Manaus

As mentioned in the previous update, we had arrived in Porto Velho on a Saturday via a 52 hour bus ride and had bought our tickets for a boat that would be taking off on TUESDAY and would go up the Rio Madeiro to Manaus, deep in the Amazon.  This was not quite the case.  On Monday night we went to the boat and got ourselves "comfortable" in our cabin for the voyage the next day.  We were allowed to stay on the boat before it took off and though our tickets included meals, they had already made clear to us that they wouldn't feed us until the boat was enroute.  That was fine with us - at least we wouldn't have to pay for a hotel for Monday night.  Well, one night turned into two, which turned into three, and then even a fourth!  Every day they would say to us, we're leaving tomorrow at noon.  And then noon the following day would come with no results.  They were waiting for more cargo, as this boat was not exactly intended for passengers.  Though, they did manage to squeeze approximately 100, or more, people onto a single deck all on hammocks. Friday at 12pm came and we still didn't leave until about 3pm.  But we were off!  Finally!  The boat trip itself wasn't all that bad but there were some major annoyances.  First off, the bathroom.  Oh my god, you've never smelled such a thing.  All of these people sharing a mere four bathrooms for 8 days straight (I believe I mentioned this before, but yes, the boat trip itself took four days to get to Manaus).  The cabin was blisteringly hot, but once the boat was moving, the breeze on the deck was quite refreshing.  The scenery was gorgeous as we navigated down the river, the amazon rainforest swept slowly on by along the banks.  We met a couple people on the boat and finished a lot of reading.  To make a long story a bit shorter, we arrived in Manaus late in the night, slept one last night on the boat, and then the next morning settled into a cheap, but decent, hotel.

Since we've been here, we've navigated about the city viewing the various museums and galleries it has to offer.  We walked through one of the parks and got some spectacular shots of birds and other wild life.  We've seen monkeys, a lazy sloth, a few wild caimans (Caimans are an aligator-like reptile.  This was a bit unnerving considering they are not bound by any fence or anything at all), and beautiful macaws (the red, yellow and blue parot-like bird of Brasil).  We've also visited a couple of the Indian museums offered in the city, which display artifacts such as pottery, weaponry and other tools used by the native people of the Amazon.

It has been really difficult to navigate this city, however.  There are thousands and thousands of buses here, and none of them seem to be going where you need to be.  Ever!  And then we've found ourselves in remote parts of the city, having great difficulty finding a bus that can bring us back to the center, or even finding a bus at all some times!  The city is much, much larger than I would have expected, considering it is a rather peculiar settlement smack-dab in the middle of the rainforest.

So, being that we ARE very much in the forest (though currently surrounded by city), the obvious next step is to explore this wild forest!  Which we intend on doing.  No, no, no, don't fret.  We have no intention on walking into the forest like you may do in the woods of Massachusetts.  We will be guided.  By Indians, in fact.  We've arranged a five day guided tour through the forest with this small agency that we found, after considering the many, many agencies available here.  Most all of the agencies we'd checked out seemed so artificial and watered down.  Until of course we walked by the hole in the wall.  We walked in and immediately had a long conversation with this Indian man that ran the place, Soares.  He sold me when in mid-speech he picked up a blow dart gun and shot it at this wooden statue on the other side of the room.  The trip will consist of traversing the forest, sleeping on hammocks with bug nets deep in the forest, fishing for piranas, and many other activities.  The whole thing appears quite genuine and rustic and I'm very excited about it.  We actually leave tomorrow morning at 5am and will be gone for the following five days.  If no one hears from us after that... well...

Moving on - We had a cool night last night.  We went to this beautiful theater here in town and watched a live concert by the Manaus Philharmonic.  They performed for two hours, and played several pieces I was unfamiliar with, and also Beethoven.  It was excellent and best of all, FREE!  Tonight we plan on returning for yet another free show.  I don't know the name of the group, they are a jazz band.  I'll obviously try to get a name to the music and give my review later.

