Sorry for the recent lack of updates– I spent the better part of last week lying sick on a cot in Buenos Aires. I think I caught a virus (or, as it’s called in the colorful local language, “un virus”), but I recovered just in time to swing into Uruguay’s cozy little capital for the weekend.

Despite its small size and heavy dependence on capital from Argentina, Uruguay ranks among South America’s wealthiest and least corrupt countries, having recovered fairly well from the economic implosion it suffered in 2001. (Taking Spanish lessons in Argentina, I learned to say “foreign debt” before I learned how to say “breakfast.”) Montevideo was every bit as clean and orderly as I had been made to expect, and it would have suffered from quaintness– that most obnoxious form of cuteness– had it not been so endearingly seedy. I can enjoy pedestrian arcades and peaceful 19th century architecture, but only when they coexist with an appropriate smattering of obese prostitutes and homeless burnouts who address you as “amigo.”

The city’s historical center was mostly constructed during the heady days of the 1880s beef boom (what a grand beef boom it was), and is defined by a row of five psuedo-stately plazas, each one a few minutes’ walk removed from the next.

The middle and most important of these is the Plaza Independencia, which boasts the Puerta de la Ciudadela (which I took to be the country’s national symbol) and, directly underfoot, the sort of mausoleum which I assume will one day house my own revered remains.

Above ground, the plaza has been surreally given over to several winding rows of six-foot-tall bears, each one decorated by artists from a different coutnry. The exhibition was put on by an organization called “United Buddy Bears,” which, according to their rather somber mission statement, exists to bring about everlasting world peace through the cross-national exchange of painted bear statues. (I wish I could have been there for the eureka moment that gave birth to this project. I kept picturing tense strategic arms limitation talks in Moscow– the American envoy leans in slowly and, in gravely subdued tones, whispers, “President Medvedev, let’s leave this subject aside for the moment; We have developed an airtight means of deterring all future wars, and indeed all violent conflict of any sort for the entire subsequent history of this planet. We urgently request of you 250 life-sized linoleum bears, three barrels of glaze, some bright paint, and a freight vessel bound for southern Uruguay…)

The Iranian bear was one of the best

I forget which country this was-- Trinidad & Tobago?-- but props to them

I couldn't tell you why, but Belarus chose to go with a submarine theme

When I first arrived in Sampa I made a list of all the tourist sites and museums that I intended to see, and ten days later that list is still sneering at me, triumphant, having survived with barely a scratch. There’s no doubt in my mind that I’ll return to São Paulo at some point, though of course it’s impossible to say when. For the moment, though, I’ll be spending the next month living more or less in Buenos Aires, taking Spanish lessons by day during the week and travelling on weekends. There’s a greasy Israeli girl at the computer next to me, cackling loudly. I need to go to bed.

1- As the most populous metro area in South America, São Paulo is ridiculously large and complex. It doesn’t seem to have any single defined center– instead, it sprawls out indefinitely in all directions, with district following district in an endless succession of noise and confusion. I’ve been wandering the streets for a couple of days now, and I haven’t even begun to make sense of it.

Simplified street plan of Sao Paulo

2- The Liberdade district is home to the largest Japanese population in the world outside of Japan itself– it’s a totally pleasant place to walk around (or “stroll,” as the kids say), but aside from the novelty of seeing Yakult and yaki soba in Brazil there isn’t much of interest there. All the streetlights are painted bright red and shaped like halves of torii gates, though, which is beyond adorable.

3- The São Paulo Museum of Art is extremely legit– I’m going back tomorrow to go through it properly, but at the moment their entire bottom level is given over to a special Vik Muniz exhibition (Vik Muniz being a Brazilian artist famous for creating images from unusual materials such as dust, thread, scattered sugar, dry pigment, chocolate syrup, wire, plastic bugs, toy soldiers &c &c– I would post a couple of pictures but I don’t feel like getting sued. Not that anyone actually visits this site anyway).

4- This has nothing to do with São Paulo, but Chelsea did an incredible job of suffocating Barcelona today, proving that it is indeed possible to shackle the monster for 90 minutes. The match was taut, tense, and fluid in the midfield– scoreless but very entertaining. The return clash at Stamford Bridge should be fun.

http://www.theonion.com/content/node/28470

An eternity ago, back in Manaus, I had asked around and gotten in touch with a freelance guide named Jungle Boy who specialized in survivalism. The plan we hashed out was simple: meet up with an indigenous guide (a hilarious little bugger named The Captain) who had a rough feel for the area; take a leaky wooden boat down the Amazon’s flooded tributaries until we found a perfectly obscure, unexplored stretch of wilderness; tether the boat and set up a base by the shore; then trek inland as far as we possible could in ten days. Carrying only basic supplies, miniature hammocks, an old rifle, and three machetes, we spent several days hacking a narrow path through untouched jungle, making knife gashes in tree trunks as we passed to mark our way. Progress was slow and difficult, as every step required us to cut through dense tangles of trees, vines, branches, and roots– some spiked, some twisted, some as hard as rock. The sun glared down on us ferociously. A layer of filth coated our skin with a slimy sheen. Ants crawled inside our clothes and bit our bodies; mosquito bites covered literally every square inch of exposed flesh; my head was swollen from the five simultaneous wasp stings I had suffered on the first morning, four on my scalp and one on my upper lip which made it somewhat painful to speak.

– “Do you think,” I asked Jungle Boy towards the end of our first day inland, “that anyone has ever been here before?”
– “No,” he answered immediately. “Not a chance.”

