Hoarse Speak

So less than a week before I start the trek back home. This past week has been good, Ana and I have been talking a lot about our future plans and are both looking forward to being home again. She's staying here another month.

Last weekend, we were invited to a birthday party out on a farm where about 50 people showed up for a Mass and feast. The woman who's birthday it was turned 66 and still rides her bicycle into town twice a week to buy groceries and whatnot. As it took us over 20 minutes to get there in a pickup truck, I was impressed - I'm sure she'll live to be 106 at this rate. Farms in the Bahian sertão are quite different from North Carolina farms - If people are lucky, they've been able to actually stucco their houses, a lot are still just taipa (mud brick and wattle) with tile roofs. This woman, Maria, had a very simple house, but stuccoed with a single solar panel for lights at night. The stove was a simple wood stove built from stone and concrete like you might have seen in houses 60 - 100 years ago. She also collected all her rain water into a covered cistern for drinking; she had water delivered for the animals and for cleaning. For the celebration she had slaughtered two goats and she and her daughters and perhaps some neighbors cooked up a mess of rice, beans, macaroni, and farofa to go with it.

Here are some pictures of local kids practicing some horsemanship across the street from our house for the 17th anniversary celebration of the city.

The rains have finally started and brought with them spectacular thunderstorms as well as some relief from the oppressive heat to be replaced with oppressive humidity and flies - the flies are infinitely more annoying than the mosquitoes which mainly come out at night and can be avoided by a bed net. Aside from the annoyance of the flies, I love the desert when it rains as everything turns green and the cactus flower.

Unfortunately, when the rains come, the Martians invade. I though I had escaped the walkers in the dunes of Ceará, but they seem to have found me in Sobradinho. At least I was able to collect some photographic evidence:

Images of the walkers decending in the evening


Destruction of a local pentecostal church

Luckily, finding only poor farmers, fishermen, goats, cows and vaqueiros, the Martians satisfied themselves with the destruction of the Pentecostal church then moved on across the Caatinga towards richer hunting in the coastal areas.

Ana and I celebrated our luck by coming into Juazeiro and eating at our favorite restaurant here: Papa's Bode Assado (Papa's roast goat) - the best place for goat in Juazeiro. It's a place with only outdoor seating, plastic tables, cheap beer and two things on the menu: Half order of goat or Full order of goat either with or without fat. We usually get a half order without fat.

We're both looking forward to going back to a vegetarian existence when we return to the states.

Well, I'll let the photo speak for itself…

As can be seen, safety first. I have been electricuted minorly by a myriad of these death traps. This one was in our hotel in Fortaleza, and the only way to shut it off without getting zapped was to get out of the shower, put rubber soled shoes on and turn the water off. The other day, I got shocked by the stream of water coming out of the side port at the base of the shower head when the little hose popped out on the one at our place in Sobradinho. The tapwater is so warm by afternoon in Sobradinho that heating the water isn't really necessary this time of year, but disconnecting or otherwise tampering with the thing is probably akin to playing with a live rattlesnake - especially given Ze Caçola's (our slumlord) Kwality wiring.

As we were heading to Salvador for a meeting that Ana had to attend today, we decided to pass through the town of Canudos, the sight of the war of canudos also known as Antonio Conselheiro's rebellion. The original site has been flooded due to a dam project on the river and the new town is about 3-4 km away.

We took the bus from Juazeiro - which was an agonizing 6 1/2 hours (5 of which were on dirt roads averaging about 30kph) - arriving in Canudos at almost 10pm. We'd made a reservation at a pousada in the Rough guide, but no one seemed to know it or where it might be. When Ana asked about the address, one guy said that the praça she was asking about was in another town. Luckily there was a pousada in town and it was a short walk from the bus office. The new Canudos was probably a town of about 5 thousand people, but that's just a guess. When we got to the pousada, we lucked out because there was another set of travellers who were hiring a guide to drive them out to the state park and battlesite and they offered to let us in on their tour if we split the cost. The people who owned the pousada were really interesting too, they were telling stories that their parents and grandparents had told them about Antonio Conselheiro and Canudos. It was interesting for there to be a sort of living memory of the city and the ideals that Canudos held for the people who trekked from all over the Sertão to be part of the city. They even had a cannon ball from the siege.

