Category: Our travel

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São Jorge

São Jorge seems farther away because of the long and lonely road you have to take to get there.  If you had an Interstate type highway, it would be an easy day trip. Only the last twelve kilometers are dirt, but it has a lot of influence on the perception of the journey.  You cannot drive fast and it is very bumpy. The roads within São Jorge are also all unpaved and this has a lot of influence over the perception of São Jorge.  Notice in the picture below that they have well marked streets, even if the streets themselves are not well marked. Notice in the photo up top that they have a paved sidewalk, but the street is still just dirt.

São Jorge is the gateway to the Chapada dos Veadeiros Park and mostly depends on eco-tourism.  There are lots of posadas, each of them idiosyncratic and more restaurants than you would expect for a town like this.  I suppose you could describe the accommodations at both as “alternative.”   There is kind of a hippie feel.  It reminds me of Sedona, Arizona – or like Sedona might have been years ago.   São Jorge was a center for crystal mining and people who believe in such things think that it is a focus of spiritual energy, so it draws some of the same sorts as Sedona.   People came to the area last year when the Maya predicted the end of the world.  Evidently this area would have survived had the Maya been right.  Locals seem undisturbed by these people, but there are new age type shops that cater to them.

We stayed at a place called Bambu.  It is a delightfully relaxing place with a very distinct personality.  Tranquil is the word I would use to describe it, if I had to pick one word.  It is near the edge of town.  Of course, in a town this size most places are near an edge.  But you can walk down the busy main street.  I say “busy” only half in jest.   There are a lot of people walking around.  On the corner down from Bambu is a little store where you can buy sandwiches for your day trips into Chapada dos Veadeiros.   And down the street is a good restaurant called Nenzinha, where you pay by the kilo.  The restaurant at Bambu is very nice with a wide selection of food, if you like variations on lasagna.  The pleasant ambiance makes up for the somewhat limited menu.  

They do have a very large variety of liquor and mixed drinks.  Espen and I had the usual caipirinha, which is Brazil’s national cocktail.   It is made with cachaça, a hard liquor made with sugar cane.  Some people prefer vodka, which is then called a caipiroska.  It is a distinctly inferior drink.  Vodka has no taste of its own.  Instead of a caipirinha, you just have a kind of sweet lime drink.  Stick with cachaça.  A warning is in order, however.  Caipirinhas are much stronger than they seem.

Notes from my first trip to this area are at this link.  Look at the ones before and after too.

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One day

I got to walk through St. Louis in the morning and evening. It was different.  The morning was great weather, sunny and 70.  I noticed the sign above. I wondered if I would have to toss something on the ground in order to avoid the penalty.

The way home was less pleasant.  It poured.  But it lasted only about as long as it took me to walk home.  Chrissy & I went to Denny’s for supper and by the time we were done eating it was clear and pleasant again. Tomorrow I go back to Brasilia and Chrissy goes back to Virginia. Time together was too short. 

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Indian mounds at Cahokia

Cahokia is the biggest native settlement north of Mexico.   The inhabitants built mounds for temples, burials and platforms. Nobody is really sure what they used them for, since the civilization had no discovered writing and it completely disappeared before any European exporters showed up to write anything down for them.Cahokia was the biggest of the mound building societies.  Since mostly they lived in the Mississippi drainage basin, we call them Mississippian culture.

Archeology indicates that 10-20,000 people lived at Cahokia during the height, around 900 years ago. That was a big deal for the time and available technology.  The concentration was made possible by the rich river soils that allowed surplus of corn.  It seems to have been a highly structured society with rigid castes.

Nobody can be sure why the civilization disappeared. The leading candidate is ecological degradation. Cahokians probably just outran their resource base, exhausted their soils and killed off local game. We also don’t know where the people went. Since their civilization collapsed before the introduction of the horse to the plains, they could not have suffered the fate of so many other farming tribes, i.e. being wiped out by plains Indians mounted on horses. The horse changed the balance of power on the plains, allowing previously backward tribes to kick ass. Tribes like to Comanche, Sioux and the Cheyenne more or less wiped out the farming tribes. These genocides were mostly per-historic, in that there are few historic records, but it changed the ethnic mix of middle of America.

The museum was really nice, but I did not particularly like the juxtaposition of the archeologist versus the storyteller, implying an equality of myth and science.  Oral history can inform science and real history, but it is always seriously flawed. It cannot be properly evaluated until somebody writes it down and then it stops being oral history.  In other words, oral history is a raw material for historical analysis.  It is even worse in this case, since there is no oral history.  The Cahokians are gone.  There was no oral history, so all the “wisdom” is conjecture.