My birthday (two days ago) was spent at one of the city parks, later Lena and I duked it out in an arcade fighting game, and then later that night we went to "Praia da Lua" (Moon beach).  The sand was white and fine and the river water was calm, fresh, free of piranas, and so so beautifully warm!  There's much more to this story, but now is not the time... I'll explain later.  Overall, an eventful and exciting birthday.  Thank you all for the birthday wishes on facebook.

Last bit of news, Lena and I are coming home early.  The flight has been changed from November 30th to October 19th.  See y'all sooner!

Porto Velho

The plan was much more simple than it actually panned out.  We were going to take a train from Governador Valadares to Belo Horizonte (This actually happened, and the train ride went quite smoothly).  Then we were going to take a plane from BH to Manaus, Amazonas (This did not actually happen).  We got to the airport and were told that we could not travel (even domestically) without our passports.  We had left them in the apartment at Valadares because we were under the impression that we would not be needing them.  We thought it would be safer to travel without them and were under this impression due information we had been told, had read, and even based on the TAM (the airline we were going to fly with) website itself.  Anyway, we argued with TAM officials, the check-in desk, several federal police officers, and then more TAM people.  All to discover that there was literally nothing we could do.

We had two options.  Change the flight, take the train back to Valadares, get the passports, take the train back yet again to BH, and then fly to Manaus 5 days behind schedule.  OR!!  There´s the option that we actually chose.  We took a most ridiculous and rather miserable bus trip from Belo to Porto Velho (please refer to the map).  This trip took us 52 hours!  That´s correct, you did not misread.  52 hours!  In others words, 2 days and 4 hours.  On a bus... living on a freakin´ bus.  At several points we even felt incredibly sick from the bouncing back and forth.  Yet another thing to accentuate the misery.  This even included vomiting, from both of us.  Ewww...

So now we´re in Porto Velho.  This town has pretty much nothing going for it.  There´s nothing to do here and everything that is around is closed.  There was even a shop called "Open", and ironically that was even closed.  So now we wait until Tuesday when we will be boating it up.  We´re taking a 4 day long boat ride (I´m guessing it´ll be gross as well) up the Rio Madeira (again, refer to the map), which is of course a river, to Manaus.  We´ll get back to you on how that went when we arrive... next freakin´week!

So basically, to wrap it all up, an approximately two hour plane flight turned into a very stinky week and a half.

snuggles and loves!!
Tiago and Lena

So, here's the scoop..

We have some news on our upcoming venture. We just booked ourselves on a flight to Manaus, the capital of the state Amazonas, which holds the majority of Brasil's portion of the Amazon rain forest. We plan to start our journey there and then continue east along the Amazon river until we reach the coast. From there, we will follow the coast back to Governador Valadares. We decided to take this route because it allows us the most freedom to stay in places as long as we want or can afford to without having to make the deadline of a flight back to Valadares. There are a few different WWOOF farms along our route that we might wind up at, and we've already begun to contact them. Our itinerary is subject to change, and will probably remain that way indefinitely. By that I mean that we may decide to cut something out or add something along our way. As of now, we plan to go from Governador Valadares to Belo Horizonte, then our flight to Manaus. From there we will travel downstream to Santarém and then to Belém from there. After Belém comes São Luiz and the beautiful Parque Nacional dos Lençóis Maranhenses.  Followed by Fortaleza, Recife, Salvador, Parque Narcional da Chapada Diamantina, Porto Seguro and then back to Valadares. We aren't really sure how long this will all take but have projected two months total. That's including two weeks WWOOFing, and we might end up doing more than that. We're thinking the trip will last at least to the beginning of October.

Anyways, this Tuesday we're going to take a train to Belo Horizonte, which is the nearest big city to Valadares, and after having spent one night there we will fly to Manaus on Wednesday morning. This first WWOOF host farm along our route is located in just outside of Presidente Figueiredo, which is about 100km from Manaus. We're really hoping to be able to stay there because it's right in the rain forest and they grow all sorts of delicious tropical fruits!  And they sleep in huts!

