Day 2 or I am a lucky Bastard

Notes of June 20, 2009

Yes my friends, the travel gods have smiled on me, big time. I could not have imagined a better stroke of luck. Last night, the bus ride to Sao Joao de Rei was as uneventful and long as the scenery leaving Rio was breathtaking. And yes, the bus hugged mountain curves with sheer drops on one side that exhilarated and terrified me at the same time. But around 4:30 the sky took on a distinctly dusky look, and I began to wonder if rain was coming. Then I remembered that I was in the southern hemisphere and that if the summer solstice was encroaching up north, the winter solstice must be thinking of doing the same down here. Duh, Keke.

As the bus approached Sao Joao around 8:00, I started to figure out my plan for the night. I didn't have a reservation at a Pousada (none of the ones I had e-mailed before I left responded) and the one I wanted to try first was a kilometer walk from the bus station. But the closer we got to the station, the more I realized this was not a neighborhood I wanted to be walking in at night towing a suitcase big enough to fit a small giraffe with a sign on my head that screams "Tourista!" Plan B: Taxi to the pousada. As I was fetching my luggage from the bus under carriage, a sharply dressed Brazilian woman who had been on the bus with me approached me and asked in broken English if I was a tourista, which I thought was pretty obvious. But soon she was asking me where I was from and she told me she has a neice that lives in Atlanta and that she enjoyed the ATL very much. "Where are you staying?" she asked. And I told her my plans to stay in Sao Joao, even though I was improvising at the moment, and that I planned to travel to Tiradentes (pronounced CHEER-a-dench) tomorrow. "Ahhh, you should come with me to Tiradentes tonight! It is much nicer to stay there than Sao Joao. Tiradentes is beautiful. I have a house there, and I can show you around. My husband is just coming to pick me up and we can take you!" And on cue, her husband appeared on the platform and she gave him the warmest hug, like the hug you give a man returning from overseas, and any niggling reservations I may have had about going with them melted away. So Virgina Wilson (the most Portugese name EVER) and her husband packed my luggage in their trunk, and me in the back seat, and drove me through the heart of Sao Joao to show me the colonial district, and then took the scenic route to Tiradentes (even though I couldn't see much in the dark), and showed me around the town (which took about ten minutes it's so little) and then drove me to the first pousada I picked. Virginia went in with me to inquire about a room. When there were no vacancies there, she drove me to the next pousada, and then next, where finally there was a spare little room on the first floor waiting for me. Her husband brought in all my luggage, she negotiated R20 off the room price for me, told the host to take good care of me because now I was her good friend, kissed me on both cheeks and told me to have a wonderful time in her country (and be careful in Rio) before disappearing out the door into the chill Minas evening. Jeeze. Do we even know the meaning of hospitality in the US? At all?

In the morning, I woke to a charming breakfast (cafe amanha) of fresh papaya, cheese and random mystery buscuits, along with my first taste of Brazilian coffee. Damn. Just Damn. Dark, sweet, and with fresh cows milk, creamy and full of flavor.

So now a little about the town I am in: I took a bus almost due north of Rio into the state of Minas Gerais (General Mines). In the early 18th century, the Portugese began extracting gold and gems in earnest from Minas, and with the growing mineral wealth came population growth. Mining towns like Sao Joao de Rei, Tiradentes and Ouro Preto grew near the mines, and became showcases of the wealth the region generated. Black slaves were brought from Angola in Africa and elsewhere in Brazil to do the dirty work (quite literally) of working in the mines, while the Portugese enjoyed the fruits and luxuries of their labor after the majority of wealth was sent back to Portugal.*

So why did I want to come to Minas? Well, I have this book called 1000 Places to See Before You Die, and the colonial mining towns of Minas are on the list. The Baroque architecture is acclaimed, and one of the towns is a UNESCO World Heritage site, so I was pretty much burning to see it once I read about it and nothing was going to stop me (except swine flu). So my first venture out in the morning took me into a cobble stone clad streetscape in Tiradentes with hills and single story stucco houses culminating in the Igreja Matriz de Santo Antonio. The church was designed by this dude named Aleijadinho (pronounced a-LAY-ja-jeen-yo), the Michaelangleo of Brazil for his Baroque masterpieces. I'll explain more about this guy later, but for now, let me just say the church looks like a gold bomb exploded in there. It is intense and overwhelming, teetering between over adorned and pleasantly ornate. It has this multi colored pipe organ (which still works) that was made in Portugal and brought to the town in pieces by donkey in 1798. This is a trippy detail when you realize how mountainous the region is, and just how much stuff MUST have been brought here by donkey from the coast, AFTER if was shipped for months across the Atlantic. And then there's this other church, called Igreja Nossa Senorha Rosario Dos Petros (Our Lady Rosario of the Rocks). This place was built by and for the black slaves, but because they slaves mined during daylight hours (all of them), they had to build it all at night.

