“A person can make it well and far bucking the odds through luck and audacity. But the coin always comes due. And it’s good to know how much to pay when it does.” – Old Sean
Ill in Rio
Welp, caught that good ol’ COVID virus.
It was somewhat inevitable. I have my own levels of caution but one of the great mainstays of staying healthy in my life has been a bulwark of plentiful sleep and lots of healthy food. Rio has offered me neither. My street is noisy nightly and I sleep a lesser amount and there is nothing healthy about Brazilian food in general.
Though I was able to shake off the full disease within two days and my doctor cleared me on my third, I was repeatedly slammed by fatigue. A mere two hours of walking on level ground essentially emptied my tank. During my admittedly brief waking hours, I started longing for my youth (three weeks past) where a rigorous six hours of hill marching would finally leave me short on breath.
That being said, I don’t have much time left in Brazil and now that I’m no longer contagious, I’m still doing my best to see a few more parts of Rio and the surrounding territories.
Copacabana
I’ve met a new friend named Josi who has done her best to help me limp along in a sleepy stupor to spot a few nice things around town. We’ve visited the small military fort of Forte de Copacabana, which is a long and narrow white building staffed with men in cameo uniforms on one end of the spectrum and a small army of waiters serving umbrella-tables on the other.
Located on the southernmost end of Copacabana Beach, the famous round-mountain cliffs of Rio are visable in three directions. Further interesting features include the favelas which tumble their way up the mountain edges, bright colors rendering them uniquely distinct.
Within the fort, much of the old machinery is on display, including missal tubes, rifle armories, long range guns, cement bulwarks, interior pumps, infirmaries, barracks and other features. The secondary part of the base hosts human mannequins depicting the history of the base with images of European settlers, conquerors, explorers and native holdouts. These parts of the fort are rather interesting in their current state, since they’ve been repainted white and decorated with stone carvings and slightly decayed artillery units. It makes the fort look like a Disneyland-Replica of itself.
The rest of the fort (and far more popular area) now hosts various cafes and small restaurants, which throng the central part of the penninsula under umbrellas. Hoards of beach-goers frolic to the north and small platoons of people on paddle-boards bob past the rocky shoreline.
Favela Tour
After gaining sufficient rest, Josi next induced me to visit the favelas of Brazil, which is one of the cultural hallmarks of the country. Favelas is a catch-all phrase for the slightly impoverished part of Brazil’s outlying neighborhood, but it would be unfair to call them true slums or ghettos. Indeed, they’re quite nice with lots of narrow outdoor meeting areas in between admittedly ramshackle buildings painted nearly-neon-bright colors. I wouldn’t call them great living conditions, but I’ve slept in worse.
When I was in university, there was a short comedy sketch where a young black man pitched his business idea to create a ghetto-safari tour. The joke-concept being that white people paying a bundle to risk their lives on an African Lion Safari would be equally enthralled to risk their lives in a United States ghetto tour at the same price, in a much nicer golf cart.
Brazil sort of already has this business model intact, sideways jokes and all. People are allowed to pay a small sum for tour guides to walk them through the favelas in the hopes of experiencing “real” Brazilian culture. This has resulted in some odd ethical arguments bumbling around the concept.
There are obviously a lot of opportunities for a large-scale tour of a poor urban environment to become exploitative. Additionally, Favelas do promote unique culture icons, like Baile Funk (a popular street dancing style more famously done in parties in northern Brazil). But these kinds of promotions can create faux-performers, similar to countries and villages that parody their own cultures for the sake of tourism. Naturally, “reality-tourism” is inherently a form of privileged voyeurisms with zoo-like connotations, all capable of driving up prices in already impoverished neighborhoods. The alternative benefit is such tourism provides “real” experiences to travelers while shedding light on conditions in favelas and giving the weight of firsthand experience to people’s stories and lives. It can also provide desperately needed revenue streams to otherwise struggling neighborhoods.
When I first went to Thailand, I wanted to work with elephants. It took weeks of research and consideration before finding a company that allowed interactions with the behemoths without any level of exploitation. There were no elephant rides, water baths, excessive petting, stressful contact or overfeeding. Instead, the selected program of Elephant Valley of Chiang Rai in northern Thailand worked in Animal Welfare, with the majority of the effort being used to rehabilitate domesticated elephants back into their natural habitats. Human interactions were extremely limited and the majority of the volunteer work was spent planting food, cleaning up the enclosure and observing the animals from a distance.
However, the point being, it takes an almost rediculous amount of research to find companies which ethically interact with a visited society, culture or biosphere.
