the shaggy nomad

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

If you were to lock an unimaginative eight year old in a room for several months with an infinite supply of Legos and nothing to eat but bread and Adderall, the São Paulo cityscape is pretty much what you’d end up with. São Paulo is a city of evenly spaced squares, obedient rectangles, and rows of parallel lines which, when they’re feeling a bit naughty, intersect at perfect perpendiculars with other rows of parallel lines. Being in a country as charmingly anarchic as Brazil, it’s really odd to see this sort of geometric regularity– so odd, in fact, that I didn’t even notice it until I climbed to the top of São Paulo’s skyscrapingest skyscaper to get the Mount Olympus view of the city. As you can see, much as chaos may reign over Brazilian life, its empire does not extend to the architecture of São Paulo:

I meant to work these into my last post, but as you can imagine internet connections are infuriatingly slow in the middle of Amazonas. In any case:

Sunsets were beautiful because the slow waters of the Amazon reflect light like a mirror.

The Rio Negro meets the Rio Solimoes; the Rio Negro is the largest blackwater river in the world, flowing slowly and dark with decomposed plant matter; the Solimoes is fast and muddy, originating in the Peruvian Andes

We stopped off in a little, remote town along the way-- during rainy season all the houses are separated by at least .5 km of water... in other news, capybaras are mad cute

My intrepid guides

These things were absolutely everywhere, some as large as small frisbees... you kind of get used to them after awhile

This is called a "jungle"

These are basically what we used to make our shelters

Smoke in the leaves

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