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.
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