In the end, I didn’t find any official Favela Tours that were a clear benefit to the communities they visited. It was easier just to have a friend of a friend invite me over and guide me around. I ended up getting a drink, checking out some of the sunrise views, helping out with a bit of graffiti artwork on a torn wall and helping make lunch later in the day. Then I drank some truly horrendous coffee and went home.
We live in a strange world where presence alone can create such an outsized impact.
Visiting Petropolis
The following day, I met Josi again, this time in a trip to Petropolis, a mountain city north of Rio.
Getting around Brazil without a personal vehicle is always a bit of a struggle and the two of us were left waiting at a powerfully loud bus station in a crippling heat wave until our late bus thundered into the highway station. We were in Petropolis less than an hour later after seeing some of the enormously gorgeous mountains which make highland Brazil so famous.
Every county I’ve visited in life has moments that are a bit of a nose-tweak, where preconceptions are knocked away. Always, Rio and Brazil in my mind has remained a party capital with large beaches, crowds and jungles. Popular imagination ensures that Christ the Redeemer remains at the forefront of my mind with a strong coloring of slums and favelas adding to the culture. Somehow, the rounded mountains with cliffs of brown stone and numerous yellow birds and toucans never remain prominent in my head.
But that’s exactly part of the defining scenery of Petropolis, with verdant mountains arcing against a clear, cool sky. The architecture too, changed dramatically into the Austrian-German style of white walls with exposed wooden beams. Cultivated gardens and lakes traced the elevated valleys and cobbled streets were tucked in various corners.
Palaces in Petropolis
Josi and I first visited Quitandinha Lake, which offered spectacular entrance views in the strong sunlight. At the northern curve of the lake Quitandinha Palace rose above the brownish water, a stark-white-and-grey building that once served as a luxery resort. The interior was a fantastic visit, with giant curved walls for romantic theaters, entire rooms dedicated to tall, caged fountains, ballrooms stuffed with decadent chandeliers, hallways along the exterior with mirrors and enormous patterned windows and empty bathhouses oddly tacky in the otherwise elegant design. Stone Quitandinha, the large rounded mountain of brown stone, overlooked the scenic grounds.
The interior of the city was likewise pleasant. The Praca da Liberdade (Liberty Square) was an uplifting and bustling small fountain area, with people performing tricks on bicycles and small canals lacing up and down the edges of the green space. In the distance, Cathedral Sao Pedro de Alcantara made an imposing image, despite being netted in construction materials when we visited. The Crystal Palace, also located somewhat nearby, was likewise closed for construction but very surrounded by a very pretty gated park.
The best part of the central part of Petropolis was the incredible number of museums. Josi and I managed to check out Santos Dumont’s House, a hillside house with a viewing platform built on stilts into the side of a jungle-mountain. Dumont was an aeronaut-inventor and cultural hero of Brazilian innovation. Where the Wright Brothers invented flight in the United States, Dumont replicated the heavier-than-air flights without use of a launching rail while also inventing and flying the first gasoline-powered dirigible balloons.
A Moment for Dumont
Though I’ve heard of Dumont many times, especially when visiting Paris where many of his public exploits and flights are recorded in great detail with images, I didn’t know that Dumont’s achievements were in something of a historical rivalry with the Wright Brothers of the United States. Apparently, since the Wright Brothers kept most of their achievements somewhat private (since they had business and technology competitors to worry about) and used an external system to help propel their crafts into the air, many of the Dumont camp give credit to the first flight to Dumont himself. Dumont, of course, was a notoriously romantic inventor and had virtually no secrecy or patents surrounding his extremely public achievements.
That being said, Dumont had an extremely lovely housing situation in Brazil.
Naturally, I hoped to see another few museums of Petropolis, but fatigue has been my companion for a strong week now. I find myself hoping to escape the city of Rio soon for quieter horizons. My next two days were spent working online in sleepy recover, pattering away at a keyboard and imposing on Josi’s hospitality by resting at her countryside house and paddling about in a shallow, warm pool.
I’m sure I’ll rally again soon, hopefully to a more relaxing area where I can regain my strength.
Until then,
Best regards and excellent trails,
Old Sean
Written January 19th 2022
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Ten years ago, I abandoned my military surplus store backpack for a Farpoint 40 Osprey Travel Pack. I’ve never replaced my bag since. Two years ago, I bought two more Osprey Backpacks for my younger siblings on their first tour outside the country. I have nothing but praise for Osprey Products.
