Macapá sits on the equator and they have a modest monument marking it.They say that the sun shines right through the hole in the tower during the spring and autumn equinoxes. I don’t know what time it would be. At high noon the sun should be directly overhead.
This monument is on my list of things that are worth seeing but not worth going to see, but since it was on the way to the boat it was worth stopping and officially putting one foot in each hemisphere. There are lots of myths about the equator. Some people think that an egg can stand up straight on the end on the equator. This is not true.
A more persistent myth is that water drains in different directions in different hemispheres. This is also is not true. The idea is based on the Coriolis force, which deflects the air to the right in the Northern Hemisphere and to the left in the Southern Hemisphere. This only affect phenomenon that are spread over very large areas, like hurricanes. In physics weak forces make large extensive things and strong ones make small compact ones. There is no Coriolis affect exactly at the equator, which is why hurricanes can’t cross the equator, probably a good thing. Water going down the drain is too small to be affected or more correctly it is much more affected by other factors such as how the water hits the drain or the shape of the vessel holding the water.
I walked down the rail marking the equator. That was my ritual to the place.
The pictures are all from Macapá. Up top is the equator monument. Below are kids playing soccer in the Amazon. This part is tidal; the river withdraws from the dock at low tide exposing the soccer field. Next is downtown. Not very exciting. And just above shows how little red peddles fall from the trees. It is kind of like the pink snow in the “Cat in the Hat” or maybe like candy. It is pretty in any case.
It is as if one world lassoed another and pulled it closer. That is what this bridge across the Rio Negro did. It is the first bridge you encounter as you come up the Amazon system. The river is just too wide everywhere else and besides there is nothing much to connect.
There is nothing much to connect here either – yet. The long high bridge now ties the unremarkable village of Iranduba with Manaus might seem like a waste of money. But it is changing things. You used to have to take a ferry for a couple hours to get to Iranduba & there were few reasons to make the trip; you can now drive in fifteen minutes. This has the practical effect of creating new land in Manaus and you can already see what will happen in the next few years. As you cross the bridge into this formerly distant peninsula between the Solimões and Rio Negro, the first thing you notice is all the real estate signs. It reminded me of Northern Virginia in the boom times. This will soon be suburbs and exurbs, probably mostly high end from the looks of the pictures advertising the new developments.
From my public affairs angle, I thought this would be the ideal time to connect local leaders with Americans who have experienced similar growth in the not very distant past. Development is inevitable, but it can be done well or poorly. There is a lot of wetland and nature that should be properly protected. If done well, they can avoid the damage caused by rising water and erosion. I say avoid the damage, because they cannot avoid the water and can avoid damage by not building in some places. People like to build on low areas near water. They shouldn’t do it. Beyond that, I hope that there is better planning. Manaus is not an attractive city. Just spreading it across the river would be a bad idea. Maybe some of these guys should visit Curitiba. They plan right down there (although this week’s “Veja” indicates that not all is well in Curitiba’s suburbs.)
The village of Iranduba evidently has only two claims to fame, or did before the recent Anschluß with Manaus. It was a place that produced bricks and natural rubber condoms. The brick making is the one that the town fathers choose to emphasize but the monument they chose to erect could be appropriate to both, as you can see from the picture above. Below is the other factory Lam-Latex.
Besides these industries, there seemed to be a lot of fishing and cattle ranching. I don’t know what will happen to the former ferry port on the Solimões. My first thought was that it would atrophy and fade away, but if the town grows I could envision it becoming a kind of tourist attraction.
We visited a big marketplace where the locals could buy all they needed.The fish were very fresh, many were still alive. I could not identify them, but they said some were piranhas. Besides fish, there were butcher shops, produce stands, stands selling clothes etc.
Farther down the road are more tourist attractions in transition. You can see in the pictures. It reminds me of those little resorts on small lakes in Wisconsin. Most of them have now become bigger, moved high-end or faded away. I think the days of the little lakes lodges are fleeting.
The beach you see in the picture is on the Rio Negro. The water is very warm and shallow. This is a high water time on the Rio Negro, as you can tell from the submerged trees and bushes. Our Brazilian friend told us that the beach had gone out another twenty meters a few weeks earlier.
Below is the characteristic we environment near Iranduba. I joked with our Brazilian friends that I expected alligators. They pointed out that this was not true, since this was anaconda habitat. I expect people moving into new subdivisions won’t be able to keep small dogs and cats … at least not for long. I thought my colleague Justen should wade into the water and see if he could scare up a couple of the big snakes, but he was unenthusiastic about the idea.
I spent two days and two nights sailing up the Amazon with the Semester at Sea. Most of my waking time was spent talking to students. They kept me fully scheduled, which is how I like it. It was lots of fun to interact with the clever students and professors. They also have a group called “lifelong learners,” who are retired people who want to cruise in a learning environment.
