated wood paths to the GIANT lily pads – as in 2 m across GIANT. The edges all curved up sharp, making them look like extra large crème brulee containers, which also mostly kept them dry on the inside (though they typically had holes). But on the outside of the pads were large spines to keep fish and turtles from having salad (though it doesn’t work against cows, which do live there, too). Alongside the lily pads was a jacare-tinga sunning himself.

On this trip as our chaperone was Teresa. Teresa is a retired grandmother, active in Rotary. She speaks almost no English. She is very quiet around us. She accompanied us to INPA on Tuesday and allowed the INPA guides to do most of the talking, though she knew a fair amount. But I talked to her a lot on this voyage about her family, my family, her travel experiences and mine. She is going to Los Angeles in June and on a European cruise in August. That’s a good life.