Because we had decided against bringing tents, we had to spend our afternoons constructing makeshift shelters for the night. The designs grew increasingly complex, but the simplest was a sort of teepee made from chopped wood and palm fronds. This first required us to find an appropriately spaced triangle of thick trees, then to clear the area between them with our machetes while keeping a careful eye out for snakes and tarantula dens. Next, we each cut down a medium-sized tree, measured out the correct distance, then fastened it horizontally to one side of the triangle at a height of about 2.5 meters, knotting it with vine. The walls and roof of the structure were formed with colossal palm fronds, each an absolute minimum of 12 meters high, which we sliced down and collected from the surrounding forest. This step was by far the longest, as each of the 80 or so palm fronds had to be individually cut, dragged to the shelter, and jammed upright into small holes in the ground, turned inward to form a canopy. When all this was done, we had to quickly string up our hammocks, tend to our wounds, then set out searching for food in the premature darkness of the jungle. On the fifth night, feeling inexplicably ambitious, we cut down, hauled, and fastened 10 large trees and about 85 palm fronds to form a rudimentary house. We camped there for two nights, fishing for pirhanas by day, and keeping a wary watch for jaguars at night by the light of our dying fire.

Nighttime in the jungle is primal and terrifying. When the sun sets on the Amazon, it doesn’t matter if your eyes are open or closed: either way, all you can see is pure, infinite blackness. This complete lack of visual input makes sounds much more intense– every shriek, squawk, growl, call, and cackle explodes savagely in your eardrums. The haunted-house ambience of the jungle, combined with the effects of malaria pills, makes nightmares long, cinematic, elaborate, and extremely vivid– I felt like I was lending my brain to David Lynch for four hours every night. I thought the Heart of Darkness effect was just a metaphor, but for me it turned out to be real– your brain really does tunnel into some dark burrows when night falls on the rainforest.

Here in Manaus I’m showered, shaven, well-fed, recovering. I just charged my iPod and ate a bowl of açaí gelato as big as my head, but being back in civilization still feels weird, and a little disconcerting. I’m hoping this is just a temporary aftereffect of the jungle, because in two days I’ll be heading to Sao Paulo– from unexplored wilderness to a city of 11 million in the space of five days. Right now I’m going to calm my nerves with some cheap Brazilian beer; I’ll add photos when I find a decent internet connection. Hope you didn’t miss me too much.

I’ll be trekking in the Brazilian Amazon for the next ten days. See you then.

In any case, because of the holiday, no boats were leaving for Manaus until Tuesday, a schedule which would have killed off about half my time in the Amazon. After wandering the city for two hours attempting to find an internet cafe that wasn’t closed for Easter weekend, I finally bit the bullet and ducked into a travel agency to buy plane tickets for Manaus. Now, I’m trying to resist using this blog for random hating– every day on Ipanema beach in Rio we saw a 350lb black dude wearing a pink fluourescent string bikini, and I let that slide–  but the woman behind the desk extinguished whatever dwindling embers of hope I might have had for the human race. If your imagination is depraved enough, try to picture a cross between Charlie Weis and Sally Struthers as she appears on South Park, with the mental agility of a defective tortoise. After 25 labored minutes, I managed to get on a morning flight to Manaus, which is where I am now. I’ll spend tomorrow finding a good agency for jungle trekking, then hopefully set off properly on Tuesday.

Until then, happy Easter!

Lonely Planet, in its characteristically corny style, refers to Salvador as the “African soul of Brazil,” and even though the phrase is tacky it’s pretty much on point. Geographically and culturally, Salvador is the closest thing Brazil has to an African city. Racial classification is notoriously difficult in Brazil, but by the best estimates over 80% of Salvador’s population is either “black” or “Pardo” (brown)– indeed, most of the current population of Salvador can trace its lineage directly back to the West African slaves who flooded into these ports in unimaginable numbers between the 16th and 18th centuries.

Salvador was the most populous city in the Americas at the time of the American Revolution, so history looms very large here. The Upper city, a UNESCO world heritage site, is a zigzagging maze of cobblestoned streets emanating from a central plaza called the Pelourinho. Nowadays the main square in Pelourinho is the site of pulsing Tuesday night street parties, expensive restaurants, and sunscreened tourists, but it got its name because it was traditionally used for the “pillorying” and public beating of disobedient slaves. The plaza is still presided over by the administrative buildings of the Portuguese, miraculously well preserved and still in their own way imposing. The Lower city, meanwhile, is a beehive of commercial activity, consisting of the port and the market which, instead of selling slaves and sugar, now mostly hawks imitation leather purses, pirated DVDs, and sugarcane juice.

Two more things are worth pointing out about Salvador. First, it has a small cluster of fantastic art galleries on the narrow roads that veer off from Pelourinho. I spent three tense hours over two days negotiating the purchase of a painting (see below) from a Portuguese artist named Arlejo, working down from R$3500 to USD$700 in an animated duel of jerky gestures and bitter broken Portuguese. (The longer and more hostile the negotiations, the better I assume I did).

Second, the beaches here are criminally underrated. The waters are smooth and hypnotic, the sand soft and powdery, and once you get to the outskirts of the city the untouched beachfront stretches for miles. Before sunrise tomorrow I’m off to Belem to start two weeks of trekking in the Amazon Rainforest, so I don’t imagine I’ll find a better beach anytime soon.