Day 4 or The Gringo Girl and the Garim Peiros

Notes on June 22, 2009

This morning at breakfast there were two new faces eating with Mike and Melie when I came downstairs, suffling sleepily. When I entered the dining room, Melie introduced me as "our adopted daughter." Awwww, schniff. It was too sweet and I felt all warm and fuzzy. Of the new guys, Rob is a proper, poised sort of character, and his friend, Naimon (awesome name, Naimon), is the soft spoken, shy one. Both are professors, traveling in Minas for a few days after a conference in Rio or Sao Paulo, I forget which. It still felt good to hear some more English, even with the considerable conversational abilities of Mike and Melie.

After breakfast, the adventure began in earnest. Mike and Melie and I decided to drive to the Minas de Passagem, a decommissioned gold mine some twenty mintues outside of Ouro Preto, on the way to Mariana. It has been turned into a tourist attraction (they charge an exhorbitant R24 to go down in). When we pulled in the parking lot a 12 year old boy immediately approached the car, and now I was introduced to hustling, Brazilian style. The kid wanted to give us a tour of the mine (for which some payment would naturally be expected), but seeing as how we had planned to pay the official mine tour guide for all of that, we couldn't justify two tour guides. Then he suggested that we pay another dude (an older guy lingering in the parking lot) to "keep an eye" on our car for us. So what, are we paying you NOT to rob us? But luckily Mike was hip to this stuff, and he was able to decline with our car and our belongings in tact. (I tell you I am just soaking in all his savvy traveler mojo). Then the kid offered to wash our car for a small fee, but Mike told him we like it dirty, which is really super savvy, because a dirty car is much more discreet in these parts. It fits in with everyone eles's dirty cars.

And then we saw the mine. So it's like a whole in the ground that is over 1000m deep. And the way you get down in this thing is to wait at the top while the tour guide fires up this huge old engine with a crank shaft which slowly starts to haul the most rickety, rackety, antique passenger mine car out of the hole on ONE, yes ONE, rope (I don't even think it was a cable). I don't think OSHA would approve this whole rig for employees, let alone tourists. But the car comes up and we all climb in, and then we notice just how steep the hill is going down into the mine, and Melie starts with, "I don like thees, Mike. I am not going to go. Will you hold me." Good job Melie. Way to play the damsel in distress. So she gets on the car (of course she did), and we get ready for Disneyworld Minas Gerais style. We start to get lowered into the mine. OMG. This thing was so slow and tame all the excitement of possibly plummeting out of control down into a mine and careening around dangerous curves a la Indian Jones and the Temple of Doom evaporated as we descended inch by jiggly inch. Still, the ONE rope holding us added a little suspense.

The mine was opened in 1719, and was mined for gold be primarily black slaves, natch. The tour was in Portuguese, and Mike was successful at translating all of it. Turns out there is a shrine to dead miners at the bottom, where people leave little bottles of nail polish or lipstick. I am still trying to figure that one out. Maybe you just leave what you have on hand? Maybe the miners were drag queens? Not sure.

Then it was time to make the slow climb back to the surface, where our tour guide finished the show by panning for gold dust, which he actually did find in the bottom of the pan. And then we headed back to the car, where the kid asked us for a ride to Mariana, where we were headed next. So Mike decided to go ahead and give this kid a ride in lieu of money. As he climbed in the back seat with me, Melie said, "Kreesteen, we 'ave your Brazilian for you." "Melie, you're fired." I officially revoked her match making priviledges out of self defense.

In Mariana, after we ditched the kid, we went to lunch at a "self service" restaurant. In Brazil, self service is the fancy Americanized way of saying buffet, and you buy your food by the kilogram. I like eating this way. The spreads are tremendous: traditional beans and rice (of course), roasted chicken, roast beef, blanched veggies of all shapes and sizes, mystery dishes, and tasty cakes. You basically pile your plate up with whatever catches your stomach's eye and then take it over to a lady with a scale, who weighs it and writes down the price for the plate. They don't even look at you funny when you are a chubby white girl with an enormous plate of food ten times the size of Brazil. I like it. There was only one wierd veggie glop that I had to spit back out on my plate, but the rest was pretty damn yummy.

After lunch we set out for the town square, and Mike and I ducked into a promising furniture shop, where I abandoned Mike and went in search of Melie. After I poked my head into yet another Baroque igreja, I sat with Melie on the steps of the church. We took off our shoes and socks and relaxed in the sun, and told each other more of our stories. It was one of those conversations that went really deep really fast, and I find life more than ironic when that happens. It feels like you've known each other for an age, even though you may only know them for a few days or hours or minutes of your life. Sometimes it seems the people we spend the most time with know us the least, and those fleeting encounters with strangers, where we have nothing to hide or lose or gain, and no history that could color their judgment and no future to smooth the way for, we feel OK to be ourselves. It was one of those conversations.

Mike eventually showed up with a new friend he'd picked up back in the furniture store. The guy was a spindly looking carpenter and had nothing better to do than to show Mike around the town square and tell him some interesting local history, like how the pedestool used to beat the slaves was right there on the square in front of the church. And sure enough, there was an iron ring where slaves were chained in a stone pilar on the green. Nothing like a little human brutality to prove to god how you worship him. "Hey look Jesus! Won't it be great to watch us whip slaves? It's so funny when they scream! And it makes us such good Christians too!" But of course, the Portugese did believe they were being good Christians, just like slave owners in Georgia or the Carribbean or where ever, because slaves were godless heathens, and they needed to be whipped for their own good after all. This kind of thing always makes me wonder: when do we give people a pass? Do we excuse the slave owners (it was the eighteenth century after all, they didn't know better), or do we condemn them (it was the eighteenth century after all, shouldn't they have figured it out by then)? But then, Bush still hadn't figured it out in 2003 so I don't know.