But I did have some time to myself and I spent lots of that free time just looking at the river and thinking about how interesting it was just to be on the Amazon. You can see my balcony in the picture above. It was nice to sit out there. It is humid, but fresh on the river. The Amazon – the word conjures up all sorts of feelings and images. It was interesting and a little scary to look out over the river in the midnight darkness. It is so empty out there, as I mentioned in an earlier post. The picture up top shows a beautiful scene. Beautiful from a distance. That green in the front is not grass. It is a type of reed. You could not walk through it.
During the day you can see that the water is the color of coffee with cream. The silt does not sink out. There is a lot of other stuff floating. It is mostly branches and floating weeds, but I also saw whole trees and what looked like a dead cow. The dead cow made me feel more confident about the water. I figured that if a dead cow could float unvexed down the river there could not be that many piranha.
I was told that the water was low, even though it looked like the forest came right to the shore and was only a few feet above the water. Evidently in the high water time the river goes into the forest and you can see the tops of the trees reaching out of the water. That would be interesting. It is hard to believe that the river could be much wider, but it can.
As far as famous rivers go, however, the Amazon is a little monotonous. The land along-side is almost uniformly flat. You get a lot more variety on the Rhine. The Nile has cataracts. I don’t know the Mississippi except in Minnesota & Wisconsin, but it also has more bluffs and variety. The interesting thing about the Amazon is the water itself not only the sheer amount of it but also its composition.
The Amazon is formed when the Rio Solimões meets the Rio Negro outside Manaus. The Solimões is cloudy and coffee & creme colored, as is the Amazon downstream. The Rio Negro, as its name implies, is black. Above is Manaus from the Rio Negro. Below is a ferry stop on the Rio Solimões.You can see the difference. The waters meet but don’t immediately mix, instead running side by side for several miles. I did not see this, since the ship crossed this at night while it was still dark. I woke up to see that the color of the water was black, as we were heading up the Rio Negro toward the Port of Manaus. It was also dark when we passed Santarém the night before. This is where the Rio Tapajos meets the Amazon. The Tapajos is supposed to be turquoise colored. I will have to wait to see that some other time.
We did cross the new bridge in Manaus across the Rio Negro. I will write a little more about that later. Suffice to say now that on the other side we caught up with the Solimões. The Amazon takes its look from this river. The Rio Negro & the Tapajos just give their water and soon lose themselves.
These forts really were impregnable. If you had a fort like this, you forced your adversaries to engage in some other sort of warfare. Of course the problem with static defense is that it makes you rely too heavily on the bricks and mortar or on the technologies that were dominate when you built the structure. You don’t adapt to changing conditions both because you trust your existing protection and because you have so much invested in it that you really cannot easily change. Most of the great infrastructure of war is never conquered, but it is often bypassed or overtaken by changes. The smart opponent doesn’t attack your strength but searches for weakness.
They told me that the fort in Macapá is the largest of its kind. I don’t know if that is true; it isn’t that big but I have not seen many other star forts. I am also a little leery of the that term “of its kind.” Maybe it’s the largest of its kind in Macapá. I don’t know. Star forts have walls that point out like tips of a star. This was a response to artillery. Medieval castles have straight walls, since you could repel attackers from any point and they could attack from any point. The problem is that there are blind spots that cannot be adequately protected from any of the castles towers. This doesn’t matter if your attackers are using swords, spears or pointy stick. It matters if you enemy can bring artillery to bear on your walls and if you have artillery of your own to direct against them. What the star fort does is fill the blind spot space so that anywhere that the enemy could approach is subject to interlocking fields of fire from the various points of the fort. The walls are also sloped so that projectiles will tend to glance off instead of just slamming in as they did with a medieval wall. The walls are also lower, since you can presumably put your adversaries under fire from a long way off.
This type of fort worked well until artillery power, range & accuracy improved. It is the characteristic colonial fort of the Spanish and Portuguese. An example of a star fort in the U.S. is Fort Ticonderoga.
The fort in Macapá controls the main mouth of the Amazon. I didn’t know this, but the river that comes out at Belém do Pará is technically not the Amazon. It has the same water, of course, but in going around an island it gets a different name. The Amazon empties into the Atlantic at Macapá.
We were nominating the Instituto Geográfico e Histórico do Pará for a grant to renew & restore their document collection, so due diligence required that we go there in person to look around. Things often look different on a paper proposal than they do when you see them in person. The need and the utility are there, as is the potential to make things better. They have a large collection of paper documents describing all sorts of transactions as well miscellaneous documents such as the sorts of notices they used to post for the general public, some centuries old. They are not in a terrible condition, but also not good and threatened. This is a very humid climate. Many of the documents look good, but it would not be good to handle them too much. The Institute will file, restore and most importantly make electronic copies of the documents. Documents that you cannot access are not more useful than documents that don’t exist.