Cahokia is worth seeing if you are in the St. Louis area, although I doubt I would drive very far to see it. I drove out of my way to visit Chillicothe, Ohio a couple years ago. It was similar. Cahokia is a little bigger. I visited Aztalan in Wisconsin too, but that was a long time ago and I don’t recall much.

Above is “Wood henge.” It is the ancient American answer to Stonehenge.  Looks a lot like telephone pole henge, but I suppose it was the thought that counted.

My first visit to an Indian mound was Lizard Mound in Wisconsin. I went as a child and I still remember the exhibit with a skeleton. Scared me for days and I still remember it.

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St. Louis Blues Week

We were lucky enough to have our hotel a short walk from the St. Louis Blues week. It was sponsored by Jack Daniels, so they were selling Jack with various combinations.  They had Jack Daniels and Diet Coke. It is very good. I just had the straight stuff followed by beer and lots of pulled pork. Lucky we could walk back the hotel. It wore off some of the food and avoided a drunk driving experience.

Making good barbeque is a real art.  People work on it. They have special recipes and techniques. I am not a connoisseur of pulled pork but I do like to try the different types.  I ate too much and went back the next day. I can admire the artists of pork.

I love the variety of America.  Above are perhaps not “typical” but they are picturesque.

I was vaguely aware of St. Louis, but didn’t really think much or know much about it. It is a really nice city.  It is much like Milwaukee, probably because of the German influence on civic pride, but (excuse my hometown) a little nicer in many ways.  If it had Lake Michigan it would beat Milwaukee.  Speaking of German heritage in St Louis, above is a statue of the great German poet & philosopher Frederich Schiller.  Below is the great German naturalist Alexander von Humboldt.  Germans made great contributions to America and our country. Our universities are based on German models; much of our civic culture was cultured by German immigrants; of course we eat hamburgers and frankfurters (hot dogs) and drive on highways inspired by the autobahns.  The experience of two terrible wars has made us forget how much our country was affected positively by Germans. It is useful to recall, even in this, that our American armies and navies in those wars had lots of German Americans, including leaders such as Eisenhower, Chester Nimitz and John J Pershing. On the 2000 census 58 million Americans claimed to be primarily of German ancestry.  It is still our largest ethnic heritage.

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Chrissy & I visit Rio

Chrissy and I are in Rio.  We went here from São Paulo.  It was Chrissy’s first time in São Paulo and her first time in Rio for more than twenty-five years. We got to stay at Marriott.  The above picture is taken from the roof. The first time we came here in 1985, we stayed at the Debret Hotel. To my surprise, it is still here, as you can see below.

Rio is looking good. Chrissy and I went to the botanical gardens. The pictures below are from there.

Above is the palm arcade and below is the interesting root system.  Tropical plants in moist soils produce these buttressed roots to prop themselves up.

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Hard to Get Around Walking on Steep Ground

Ouro Preto is not really a walkable city.  It is small and compact enough, but the hills are dauntingly steep.  Many of the hills are steeper than an average staircase and they are a lot longer. There are also uneven pavements and big steps up & down.  I don’t think of myself as lazy and I am in pretty good condition, but this is just not a place for a nice stroll.

On the plus side, you get a good workout just going from the hotel to a restaurant.

It is not an easier place for cars.  The streets are narrow with lots of sharp turns and the steep hills are also difficult for cars, as you can see in the pictures.  Above is the monument to Tiradentes, who rebelled against the Portuguese, was killed in a nasty way and became a hero-martyr. 

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Art in a Hard to Reach Place

I wrote about the road in the last post.  Inhotim is where the road was taking us.  It is a vast outdoor art park.  I enjoyed the art because it was in the beautiful natural settings.

You have to give thanks to crazy rich guys.  This park is the work of one such man who collected art and wanted to share it with others. It would have been difficult for any but a private individual to justify a place like this.  You pay $R20 to get in, but the revenues from that don’t cover the costs of current operations, much less the costs of obtaining the land, building the buildings & buying the works of art.  It has never broken even and never will.  

People would be unwilling to pay enough to cover the costs. This is also why it probably would never be created by government. If the individuals enjoying the place would be unwilling to pay, why would it be a better deal to force taxpayers to foot the bill?  Eventually I suppose it will be run by a kind of ongoing foundation.  Some people will become “members” and they will have fund raising drives. The rich guy will have footed the bill for the big capital expense of building the place, so they will just have to fill the gap between the amount of money they can make in revenue and the amount they need to keep it going.

Chrissy and I had a buffet lunch at a restaurant in the middle of the park. It has the most beautiful buffet, in terms of setup, that we had ever seen. We ate under palm trees in a heavenly setting. I recommend that. Another think I liked was the quiet. They still did things with hand tools (see above). I didn’t see any leaf blowers.

