Brazil

Last Sunday I got myself up at 5:15am to go up on deck and watch the sunrise over our first port, Salvador, Brazil. What an amazing thing it was to see the skyline of this old colonial city in the morning light!

After I went back to bed and awaited pulling into port, customs, etc, we finally got off the boat around 11am. We walked right out of the dock into the Cidade Baxia, or Lower City of Salvador. Not much goes on in the lower part, so we took the city’s famed elevator to the Cidade Alta, or Upper City. As an art history major, it was really cool for me to see the lasting colonial Portuguese architectural influence. Some of the churches and buildings were just beautiful.

I don’t know if I mentioned this before, but the day we got into port was Brazilian Independence Day. We wound our way among some side streets and stumbled upon a huge parade complete with soldiers, police officers, fire fighters, public officials, marching bands, and dancers! It went on for miles and miles. After the parade we found a small square with lots of little authentic Brazilian shops filled floor-to-ceiling with some of the most beautiful art I have ever seen.

The highlight of this however, was that we met a woman named Illada, who was a practicing member of Candomblé, one of the most popular Brazilian religions, which resembles Santoría. We had been learning about Candomblé in our religion global class, so it was really cool to have our guide around the city be a woman dressed in traditional garb. She took us to her terreiro, or house of worship, and explained all about orixás, their spirits, and spirit possession, etc. It was really awesome! That night we went to dinner in the Barra region of Salvador and found a small salsa, samba, and reggae club, where a Brazilian woman offered to teach us to dance…I’m still really bad!

The next morning got off to an early start…5:00am to be exact. Our bus for the airport for our flight to Iguaçu Falls left at 5:30am…enough said. However, by 1:30pm that afternoon we were hiking along the Brazilian side of the falls. Okay, life advice according to me (which you obviously should take): if you have not gone to Iguaçu Falls, make it a point to get there in your life! It was by far the most amazing thing I have ever seen. It is indescribable – neither words nor pictures do it justice! Wider than Niagara and taller than Victoria, it is easily the most wonderful set of water falls in the world.

We walked along wooden platforms until we were practically hanging out over the falls! It got so wet from all the mist and spray that we had to wear rain jackets, and I have never seen more rainbows in one place than I did at Iguaçu.

After finishing our hike on the Brazilian side, we headed back to the hotel to prepare for our dinner at a Brazilian barbecue. This type of eating is famous in Argentina and Brazilian and essentially all you do is eat tons, and tons, and tons of meat.

Any kind you can think of! It is unlimited and the variety of meats they have is kind of overwhelming. This dinner was especially great though because we also got to see a show of music and dance from each country in South America – the tango, salsa, samba – you name it, I saw it!
The next day we boarded our bus to travel into Argentina for the day. We entered the national park where the falls are on the Argentinean side, and took a safari-jungle ride to meet the boats that were taking us down the river. No animals in the jungle, slightly disappointing, but I’m hoping I can make up for that in Africa!

After the trek we boarded our boats to white-water raft into the falls, by far the most awesome part of the trip. We put everything but our bathing suits into waterproof bags and we went STRAIGHT into the falls! I was soaking wet but it was AMAZING!!

After that, we hiked around the Argentinean side of the falls, went to an Argentinean barbecue for lunch, where Evita was playing endlessly on the speaker system, and finally ended up at the most famous part of the falls – the Devil’s Throat. The sheer power of the water at the top of these falls was ridiculous. Our guide explains that ¼ of the entire Paraná river is at the Devil’s Throat at any one point in time.

It is about 7 meters high, and the water is 5 meters deep at the bottom because the volcanic rock making up the falls has not been eroded. According to the guide, the mist rising from this part of the falls can be seen from 3km away – that’s about 2 miles! The sound was also awesome and really soothing.
After leaving the falls we made our way to a small Argentinean Indian village.

The people, called Guraní, used to be foragers, but have settled next to a large Argentinean city, unfortunately causing them to assimilate and lose parts of their culture. They no longer have all the capacities to make their own medicinal remedies; they go to the pharmacy and get pills like we do. Carlos, our guide, explain to us that an anthropological university in Canada has formed a relationship with these people in order to try to help them preserve their culture, while still continuing to modernize so that they survive. We learned about their religious, economic, social, and legal systems – all different from Argentinean society. It’s true that they were very poverty-stricken, living in houses without running water and minimal electricity, but you could never tell that from looking at them. The kids were running around (without shoes) on the muddy ground with huge grins on their faces, playing games.

They were fascinated by our digital cameras and took every chance they got to look at themselves on our camera screens. It was so adorable. It was interesting though, because they don’t yet speak Spanish, they do not learned Spanish until they’re 5 in their school system. They only spoke their Indian dialect, none of which I understood at all, so I never learned any of their names. But this one little boy I absolutely adored and when I picked him up, he wouldn’t let me put him down until we left. It was so cute! The funniest part was that they had somehow heard about Spiderman, and one of them was wearing a Spiderman t-shirt, so in every picture they took they would pretend to shoot spider webs out of their wrists.

After the humbling experience of visiting the village the day before, our final day was spent at another amazing site – Itaípu Dam. It is the world’s largest hydroelectric dam, supplying energy to all of the homes in Paraguay and 75% of the homes in Brazil – over 10 million people.

Our final stop was at an aviary, where we got to see all the birds native to South America – including toucans, macaws, and many types of parrots. They also had giant anacondas, thank god they were behind glass cages! At the end I got to hold a macaw, a boa constrictor, and posed with a toucan! It was so fun and cool and the toco toucan is definitely my new favorite bird.

After we came back from Iguaçu, my final day in Brazil was spent in Cachoeira, a small town that is viewed as the sort of Mecca of the Candomblé religion. The Bahia region of Brazil (where Cacheoira and Salvador are) is where most of the slaves were brought during the Portuguese enslavement of Western Africans. Most of the slaves were brought to plantations outside Cachoeira, which is why most of the Brazilians from this region today are of Afro-Brazilian descent. Anyway, when the slaves came over they were told they were no longer allowed to practice their religion and had to convert to Catholicism. Instead of doing this, they pretended to worship Jesus and Mary, but were really using them as covers for worshipping Xangó and Lemanja. Because of this, there has been a growing syncretism between the two religions, so that now many members of Candomblé terreiros are Catholic. We visited the Sisterhood of Good Death, where the Candomblé initiates explained all of this to us.

We also visited an MST land reform project and got to see different families and what they plant to eat and then to sell at the public markets. Our final stop was at a cigar factory, where we got to see exactly how each cigar is made from beginning to end.
So all in all Brazil was a pretty cool place to visit! Like I said, pictures don’t do any of it justice, but I hope these help you see a little bit of what I experienced!! We are now in the middle of the Atlantic, beginning our crossing to Walvis Bay, Namibia. Africa in only 6 DAYS!!