The park itself is mostly the battle site. There is one area called the Vale do Morte (valley of death) where most of the massacre took place. The 4th expedition of about 9,000 troops finally broke Canudos, though at the loss of half the expedition. There are still trenches dug in the hilltops where the Conselherenses defended the city from the soldiers. One of the plants that grows in the area is called the Favela tree, its leaves are thorned to protect it from being eaten, and it grows to be about 10-15 feet in height. I'm not sure, but I think the word favela for the brazilian slums of displaced people comes from Canudos and the favela tree…

This is the last stop for us, we managed to crawl along the coast all the way from Penedo in Alagoas state to São Luis in Maranhão – sometimes literally driving on the beach.  I’ll try to get some pictures up in the next week or so (Ana has been much better than I have).  São Luis itself is really nice, the colonial area is quaint and not over touristed – though there does seem to be a growing prostitution/old white men on sex tours of developing countries (particularly older French men) scene developing.  Lots of good outdoor bars with live music (sometimes good, sometimes cheesy) and great museums in old preserved colonial mansions.  Unfortunately, we weren't here during the June festivals which feature the many different street celebrations of Bumba Meu Boi .

Ok, since I haven’t been particularly good at updating, I’ll just start at the end and work my way back eventually.  Alcântara was our last stop before heading home to Sobradinho.  Just across the bay from São Luis, the capital of Maranhão state, Alcântara was the richest town in northern Brazil at one time and the capital of Maranhão.  The capital was moved to São Luis some time in the 17th century and it seems that since then it has been gracefully falling apart.  The two claims to fame that Alcântara has are pretty decaying colonial buildings from that time period (including the oldest surviving whipping post in Brazil – put up in 1647) and the home of the Brazilian space program. 

Here’s a few pictures of the town:

Today is our last day in Penedo at the mouth of the São Francisco river. We head for Maceió this afternoon and then onto Porto de Galinhas to spend New Years on the beach.

Penedo is a pretty little colonial river town in Alagoas State. It used to carry a lot more river commerce, but with the Dams built upriver at Itaparica, Xingó, Paulo Alfonso and other places that I can't remember, much of the river traffic slowed or stopped. We met an interesting man in his 80s the first day we were here who had lived in Penedo most of his life - he told us about how the city changed with the damming of the river. Movement on the river slowed a lot and the towns started to decline. Rice farming which had been common because of the flooding and receding of the river stopped since it was no longer easy to plant rice and wait for the river water to rise in the season. That was about all I was able to catch, Ana understood much more and she'll probably write about it at some point.

We came to Penedo via Paulo Alfonso - a much more modern city in the Bahian Sertão where a large hydroelectric dam was built. Paulo Alfonso has had way more investment than Sobradinho from a variety of sources, and it shows. When they built the dam there, they built a bunch of lakes that surround the city which helps to keep the temperature down especially in the evening. Outside Paulo Alfonso the temperature regularly reaches the high 30s (Centigrade) but inside the city it stays a few degrees cooler. For Christmas we took a nice river cruise up some of the now mostly flooded gorges of the São Francisco - they were still pretty and the boat ride was relaxing.

Ok, the bus ride to Paulo Alfonso… We left Sobradinho on the 7.30 am bus for Juazeiro. We caught the 9.30 bus for Paulo Alfonso (non airconditioned) which started our trek across the Pernambucan Sertão. One of the nuns, Cida, almost missed her bus for Feira de Santana since she had missed the 7.30 bus leaving Sobradinho and had to catch the 8am - all the nuns Ana knew were leaving for the Christmas/new years holidays the same day as we were. By the time the bus left Petrolina, just across the river, it was standing room only. By the time we reached the 3rd city just after lunch, the bus was completely packed and I gave up my seat to an old man who would never have been able to stand for the rest of the trip (another 6 hours). So I was standing just behind our seats in the second row. 3 guys got on travelling together and were forced to stand in the front - one of them took a picture from the front looking back. I counted 21 people including myself and little children in the first two rows. I'm guessing that there were more than 80 people on the bus as it flew down the road. Safety first. I just put on my neuros and tried not to think about it and hung on.

It took about an hour before one of the guys who had been taking pictures asked if I was a foreigner. Then came the barrage of questions some of which I had a hard time answering. I pulled Ana into it and we got pegged as the American couple. He said I looked like John Lennon and wanted me to sing "Imagine." Ana was having a great time laughing at me - I can't sing for shit so I kept refusing - Brazilians will sing anything whether they can sing or not, but I was way too embarrassed and shy. Later Ana also gave up her seat to an older woman but luckily we only had to stand for another 30 minutes or so at that point as people shifted around and some got off - so we grabbed seats. 3-4 hours of standing on a bus gets brutal. By the time we got to Paolo Alfonso at about 7pm we were pretty destroyed.

Looking forward to that Pinga Litoral (coastal drip i.e. the slow bus that stops everywhere) that we're getting on today for Maceió - luckily only 4.5 hours. But then another Pinga Litoral heading north to Ipajuca where we get off for Porto de Galinhas. We splashed out a little on our hotel in Porto and we're both looking forward to it.