the shaggy nomad

It’s past midnght. Our flashlights are poking tiny pinholes in the darkness. Silently we stalk through the jungle, tiptoeing slowly between the trees and sinking our boots deep in the clay-colored mud. Our food rations exhausted, we keep our eyes riveted to the ground, looking for little furrows in the leaves. To my starving imagination, every vague pattern in the dirt is an animal trail– the footprints of a paca, a tapir, a wayward armadillo. My stomach is audibly growling; my body is sore and wet. Still nothing. Every muscle tense with anticipation. We hear the scream of a distant macaw. A flurry of bats’ wings overhead. Then nothing but pregnant stillness. The blade of my machete glows pale blue in the moonlight– I run my fingers gently up and down the handle, feeling its cold texture. Then, suddenly– the gunman spins around and hurries back to us, his face hardened into a look of restrained panic.
– “Jaguar.”
– “How far?”
– “Not far.”
– “And what the f*ck do we do if it comes”
– “Keell it.”
We press on, blindly, weapons poised. Little distinction between hunter and hunted.

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.

Yesterday I made the first of what I can only assume will be many tactical errors on my trip. I arrived in Belem with the thought of setting off immediately by boat down the Amazon, in hopes that spending five days on a hammock in mosquito-infested humidity would… give me a feel for the jungle? Actually I don’t know what I was expecting, but for some reason it seemed like the right thing to do at the time. (Impulsiveness is probably my worst flaw and my greatest asset when traveling.)

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!

Four days ago I left Brazil’s current capital city and touched down in its first one, and the effect was something like leaping from an ice bath into a jacuzzi. Nothing could contrast more strongly with the cold, lifeless sterility of Brasilia than Salvador da Bahia, the splashy, colorful, and at times ragged colonial city best known for being the hub of the New World slave trade.

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.

When President Juscelino Kubitshcek ordered the construction of Brasilia starting in 1956, his aims were twofold: (1) to stimulate the economy through mass-scale, government-directed industrial development, and (2) to create a magnificent capital city in the heart of Brazil’s vast interior, a glimmering metropolis that would both symbolize and accelerate the country’s emergence into modernity. What he actually built, though, was one of Earth’s most poignant monuments to the futility of human ambition. Moreover, the inflation generated by this maniacal construction project ravaged the Brazilian economy, fatally destabilized the government, and led directly to twenty years of violent, repressive military dictatorship. Nice airport, though.

Rush hour in Brasilia

This city is best experienced through the eyes of a 31st century archaeologist, impressed by the orderliness of a 20th century planned city yet baffled by its intended purpose. The city is spacious, linear, and utterly utterly empty. It is a city of 14-lane highways devoid of cars; of disused stadia, overgrown parks, and rusting convention centers; of vacant acres of concrete sprawled out between lurching structures whose architecture could have been plucked from a 1950s sci-fi movie.

Raucous crowds throng the stadium

Brasilia is at once futuristic and painfully outdated– it succeeds in being an ostentatious spectacle, but certainly not in the way its creators intended. Row upon row of monotonous ministry buildings and block upon block of faceless residences (I’m writing from the whimsical little neighborhood of Zone S3 Quadrant 703 Block G) testify to the downright lunacy of trying to create a major city by top-down decree, and of situating the monstrosity smack in the middle of 2 million square kilometers of scarcely inhabited scrubland.

The main row of government ministries... across the street the buildings are exactly identical

Having said all that, I do feel that this colossal fiasco of a city is worth seeing. Granted, there’s nothing to really do other than wander the blank expanse of Eixo Monumental and think about mortality, but this place does have an odd allure to it all the same. There’s a point at which a particularly terrible movie can become perversely good through the charming folly of misplaced ambition, through the comically wide gap between what it strives to attain and what it actually is. For that reason, I can’t recommend Brasilia highly enough– if not as a great city, then as a curio, a relic, a cautionary example, or a bulletproof case for nihilism.

Notice how this is the first and only photo with people in it