We'll be traveling by river boat from Manaus to Santarém and from Santarém to Belém. It's pretty much the easiest way, though it's going to take at least a few days. It should be a very interesting experience though, sleeping in a hammock on a boat with a ton of other people. From Belém down the coast, we'll be taking different buses or maybe domestic flights (some of which cost the same as the buses). The distances between the cities are ridiculous though. Some of the bus rides that we might be taking are up to 20 hours.

We will try to keep in touch as much as possible throughout our trip, though it may be fairly infrequent. We'll try to keep the map up to date as well, so you can see if there have been changes in our travels. You can click on the blue icons to see what the cities are called.  This map is of our total travels, so it includes the places that we've been to and mentioned previously.  Anyway, Sayonara!

snuggles and loves,

Lena and Tiago

(July 24, 2010)

Alrighty, so here's the long awaited update on our whereabouts(sp?). We're currently back in Valadares, we've been home for a week now. I'm quite sorry this update has taken so long. I wrote it a few days ago and it got deleted for some reason so I've been reluctant to rewright it.

So I guess I'll back track to where we left off before. I believe we left off on our third or fourth day in Rio, smoking a cuban cigar. Well we ended up staying there for a whole week. The WWOOF farm in Resende that we planned to go to asked us to come a week later. We didn't think this was possible so we responded to another WWOOF host in Carlos Euler, MG who said that they could take us to their farm at the end of that week. This was still not very good for us since it meant that we now had to kill another 3-4 days in Rio, which is a pretty expensive city. Well we did just that in the most affordable way we could think of which involved a lot of reading in parks and beach futebol.

We left at the start of the weekend, on Saturday July 10th, with Arthur (the owner of the host farm) and his wife Rosi. They live in Rio at Copacabana and they visit their farm on the weekends. It's not really a farm though, it's more like a resort in the making. They're setting it up so that they'll be able to retire there and live out their days at this beautiful mountainside resort in the middle of nowhere (really, as far as I know it can't even be found on a map). It's going to be a guest house as well. Right now though, it's pretty much just their big shmancy house, a small vegetable garden, a duck pond, and a bunch of tree seedlings which they plan to plant all over the property. The call it "Caminha das Ipes" (Trail of the Ipes). Ipes are these beautiful flowering trees that they've been planting all over the place.

"The street" in Carlos Euler

Anyways we pretty much hung around the rest of the weekend and got to know the property. Arthur and Rosi left us alone in their big shmancy house on sunday night, as they live in Copacabana. It was sort of a weird situation without them there. They had a groundskeeper named Mauro and a few other workers, all of whom did not seem to know anything about WWOOF or understand what we were doing there. On our first "work day" Tiago was asked to chainsaw some logs for about an hour, and then we were left alone. After he requested more work, he was then asked to hammer a fence around a dog house. I guess the dogs were escaping and killing the chickens so their pen needed 5 lines of barbed wire. A whole day was devoted to this. I, however was not asked to do anything. I spent the day laying in the grass reading along side Tiago since I was not allowed to use a hammer, because I am a feeble woman. The next day was spent planting tree seeds. After that though, we did nothing. It rained for the next few days, and we were not asked to work at all. We spent our time playing rummy, reading, playing monopoly, and watching the Simpsons (they had a tv). We were hardly spoken to, and the whole situation was really weird. I guess we were Arthurs first WWOOFers, and he wasn't even there, so maybe that explains why this was so strange. After a week of this we were bored and weirded out and we wanted to leave.