The documents are not the only things that need restoring. The Institute is housed in a building that is still very elegant but in a “seen better days” way. The location is great as you can see from the picture above.The place used to be owned by a rich and influential local citizen and the Institute used to be the go-to place for records and research in Pará. The rich guy died; universities and other institutions took up most of the research work. But it remains one of those places that good cities revere and protect. It has a board of directors of influential local citizens and will one day – probably soon – again be a very pleasant local center. Restoration is being done on the building and the furniture inside, as you can see below.
All this made me think of how buildings and institutions work. Sometimes we would just like to preserve them and there is a school of thought that we should set these sorts of places aside, museum like, protected. I disagree. IMO historical buildings are like Stradivarius violins. They have to be used or else they decay and lose their value. This means renewing, restoring and to some extent changing rather than preserving like a fly in amber. That fly is dead. It is important that cities be full of life. Homage to the past doesn’t mean giving up the future. Things must be constantly renewed and protected against the forces of destruction. Below you can see the evidence of one of those big agents of destruction – termites.
Cultural place often supplement their incomes by housing restaurants and cafes. This provides not only some needed cash, but also brings people into the venue and since people appreciate and value what they know and what is familiar, it builds a constituency for culture. The institute has plans for such a project and I encouraged them to pursue it with determination and vigor. We don’t nominate those sorts of commercial projects for grants; there is a kind of prejudice against the profitable, but in the long run a successful operation like that will be worth more than the kindness of strangers as embodied in a grant.
We visited the Teatro da Paz in Belém to see if it would work for a visit by the Battery Dance Company, which we hope to bring to Belém in April. It does. This will be a great venue for the dancers. Now my only worry is that they will really come. I am reasonably sure that they will, but it depends on a decision by ECA.
The Teatro is similar to the Amazonas Theater in Manaus, but it was built about twenty years earlier. It is in the same tradition of bringing opera to the Amazon. Both are beautiful theaters and both are a bit of a folly. They tried so hard to be part of the cultured world of the time. Well, I suppose it was like building a stadium might be today. They figured that every important town needed one.
You can see the view from the stage of the theater in the top picture. The others are the curtains and the rehearsal area.
We visited the BNC in Belém in time to see the investiture of the new president. The Belém BNC is well established and prosperous. They have six branches, including one in Santarem, which is very far away up the Amazon. I wonder if they could open a branch in Macapá, which is actually a bit closer, although in a different state.
The BNC has a really great facility with its own theater, which you see above and an exhibit space, which you see below. BNCs face serious completion from schools that just teach English and English is the way they make their money. But BNCs are much more. They do the educational advising, sponsor art and give lots of free scholarships. I am trying to support BNCs in any way we can for that reason.
One of the senators from the state of Amapá has been asking us to visit the site of a World War II American airbase, so we did. According the locals, we are the first official Americans to visit the base since we vacated it after World War II. There is not much left except a rusting tower where they use to tie up blimps, some decaying buildings and the remains of the runway. But the visit was certainly worth the effort as it made the senator very happy and seemed to delight the local population. The mayor came along on this visit as did a couple dozen others.
We were also told that there was wreckage of a World War II American plane in the jungle of Amapá and that the bodies of American airmen killed in the crash were buried nearby by the people that found them many years ago. This is something we will investigate. If it is true, we will certainly want to bring those men home. We need to know if this is just a story or the truth.
It took us more than three hours to get from the capital city of Macapá to the municipality of Amapá. Amapá gave its name to the state, but it is no longer the capital. It is really not much more than a village, connected to the world only by a dirt road. The airbase is nine kilometers beyond that on an even worse dirt road. Inaccessible is the word you would use to describe it. One of the vehicles in our convoy hit a slippery patch and went into the ditch. Nobody was hurt, but it made us late for our next appointments and provided a spectacular picture that you can see above. Below is the municipal building.
Nevertheless, the drive was interesting. As the senator described and as we saw, Amapá has five distinct biomes. There is dry forest, wet forest, cerrado, marsh & campo (grassland). The state is not that big, so it is surprising to see that much diversity.
Much of the cerrado near the road is given over to eucalyptus plantations; I understand there are 135,000 acres. They were once owned by international paper, but were sold to a alliance of two Japanese firms – Marubeni Corp. and Nippon Papers Industries. I was told that there are no eucalyptus plantations not owned by them in the state. They chip the trees and sell the chips but do not process them further. The eucalyptus are ready to harvest in six years. Amazing.
This entry is out of order. I will write up my stories from Amapa and post soon.
