We arrived in Manaus with a list of places I wanted to visit, but Providence ruled differently. In the past I might have had a fit. I had made a list, damn it, and we were going to stick to it. We had to visit Manaus properly.
After all, wasn’t that why we were here?
Amidst a crowd of typical, T-shirts-and-jeans-wearing Brazilians, a black woman stood out. She wore an intricate, white, lace bodice covered with necklaces above a dark-blue, billowing skirt and a white piece of cloth artistically wrapped around her head. She was deep-frying some sort of snack.
Meet Salvador da Bahia’s famous Baianas de Acarajé.
It was Sunday, late afternoon. The weekend vacationers from Manaus had returned home and peace reigned once more over the small tourist town of Novo Airão. I was the only one to go swimming with dolphins.
What a stroke of luck!
Amidst the flooded forest of Anavilhanas-Archipel, I am looking up at a meters wide trunk of a tree. It splits into three immensely thick branches that reach high into the sky, as if they are on their way to heaven.
I feel as if I am looking at a scene in the cartoon of Jack and the Beanstalk.
One of the most unexpected sites I ever did in our 16-year journey was visiting a soccer stadium and actually watching a soccer game. Traveling is full of surprises, and here I stood in what ‘everybody’ considered to be the most famous stadium in the world:
The Maracaña Stadium in Rio de Janeiro.
Thick traffic and having to watch my back had made me wary of Rio de Janeiro. But after a leisurely walk up the Sugar Loaf I took in the view and suddenly understood the spell that visitors as well as Cariocas (Rio de Janeiro’s residents) fall under.
And I wondered, what’s there not to fall in love with Rio de Janeiro?
According to its inhabitants, Andacollo is the most religious town in Chile.
Time to check it out!
“Curiosity is lying in wait for every secret.”
~Ralph Waldo Emerson
“Why did I not think of this before? I’ll just buy tapioca and we’ll make beiju,” I concluded.
It was such a simple solution to such a simple problem: staying in a village where I couldn’t find bread but needing something for breakfast.
If only it were so simple…
“Life is not measured by the breaths we take but by the moments that take our breaths away.”
After more than a year of living and traveling in the Amazonian Rainforest in the Guianas and Brazil, the contrast with the landscape we encountered in Lençois Maranhenses (Northeast Brazil) couldn’t have been bigger:
1500 square kilometers of dunes.
I was looking out over the Mediterranean dotted with a couple of sailing boats. Low rolling hills line the horizon. The image was framed by Corinthian columns covered in flowering vines. I felt as if I was on vacation in Greece, Italy, or Spain.
Did that make sense, with my being 9,350 feet above sea level, in Quito, Ecuador’s capital?
Not really.
I read some facts and figures about the Itaipu Dam that simply boggled my mind and, truth be told, I couldn’t wrap my head around such numbers.
In 1873 Colonel Simião Jurumenha bought a sugarcane farm and built the cachaça factory of Douradinho in Redenção. 10 years later slavery was abolished here – 5 years before the rest of Brazil.
130 years later, I visit the still functioning factory-cum-museum.
It was almost like a dance, seven rambunctious Andean Condors hopping around chunks of mule and calf. On other days the carrion might be alpaca, sheep, or rabbit. Males generally have the first go but Awu is a female that is able to stand up for herself and makes sure she gets the piece she wants to have.
When two condors wanted the same piece they each tore on a side of it as if it were a game of tug-of-war.
Running through a town? What kind of way of exploring a place is that, you may ask. Did I get to see anything at all?
Yes, I did.