I think we have similar model with San Simeon, built on the California coast by ridiculously rich William Randolph Hearst, or the Biltmore place in the mountains of North Carolina. These were built in out-of-the-way places of significant beauty by rich guys and are now open to the public.

I suppose revenues will increase for Inhotim if they build a better road to the place.  BTW – this is the map on how to get there.   My advice is don’t even try that yellow road. You just cannot get there from anywhere.

I have more pictures than I wanted to post of process.  They are included here. 

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Not Just a Road; an Adventure

I don’t regret our adventure but I will avoid repeating it.  You really cannot say it is hard to find Brumodinho but it is really hard to get there from almost anyplace else.  It looks just off the highway on the maps and it is close for birds or somebody with a helicopter, but not so much for those stuck to the ground.

Getting there took us down a crappy road. We didn’t know how bad it was because it was after dark.  We gave ourselves time to get there while it was still light, but we got lost.   Once we got to Brumodinho, we had to find the posada, also a challenge in a place that doesn’t seem to believe in marking most streets.  We finally found the place with the directions of a gas station attendant and the grace of God.  The posada was very nice, BTW, and I recommend it, if you can find it and if you are visiting Inhotim which I also recommend.  But don’t expect it to be easy to get to.

Anyway, the posada owner told us that there was a short cut that would take us to Ouro Preto w/o having to go all the way back to Belo Horizonte.  He was right and he explained it well but facts on the ground were harder than the theory.

For one thing, there were lots of trucks and lots of hills.  This means that you get in back of trucks moving slower than you could walk.  Beyond that, the roads are not well marked. We took a wrong turn and ended up on a dirt road which ended in a construction project.  Our going down this dirt road is not as dumb as it sounds. Some dirt roads are pretty busy and this one was too.  It probably could have taken us to the main highway, BR 040, as some people told us, but rain and construction made in impossible. Anyway, we backtracked and took a narrow, winding, but asphalt surfaced road to BR 040. But this in Minas and there are mountains. At times it seemed like we were going straight up. The pictures do not accurately convey the climb.  The road was good at times, at least as good as a country road in Western Virginia, i.e. not the best road but okay. But at other times it was narrower than some of my bike trails in Virginia and not as well maintained.  Not just a road, an adventure.  

In the U.S. we don’t appreciate the infrastructure that helps make us prosperous.  It is in the secondary roads you really see it. Brazil has some first-class primary roads. What it lacks are the County Truck and country roads.  These were often build way back in the 1930s. They still serve us well.  They get our stuff to market and bring our markets to the countryside.  We take them for granted, but they are not granted to all places.

The country road you see in my pictures are the best stretches on offer. We hit dirt roads and sometimes dirt we couldn’t even identify as roads.  

We were very happy to finally get to the main highway and on the road to Ouro Preto, but that is another story. 

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Ouro Preto City of the Baroque

Ouro Preto means black gold in Portuguese. The black gold is an ore of gold mixed with iron ore.  It looks like dirt and I don’t believe I would pay attention to it if I stepping in a pile. But this black gold financed the prosperity of the city of Ouro Preto and of the whole region around it. The people of Ouro Preto, at least the ones running the show, poured their wealth into ornate baroque churches that dot the city. These and the general rich architectural tradition made Ouro Preto a UNESCO World Heritage place.

I have included pictures of the outsides of churches. The Church of Saõ Francisco de Assis is considered to be a masterpiece of Brazilian architecture, but they are all interesting Cameras are not allowed inside, so I don’t have pictures. Take a look at my posting from the São Francisco church in Salvador to get an idea, although the Ouro Preto churches are less well maintained/restored. There are very ornate carvings and sculptures.  In fact, Baroque when used as an adjective means describes something that is ornate, maybe too ornate.  

Baroque was on the way out as a style by the time the people in Ouro Preto got the word.  The most famous Brazilian artist of this period was Aleijadinho, the little cripple. Although he suffered serious physical problems, he still produced a prodigious amount of work, which you can see all around central Minas Gerais. You can see the decline of Baroque in the works in the churches, both because the style was waning but also because the gold deposits were being used up, so there was less cash to support the projects.

I am not a big fan of the baroque. They dazzle the eye with detail. There are many of those round faced angels and elaborate filigrees.  But there is a darker side. As you look closely, you see a significant cult of death, lots of skulls and suffering.  The Church promulgated the Baroque style, among other things, as a way to attract believers back to the Church and away from the Protestants.  In the baroque churches, you see both the carrots and the sticks. The art is elaborate, sensual, and even voluptuous.  But then included are the very graphic depictions of suffering, deprivation and death.  So the baroque appeals to both desire and fear.  Yes, there is the feast for the senses, but we all are alive for a short time and dead forever after, so better prepare for that.  According to the Church, there is but one way to do that and they control the tollgate.