(All this philosopherizing is hurting my head. Where's the cachaca?)

Then the guy told Mike that he could take us to a real mine, a surface mine that is currently being worked for gems and gold. Mike was a bit wary. It was a calculated risk. After all, this could be the hustle to end all hustles. But Mike had a good feeling about this guy, and he really likes rocks, and I really like gems, so we went for it. And as we drove out of town, Melie told me how she always feels safe traveling with Mike. In all the third world, war torn, flood ravaged, western hostile countries, in all the police states and during all the dicey border crossings and logistical wranglings, she has never felt she was in true danger. "'Ee can smell danger. Eef 'ee even senses it, we are out of dat place, you know?"

I don't know the name of this mining town, but it's a place that God and everybody has forgotten about, and we park next to this giant gaping black hole in the earth. Our "guide" leads us down, we cross a makeshift wood plank bridge over a chasm (another OSHA nightmare) into the pits. There are no railings, no gates, no fences to keep small children from wandering in and falling to their deaths. There are no fences to keep adults from doing the same. Are guy starts telling us, as we descend further, how the miners have to work the land by hand (no hydraulics or dynamite) and that they can only work within certain boundaries...and a new guy, his shirt dingy, his face smeared, follows us down and shakes all of our hands. And then another guy comes, and another. And I'm thinking, "Hmmm, that's interesting. Where are all these guys coming from." And then two more show up and I am thinking, "What is this, 'let's all gawk at the gringos'?" And two more show up, and now I am thinking "Uhhhh, exit strategy?" And finally we are in the belly of the mine, almost at the bottom of the pit, and all these guys who followed us down start pulling out little white paper packets from every pocket and satchel and they open them. And inside the white packets, resting on white cotton pads, are the most lovely, clear, sparkling, vibrantly colored cut gems. And now it dawns, "They want to sell them to us."

Brief side bar while I tell the story of "Gold n Gem Grubbin'" way back in Dahlonega, GA. My sister-in-law came to visit with the family last July, and she wanted to go panning for gold and gems. So I found this place online called "Gold n Gem Grubbin." The even have this Stinky Pete looking red neck miner cartoon mascot. If they got that guy, you know it's the real deal, right? So we drove up there and paid $60 for a 5 gallon bucket and sat our asses on a stump at a sluice for three hours and sifted for rubies and emeralds and sapphires and amethysts. We made a perty good haul (all of which is still sitting uncut in forgotten drawers though).

So this mine in Minas, this man made rip in the earth we were standing in with 12 very dirty miners, this was not your leisurely day of gold n gem grubbin. This was intense, strange, disconcerting, exhilarating. These miners don't deal with outsiders often so these gems were straight from the source. I was off balance at first, my mind whirring with the competing hands and faces shoving gems under my nose and jockeying for my attention. But then I began to notice the gems: citrine, amethyst, garnet, green amethyst, blue topaz, emerald, aquamarine. And it didn't take a jeweler to notice they were very, very nicely cut, and huge! Huge like the size of peanut M&Ms or dimes. And then I listened to the prices they were quoting: R20 ($10) for a square cut amethyst the size of Texas, R25 ($13) for an oval citrine like a prenatal vitamin. And my eyes began to bulge with treasure. The problem was calming down enough to think, and add, and negotiate for the bling bling. Finally I limited myself to a few nice stones and then waited till I was safely in the car to count out my money.

Later on the drive back to Mariana, Melie teased Mike, "Wow, Mike. Dat was da biggest toureest trap ever! Dat was almost as bad as dat temple in Indonesia, remember? And I was just telling Kreesteen what a savvy guy you are traveling, and you brought us to a big tourist trap! ha ha ha!"

But I was in my own exhilarated world. This was not a tourist trap, not really. The Minas de Passagem was the tourist trap. I had just had a real Lonely Planet experience. An off-the-beaten-trail, a not-in-the-guide-book, a not-even-in-the-Lonely-Planet-guide-book, moment. This was travel. This wasn't some sanitized for western white people, consumer reports five star rating for safety and comfort, AARP endorsed for oldsters travel moment. You aren't going to find this place listed in Conde Nast or National Geographic Travel magazine. And I loved it. In fact, the more I thought about what I had just done and where I had just been, the more I realized I had caught the remote third world travel bug. And I am not sure if there is a cure.

That night I lay awake thinking of more far off, hard to access, barely traveled places. And I lay awake dreaming of treasure, and bling, and pretty necklaces and sparkly girlie stuff. And I began getting greedy and I wondered why I didn't get that oceanic emerald cut aquamarine or that sunset colored glowing citrine. I drifted to sleep scheming how to go back....no matter how unlikely it would be.

And here is the story of the miners, the garim peiros, as they are actually called: These guys hack and sift dirt from 9:00 until 2:00 every damn day. Then they cut the gems right in their shanty houses, and then they sell the gems to brokers, who then sell them to jewelers, who turn them into $300 amethyst earrings or $600 citrine rings to be sold to tourists in Belo Horizonte and Ouro Preto and Tiradentes. Then, when the day is over, these guys have nothing else to do but sit around and drink cachaca all night, until it is time to get up and start digging in the dirt again.

We'll tonight boys, the good stuff (the R2 cachaca instead of the R1 cachaca) is on us!