St. Louis is a pleasant city and I was lucky to get a nice day. I walked down Market Street down to the St. Louis Arch. It is a pleasant walk. There was evidently some urban renewal done here to make all the green space. There are lots of offices and government buildings but I don’t think many people actually live down here. Above is the Courthouse against the Arch. This is the courthouse where the Dred Scott case was first decided. That decision helped lead to the Civil War. The man most responsible for ending it is below.
Below is the St Louis Arch. It is much bigger than it seems in pictures and pictures don’t do it justice.
You can see some people near the arch that shows the scale.
I have some other pictures that are interesting but you can click on them separately.
We traveled around the Louisiana and then to Washington. As I wrote a few posts ago, much of what I learned was similar to what I learned before. Educational exchanges require trust and relationships. I will not repeat that analysis again, but I do what to share some of my pictures and notes. Above are ferns on trees at the University of Louisiana in Lafayette. Many trees are covered in them.
The U.S. has lots of great universities. I am fond of the more out-of-the-way state institutions. There is a lot of excellence in these smaller centers and lots of people get their educations there. We visited Louisiana Tech in Ruston LA. It is a long way from New Orleans. The Louisiana environment is a lot like southern Virginia, pines and mixed forests. It was familiar. Above is the biomedical building at LT. Below is an interesting type of store. I never saw a store devoted to irrigation. It is especially surprising in Louisiana, where it rains a lot.
Below is a statue of Mike the Tiger at LSU. They have a real tiger too His home is behind the statue. I took a picture of Mike, but he was just laying there. The current Mike the Tiger is number 6.
We also visited Tulane. It is a beautiful university full or tradition. It is long and narrow, only a couple blocks wide but about a mile long.
It is always interesting to take a kind of journey and I like to walk so I walked from the French Quarter to my Marriott Hotel near the Causeway. I am so far from downtown because of the football game, BTW. I could not get a hotel nearer the center within government rate because so many people are coming in for the game. No matter. The walk was good and I had no other pressing business on Saturday. Took me a long time and according to Google maps, it was nine miles, but I cut off a few miles by catching the streetcar. I took pictures along the way, so I have my illustrated journey. Up top is the start at Jackson Square at the bottom of the French Quarter.
Above is just outside Jackson square. There are lots of street performers and fortune tellers. The most interesting was the Voodoo Bone Lady, above. I don’t know what she does with Voodoo bones. Didn’t want to get too close, lest I be turned into a zombie. Below is Bourbon Street. The word to describe the French Quarter is raucous. People were loudly partying, drinking and carrying on. People walk the streets with big cups of beer and other drinks. And this was just after noon.
Below are little houses on the way out of the French sector.
Below is Louis Armstrong park. Top is just the pond. Below that is a statue of Louis himself. Louis Armstrong was a great trumped player. I still remember him. He sang with a distinctive gravel voice.
After passing out of the park, you enter the 9th Ward, made famous by the flooding of Katrina. There were lots of people just hanging around, but there were also lots of empty lots that probably had homes before the hurricane. I talked to some people about the lost community. It was interesting and sad. The talked about a community of small homes, homeowners who passed their property to their kids and how the hurricane literally swept it away. They said that some people were returning, but it won’t be the same. One guy told me that he had set up a kind of phone tree and the old 9th Ward people keep in touch. They have a big picnic in the City Park every year. Meanwhile, services have not returned but wildlife has. There are deer, rabbits and even wild boar, I was told. Brad Pitt is running an organization building flood resistant housing in the area. People were generally happy about that, but that is just one point of light. Rebuilding it taking a while. Below is … I don’t know what. But the photo is interesting.
I was getting a little worried that it was taking me too long to get back to the hotel. Fortunately, I could catch the streetcar. I rode from Broad Street to the end of the line. It cost $1.25.
The line ends in a big cemetery. Evidently, the water table is so high in New Orleans that they cannot bury bodies underground. They would float up. So the tombs are above ground, creating a true city of the dead.