Virginia told me that 20 years ago, Tiradentes was in complete ruins. But the director of a Tele Novela, the Brazilian version of a soap opera, decided to use Tiradentes as a location for his soap, and a resurgence of interest in the town saved it from ruin. Now it is a rich people's getaway, kind of like Santa Fe, NM, and wealthy people from Sao Paulo and Belo Horizonte have bought up vacation homes there, causing a bit of tension with the locals who have been pushed to the outskirts. I am always amazed at social dynamics, which seem to be the same no matter where you are.

As I strolled to the town square, I was stopped dead by a row of horse drawn carrigaes. These were clearly for tourists (the vast majority of whom are Brazilian), but they were unlike any horse drawn carriages I had seen before. These were not the period perfect horse and buggies you see in Central Park, or the historic reproductions you see in Charleston, SC and Savannah. Here was a row of carriages with a distinctly, well, Warner Brothers vibe to them. The horses wore harnesses of fuschia pink and bluejay blue and sunshine yellow, with cutesy plumes on the crowns of their bridles, and they pulled chintsy looking carriages bedecked with Hello Kitty and Woody Woodpecker (who is apparently all the rage down here) stickers. This one poor horse, his head down in shame, sported a floof of pink feathers on his head and pulled a Hello Kitty bedecked carriage. Would you be happy if that was you? I don't think so. And in the saddles of others rode the illustrious likes of blow up Spidermans and Sponge Bobs. But the best was when another horse rounded a cornder with a fluffy dog, the real deal, riding the horse of all fours. No joke. Every time I crossed paths with this furry Lone Ranger and his Tonto, I took a picture. The proud dog gallantly astride his completely humiliated horse.

I crossed town to a beautiful 18th century public fountain originally erected for drinking, washing clothes and watering horses, and I offered to take pictures of a Brazililan couple. I was practicing my Portugese numbers with them: "Um, dois, tres," click. And then I spotted a couple sitting nearby with the same guide book I was carrying. I thought they might speak English, but I approached them attempting Portugese. (Thank god Rachel taught me a few useful phrases, like "where is the bathroom?" "how much does this cost?" and all the proper greetings before she left). They responded in English, and now my luck was about to change, for the even better. Mike and Melie are Canadians. Mike, an Anglophone from Vancouver Island, and Melie a Quebecois from, well, Quebec. The two were traveling here for two weeks as a sort of tenth anniversary (they aren't really married though, just "living in sin," according to Mike). Mike speaks fluent Portugese (more on that later), and Melie is pretty good herself with the language. Once more I am cursing my monolingual ass. We fell into talking and found we had similar plans to go to Sao Joao for a while that afternoon, and we made a pact to meet a little later on and drive there together for lunch (M&M have a car). No bus for me!

So we drove the thirty minutes to Sao Joao, yammering the entire way about travel and politics and domestic social concerns. Mike and Melie are each about 4 years older than I am, but it feels as if they have lived generations more of experiences in their world travels. My jaw was dragging behind the car the whole way each time they told me a new and even more incomprehensible story, like the year they spent in the Amazon working for Doctors Without Borders, or Mike's time in Angola doing the same, and in Zimbabwe after the flooding, and in Tanzania, etc. I was in awe, and I couldn't hide it, no matter how uncool I looked with my eyes popping and my "golly jeepers" tone of voice and my tongue wagging.

After our pleasant lunch in Sao Joao, and a jaunt around the town, we returned to Tiradentes and split up for awhile. I thought that might be the last I saw of them, but Tiradentes is not at all big, and we ran into each other (usually I was taking a picture of the dog on the horse when Mike spotted me). We made plans to meet again for dinner. Melie had met a guy in a gallery who recommended a snooty restaurant by the chuch, but when we hoofed up there at 6:30, the sign on the door said it was closed until 7:30. So we headed back down the hill and decided to grab a drink, and I had my first ever caipirinha (KAI-pa-reen-ya). This is a marvelous thing. They take limes, and smash them with sugar, and then pour in a shit-load of cachaca (ca-SHA-sa), the potent liqor made from sugar cane that all of Brazil is enamoured of. The cheapest stuff, the rot gut, is cheaper than water, which explains whey everyone drinks it at the slightest provocation. But this drink, this caipirinha, is a thing of beauty, tart and sweet and limey, you are three sheets before you know what's happened to you. Nice. We returned to the snooty place, which at 7:30 still wasn't open according to the waiter who opened the door. Melie, getting a little miffed, told the guy he should change his sign. "Well you should get a reservation," came the reply, after a thourough looking over of our sloppy attire. Mike dragged Melie away, mouth agape, a scowl forming, before she could say anything else.

At dinner, Restaurant Plan B, I asked them to take me to Ouro Preto with them in the morning since they were headed there too. It was a bit forward of me, being well conditioned not to impose myself on anyone and to be paranoid about being an inconvenience, but it was time for those crappy bits of self depreciation to leave me, and I found some balls and asked. (Yes mom, I offered gas money). And I am so glad I did. The next day, the good fortune and the adventure only got better.



*A lot of the history is taken from the Lonely Planet guide book, which kicks ass. Don't leave home without it. (No, they didn't pay me for that, but I want them to).