We left Carlos Euler with all of our stuff on our backs and set out for Passa Vinte which is the nearest town that shows up on a map as well as the nearest town wih a bus stop. It was actually nearly 20 kilometers away (12 miles) and took us 4 hours to hike there. Once there, we took the bus to the nearest city with a bus station which was Barra Mansa and it's right over the border into the state of Rio de Janeiro. We found that there was a bus to Governador Valadares from there but we had to wait 10 hours for it to show up! It took about 11 hours overnight for us to finally reach Valadares, and then we had to walk home (another 30-45 minutes). We were completely exhausted after this, as you can imagine. We spent the next few days recooperating and we've been lazing around since.

Looking down on the small town of Passa Vinte

Waiting 10 hours for the bus in Barra Mansa... this photo was taken at the bus station

Our next trip is going to be the big one if all goes well. We're planning to start up the coast and travel into Amazonas from there. We're going to take a bit of time preparing for this and saving money in Valadares, so we'll probably be here for a couple more weeks.  I wish ya'll the best. Take care.

snuggles and loves,
Lena and Teegs

(July 6, 2010)

So... here we are, sitting in a classy 1920´s-esque café in Rio de Janeiro (the city).  I´ll explain how we got here...

Where did we last leave off?  Climbed the mountain and about to head to Teresopolis I believe.  Well, we made it to Teresópolis last Tuesday afternoon and stayed there until Saturday.  We had wonderful free housing at my cousin´s (Diogo) apartment.  A very famous sight there is known as the "Finger of God" (Dedo de Deus)... and we didn´t bother going up.  No way José!  It was R$30 (about 17 dollars) for each of us to ascend, and yet another difficult mountain to hike.  So what did we do?  I don´t know... walked a lot.  We did get to know the city very well and had an opportunity to see the whole thing from this tower on a hill at the center of the city - a sight to see.  We visited CBF, which is the stadium in which the Brazilian national soccer team practices.  To bad they don´t practice hard enough.  Losers!  I also got an opportunity to play soccer myself with my cousin, some friends or his, and other locals around our age.  It was difficult, tiring, and I got schooled.  But it was quite fun none-the-less.

Overlooking Terésopolis

In Terésopolis

CBF in Terésopolis: Where the Brasil National team is picked and practices

view of Corcovado from bus

Moving on to Rio de Janeiro.  We´ve been here for three nights now and will be staying one more as far as we know.  The first two nights were spent at a damp, dark, piss-smelling, uncomfortable, and not as cheap as we would have liked, hostel.  But, it was right at copacabana beach!  Of course, Lena is singing now, "Her name was Lola, she was a showgirl, with yellow feathers in her hair, and a dress cut down to there...".  She´s been singing that for days.  God help me.  The weather is perfect; not too hot, not too cold.  During our stay we´ve done a lot of traveling on the public transit system and on foot and I do believe we´ve mastered the city layout.  We even jumped onto a moving bus today!  We´ve visted the Modern Art museum, the Planetarium, Pão de Açucar (Sugar Loaf mountain), Parque de Flamengo (a beautiful park with awesome huggable trees in Flamengo, a neighborhood in Rio, like copacabana), Earth Science Museum (which, had dinosaur bones and lots of ancient, sparkly rocks!), and we continued our cumulative game of soccer on the beach (Lena is winning 15 to 13).

Flamengo metro station

wonderful, huggable trees

Parque de Flamengo

At the planetarium...

The Carioca Aquaduct in Lapa

futebol on the beach..

awesome street art in Rio

"Selerón stairs" with the artist himself

Pão de Açucar (Sugarloaf Mountain)

Let me explain Pão de Açucar a little better for those who don´t know of this.  The mountain is shaped like a bullet standing upright and the only way to ascend (as far as I know) is by cable car, which is suspended in midair by a few wires (I personally find this terrifying).  We went late in the evening and because of this we missed all of the tourists and had the mountain to ourselves (along with a few creepy security gaurds and bar tenders).  From here you can see the whole view of Rio de Janeiro and beyond!