I am going up the Amazon with the Semester at Sea, a university sponsored by the University of Virginia course aboard a boat. About 600 students take a semester of credit courses, while the boat sails around the world. Among the places it goes in Manaus. The Amazon is navigable by ocean ship to Manaus. This is a very fast ship, but it still takes two days and nights to arrive. Gives an idea of the size of the Amazon.
The courses are like ordinary university courses, but with emphasis on the places they visit. The students all have to read the book “1493” which I read as part of my routine reading list, but now I can claim to have done as homework. Sweet. I get to go for free. Well I have to pay for my trip by giving lectures, which I like to do so it is better than free. I have a good job.
The job is a big part of the lectures. I am trying to get these smart kids interested in careers in the FS or in the Federal government in general. This is not hard to do. I just tell them what I have been doing for the last couple of days and everybody wants to sign up. This is not entirely representative. My job is more fun than most and the last few days have been more eventful than usual, but I think the overall picture is right. There are a couple of my more junior colleagues who fill them in about life nearer the beginning of the careers, still very good. I am also trying to create awareness of the Brazilian Science w/o Borders program and also President Obama’s 100,000 Strong initiatives to encourage Americans to study in South America. All I care about is Brazil, so I try to encourage Portuguese language study and Brazilian specialization. We need more Americans who know this place.
The ship is very comfortable. It is like a floating hotel, different from most of the U.S. Navy vessels I have visited, not gray for one thing. Food is good on the ship. It is much like that on a big Navy ship or my Anbar chow hall, which I know does sound like it should be good to those who have not had it, but actually is. I like cafeteria type food. My cabin is very nice. They are treating me very well. The ship rocks a little, but not much and is generally very smooth.
It is very cool to watch the Amazon forest from out of the windows or off the decks, but it gets to be a lot like a long flight. The scenery does not change much that you can really tell from the distance. It is an unbroken green. When you go around a bend in the river, there is more of the same. Sometimes the river widens out and there is a marshy area. Other times the forest comes right to the shore. I sat on my little balcony (yes I have one) last night for a long time, looking at the moon and thinking about the vastness. If I jumped off the boat and could swim to the shore, I would be in that proverbial middle of nowhere. There is no way I could get back. It would be like one of those episodes of “I survived” except that I wouldn’t. I don’t recall ever being in a place like this before, so empty, vast & hostile to survival. It would be scary, if I was not aboard a luxury boat, bringing civilization with me up the river.
We visted the Museu Paraense Emílio Goeldi mostly just to keep contact. We sometimes have short fuse offers of exchange programs and it is important to have connection before you need them. The museum is also a place to get some background on local history and environment.
The museum is named after Emílio Goeldi, a Swiss anthropologist who organized the collections and did a lot of anthropological studies in Pará and what became the state of Amapá. We talked about the native people of the area. Ancient people of Amapá produced the urns you see above. They contained to bones of the dead. The people who made them are now extinct and not much is known about them, but the urns and related items were used to show the continuity of cultures of Pará and Amapá.
The region was more healthful in pre-Columbian times before the introduction of malaria & yellow fever and could support a larger population using simple agriculture, hunting, gathering and fishing. I mentioned “1493,” the book I have been reading. The author says that malaria had a decisive impact on the history of the Americas. Among other things, it transformed the Amazon from a relatively healthy place to live, in terms of diseases, to a very unhealthy one. The author speculates that malaria came over from Africa with slaves. African populations have some immunity to malaria; natives of the Americas did not.
Much of the archeological and anthropological research in Pará and Amapá was carried out by German or Swiss-German scientist and German influence in general was strong in this region. As you look at the exhibits, it is one German after another. There was a darker side to this in the 1930s. The Nazis encouraged anthropological research as an adjunct to their general race-based theories. I remembered that from my studies in anthropology so many years ago after I was reminded when one of our Brazilian friends mentioned that one of the anthropologists left Brazil to serve as an officer in the Wehrmacht.
Also part of the museum is a zoo and botanical gardens. It is in many ways the old – and IMO good – model of an integrated scholarship. The zoo is mostly a rescue of animals, i.e. they don’t go out and capture them for the zoo. They had lots of sloths and some anteaters. Evidently these slow-moving animals are often victims of traffic accidents.
Belém is the kind of place I expected it should be. When I was in Manaus, I didn’t especially feel like I was in the Amazon. It was like another big city. In Belém, in contrast, you can actually see the Amazon.
I will be writing more about what we did in Belém. We were very busy. But I am also very busy today, so writing the history will have to wait. In the meantime here are a few pictures. You will notice at the top that his is just really pretty. As usual, the picture doesn’t capture all the beauty. The reddish dust you see on the path are pedals from flowers falling from the trees.