You have to understand the art and practices of the past in human terms, as you would something today.  Human nature doesn’t change and the people of the past reacted in ways that we would recognize.  If we put these great works of art in modern context, we are not talking the New York Museum of Fine Arts.  The better analogy is Disneyland.  After things have been around a long time, they acquire the patina of respectably.  On the other hand, we tend to disrespect the work of our contemporaries, especially if they are popular.  But recall the context the niche each is filling.  I have always been impressed by the innovations in arts, entertainment, crowd control and transport employed at places like Disneyland. 

I have visited “classy places” like the Vatican or Venice.  The same processes and purposes are present.  This is not to denigrate or trivialize the great accomplishments of artists past, but it is to recognize the human spirit in each generations.   The true heirs of Donatello, Leonardo, Michelangelo and Raphael (besides mutant turtles) are the engineers at amusement parks, or maybe video game designers. It is not those self-important guys who posture as professional artists, producing work that few people want and even fewer really understand.  

The churches are very pretty, but there was more pressing business in a frontier region like Minas. Things like roads, canals & universities should come first.  But I realize that mine is a very secular point of view and and not very artistic. I suppose that a thing of beauty is a joy forever and forever makes the difference.

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Wandering Goiás

We had to rent a car, since mine still has not arrived. I had them pick up it up in the middle of May. It really doesn’t do any good to send it early, since they kind of save them up to send all at once.  After it gets to the country, the Brazilian bureaucracy is daunting. I suspect they just delay so that there is no way the car will be in officially in the country for three years before you leave.  That way you still cannot sell it tax free.


Anyway, rental cars are fairly expensive here and they only have stick shifts, so it is not a good thing. But we needed the car for Chrissy to travel.  For her first visit we wanted to get around Brasilia and Goiás. You cannot do that w/o a car.

It is the end of the dry season around here.  It will rain in a few weeks, but everything now is as dry as it will get.  We saw lots of fires along the roads in Goiás.  The news mentioned the extreme dryness and fire danger and the smoke irritated our eyes and throats.

The grassland/savannah burns naturally, but a combination of human-made fires and human fire suppression causes trouble. Many people here still see fire as an enemy to be fought or prevented rather than a natural process that needs to be used and managed.

I still want to study the ecology of the cerrado more.  (FYI – the cerrado is the vast area of grass and widely spaced trees in the middle of Brazil, especially Goiás.)  It is strange to me because of the very dry season and the very wet season.  We have nothing really like it in the U.S.  The predictably of the rain is making it a good agricultural region, but I didn’t see that much crop agriculture. It seems mostly pastures and there is significant forestry, especially eucalyptus. Eucalyptus grows very rapidly here; I have heard that the rotations can be as short as five or six years. And the Brazilians have developed varieties especially adapted to the specific demands of the region. The wood is used to make charcoal and for cellulose pulp.  

Eucalyptus is unpopular with some people because not only is it an introduced species, but it also has been developed extensively both with conventional breeding and biotech.  There are indeed drawbacks to extensive eucalyptus monoculture. They do not support large populations of wildlife. The leaves are not palatable to most animals and even bugs tend to shun them.  It is no coincidence that the flavor is used for cough drops, but what is good for menthol in cough drops is usually not great for ordinary eating. The bark is loose and resinous. It tends to fall off and lay on the ground where it causes more intensive fires.  The eucalyptus themselves can usually survive these conflagrations, but other native plants often cannot. Like everything else, you have to trade benefits for costs. As a tree farmer who grows loblolly pine, I see the eucalyptus as a competitor. It produces a substitute for man of the things that my pines also produce. Putting aside my self-interest, however, I can see that eucalyptus have a place in well-managed forestry systems, but as the Greeks used to say, “nothing too much.” 

The eucalyptus plantations we saw were extremely orderly.  The rows were neat and there was almost no undergrowth of competing vegetation.  This is very much unlike pine in Virginia.  I respect the ability to transform nature, but I prefer to leave a little on my own land for the animals and natural systems. Something too orderly is probably not so good for nature. 

We followed BR 60 to Pirenópolis and BR 70 back home to Brasilia. These are good highways. There was a lot of traffic near Brasilia, but it was quiet once you got out of town. We stopped at a nice churrascaria on the road called Churrascaria Gaucho. It has gotten expensive in Brazil in all the big towns and in the tourist centers, but it is not bad in the smaller places. The total for the two of us was only $R44. They had lots of good cuts of meat and it came quickly and generously. 

My pictures show the churrascaria I mentioned above.  The middle picture is a very neat eucalyptus plantation and the two bottom pictures are the pousada where Chrissy & I stayed.