Upon arriving at the hostel, we "checked in" and they didn´t take our information or payment up front.  After staying at the hostel for the two days, we simply walked on out and got 2 nighs at copacabana for free!  Sure, we´re slimeballs, but don´t judge; if you were as broke as us and stayed in a place that reeked off pee, you would´ve done it (or at least wanted to) yourself.  My parents graciously provided us funding for decent accomodations, and we stayed at a real hotel in Flamengo last night and will be doing so again tonight.  Mom and dad, thank you again!

Back to how I started.  We are at this place called "Esch Café", which is a cigar shop/restaurant/bar.  We smoked a real cuban and hung out with about 30 old men, all of whom are at least 20 years older than us, who all speak only portuguese.  For the first time in our lives, we fit right in!  So, that just about explain that, right?

We´re still in the café and they have free internet, which is how I am writing to you now.  In using the computer, we received a few emails from WWOOF hosts (World Wide Opportunity on Organic Farms).  This is an organization that we signed up for prior to our leaving.  We would work on one of these many farms for 6 hour days and be paid in a non-conventional form; free housing and food!  Yay!  We responded to a farm in Resende, Rio de Janeiro (the state) that has accepted and invited us to work with them.  Hopefully, we will be receiving a response as to when we can arrive soon, as Rio is far too expensive and we´ve seen and done what we´ve wanted to see and do.  Wish us luck, be safe, don´t do anything I wouldn´t do.

With love,

Tiago and Lena

(June 28, 2010)

Oi amigos!
All is well with Teegs and I in Valadares. We've continued to spend our time with family and walking about the city. The weather has cooled down a bit, but it's still a very comfortable temperature. Tiago and I have been keeping up with our never-ending futebol game. The most current score is 10-9, but that will soon change because we plan on playing another game today.

So, we climbed Mt. Ibituruna on Monday. It took five hours and it was a wicked hard! My lungs were aching and my heart was pounding. We took the worst route up it too. We went on this long road that circumnavigated the mountain before we started heading upwards. The road we took was directly in the sun which was beating down on us the whole way up, and we didn't remember to bring sun screen so we both have crazy looking tans from wearing our backpacks with all of the straps. We stopped at a stream along the way to eat some fruit that we brought, and afterwards I washed my hand in it (the stream) and when I pulled it out it was covered with a ton of tiny little sluggy bugs! It was horrifying. We took another break at one point in a nice shady area that we soon discovered to be a huge spider nest! All bugs aside though, it was a great trip. We camped at this little club near the top of the mountain that Tiago's grandmother got us a camping pass for, which was very sweet of her considering she was really scared of us going. As far as food, we had only brought some fruit and some hotdogs, which probably wasn't the wisest choice since mountain climbing makes you pretty hungry. The next morning we spilt a mango for breakfast and started off down the mountain. Now the hike down probably would have been a lot easier had there been some more time since we hiked up, but we didn't have enough food for that. We spent about an hour of painfully trudging down before we agreed that we were both comfortable with hitchhiking. Only a few minutes later, a car passed, so I stuck out my thumb and we were able to bum a ride. We met a very nice young fellow named Juninho who lives very close to Tiago's grandmother. He was very friendly and gave us a ride the whole way there.
The whole experience was awesome. The view from the mountain was amazing the whole time. It was very beautiful. The mountain is covered with palm trees and a bunch of different farms that have their gorgeous horses grazing about the whole time. It was absolutely wonderful. I'm going to attempt to include a few pictures so you don't have to take my word for it.

Tomorrow morning we will be leaving for Teresopolis. It's a very mountanous city two hours north of Rio de Janeiro. We're planing to stay there with Tiago's cousin Diogo for a some time, we don't know yet how long. From there we're planning to go to Rio de Janeiro and explore the city. We've also been trying to contact a WWOOF farm that's right in Teresopolis and stay there for a week, if possible. If that's not possible, we're going to look into some other WWOOF farms in the state of Rio de Janeiro and southern Minas Gerais.
I'll try to continue with updates, but it might be more difficult for us to get internet. I hope everybody is well, take care of yourselves and keep in touch.

Love,
Tiago and Lena