It was starting to get dark, so I didn’t take more pictures. At the end of the graveyard was a nice neighborhood in the Jefferson Parish. Legally I was out of New Orleans into a place called Metairie. It was truly a long walk. I would have taken a taxi, but I found none, so I trudged on, now enjoying the walk somewhat less. One interesting thing was that the many streets had classic names. We had Homer, Hesiod, Demosthenes, Claudius & even Nero. The bottom picture I took the next day. This is the causeway that crosses Lake Pontchartrain. It is almost twenty-four miles long. It looks even stranger at night, with headlights crossing pitch black darkness. Lake Pontchartrain is brackish. Near the north end it is almost completely freshwater. The other end is half seawater. It was flooding from this side that drown so much of New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina.
BTW – I almost made a very bad decision to get a hotel on the other end of that bridge. It was a little cheaper. I figured, just across the bridge. How far could that be? Fortunately, I am on the near side. Crossing that thing would be a long and monotonous walks, if you were even allowed to do that.
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.
The water drops 168 meters, creating a constant wind and spray. It is exhilarating to walk toward the falls, surrounded by sound and mist. You soon get soaked.
The facilities were more primitive when I visited here twenty-six years ago and there were no rules. For example, you could swim in the pool right under the falls. I suppose if you were dumb enough to actually swim under the falls, you would get hurt or maybe killed, which is why it is now illegal to swim I the upper pool at all. It would be hard to get there anyway. The current pushing out from the falls is very strong and I remember being unable to swim against it – and that was back when I was strong.
Today there is a decent restaurant at the gate to the falls and a paved road that leads all the way there. The biggest challenge getting there is going through the town of Formosa. It is not a bad little city, but it is no longer a little city. The signs directing you to the falls are fairly good. I would never have found my way through that warren of streets w/o them.
IMO the drive from Formosa to the falls was worth the trip just by itself. The Goiás landscape, as I have mentioned in other posts, is very pleasant, especially this time of the year. Everything is intensely green with beautiful hills in the background.
This is mostly ranch country with lots of those white, humped Nelore and zebu cattle. This breed came originally from India, but today breeding to adapt them to local conditions has made them essentially a Brazilian breed. India has the world’s largest cattle herd, but Brazil has the world’s largest COMMERCIAL cattle herd, i.e. they use the cattle for meat. It is a little ironic, IMO, given the status of these cows in their country of origin.
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.
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.
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.
We had a good and sunny day in Inhotim and in Ouro Preto, but then is started to rain – hard. Ouro Preto is very steep. It is exhausting to walk around the city, much more like a mountain hike. It poured rain for about a half hour making the cobble-stone streets into fast flowing rivers.
These cobble-stone streets have been here for centuries and they are evidently resistant to the water flow. I think it might be hard to drive up a smoother road, especially when the water flows. Chrissy and I agreed that a city like this would be impossible in Wisconsin. Not only do we not have hills as long and steep as these, but we have snow. Even a dusting of snow or a little ice would make streets with this pitch impassible.
BTW – it started to rain on Friday PM in Ouro Preto. It kept raining until we left AM on Sunday. Since we left in the rain, we don’t know for sure if it ever stopped. The rain and fog seemed very un-Brazil and almost Central European. As we drove up the foggy roads, it reminded me of the old days in Silesia.
Above and below are wasp nests. They look just like rocks, mabye the kinds of rocks they would have on a moive set. I couldn’t find information about them on Internet, so I only have what the guide told me. I did tap on the surface and it was light weight and hollow. The guide said that they were sting-less. I didn’t actually see any bees or wasps.
Below is our guide. He said he was a native of the area and did this every day.
Below is the pousada where we stayed. It is called “Bambu” and there is lots of bamboo used around it.The place is clearly the dream of the owner. It contains lots of personalized touches and I suppose could be called either full or personality or funky. We liked it.
Below is a Coca-Cola truck on Sao Jorge street. I don’t want to go where there’s not Coca-Cola, but I doubt such a place exists anymore.
Below is Goias Hwy 118. Not a bad road.
Below is just a cool looking plant. I have no idea what it is.
