Adios Chile, Bem-vinido Brazil!

This being at times somewhat of a solitary trek, I´ve shared company with a few good books along the way so far. Reading good writing is English is a refreshing break from speaking, often in vain, juvenile sentences in a foreign language. A good book is captivating (did I just say that? ), but in the past few weeks it seems like the books have mixed in uncanny ways with the daily happenings. Cod, by Mark Kurlansky, was an great post-Newfoundland transition, and I´ve seen bacalao (cod)- both fresh and salted- showing up in markets all over. The cultural influence of the singular fish is impressive here in South America, and according to the book, the world over (you should read the book). Later, while hiking in Patagonia I read John Krakauer´s Eiger Dreams, and (in my demented mind) I myself was transported into one of the author´s “learning experiences”. While reading about a true mountaineering endeavor- waiting out a hellacious storm on Denali- I listened to the screeching Patagonian winds. Just then an especially monstrous gust of wind picked up my entire tent and hurled it 20 meters through the air, ridgepole and all. Luckily, although the howl of wind was probably comparable to that on Denali, the temperature was a balmy 30 above zero rather than 30 below. I´ll also admit that my “tent” was actually a sheet of plastic, but the gust was truly sensational- it picked up three logs, each six inches in diameter and eight feet long, along with the plastic- a good 80 pounds, and tossed it clear over my head and against nearby trees.

I´m coming around to my excuse for this ramble...Keroauc´s On the Road was the next book I picked up, and just finished. Corresponding with this, the past week has been a crazy, wild whirlwind of sights, and new experiences in new places for me. It has little to do with fishing but I think the Sal Paradise or Dean Moriarty in all of us- fascinated by how other people live their lives and go about their business- might be interested. You would be if I could only describe it as it as my eyes saw it. And I think the only way I can share the past week is in a rapid-fire, mixed-up, rollercoaster sort of way.

Puerto Aysen is a fishing port in northern Patagonia with especially friendly people, ringed by steep green hills. Hills like you´d see in the Aluetians of Alaska or in Norway, that blow you away at how something so steep could still be covered in trees. There are lots of tires on the sides of the dirt roads on the edge of town and the giant semi-ferule chickens in many of the yards had an attitude than made my heart race as I passed by. There is no true harbor in Puerto Aysen, so boats have to snake up one or another small river and either stick their bows into the muddy bank or tie up to a makeshift dock. The most crowded of these river tie-ups is called the rather ominous “Agua Muerte”. Before getting to Agua Muerte I saw a few dive boats and a lot of broken , abandoned, sulking wooden hulls. Hulls still in working order had names like Tigussa, Piratta II, Yasna, Don Alfonso, Antares, Pascualito, Mar Austral, and Reymar II. Lots of 40 foot boats working as tenders to fishermen working outside the long, narrow fjords that cut into this piece of Patagonia, and lots skiffs, around 26 feet long and rigged with 40-horsepower outboards and remarkably simple longline setups. A few hundred hooks, monofilament line, some rebar or rock anchors, and styrofoam buoys the size of a basketball.

I talked for several hours with Mauricio, who described how he caught merluza (hake). He was getting ready to go to church with his wife, having come in to town to sell fish and buy supplies, before heading back to his fishing cabin/house, 12 hours by boat. He filled gaps in our conversation by washing his hands dozens of times and muttering “Norteamericano” . I think he was trying to come to grips with why anyone would spend two days around Agua Muerte, coming from such a distant place. A place that to him exists only as an idea or photo. I tried to tell him that Patagonia was nothing but a name on a map to me, until just a week ago. I walked towards the church with the couple. Mauricio´s hands were still dirty with engine oil and hard work.

I decided to check out Valparaiso, which lies directly west of Santiago, on the coast. Valparaiso is supposedly a major fishing port, but I think that this means big, industrial trawling mostly, maybe for anchoveta, and I couldn´t find any small boats near the city. Along the water, Valparaiso is strikingly beautiful. The chaos of the markets was wild to watch. Fruits and vegetables and shellfish turn into rinds and husks and shells on the streets by evening, only to be completely cleaned in the night, and to appear all over early the next morning. In the hills rising above town, there are certainly some beautiful, old, high-end mansions, but the bulk of the hills seem to be barrios of poor, poor people. Several times when walking up the winding streets I was stopped by a local, who told me that I couldn´t go any further up, that it was too dangerous. I heeded their advice, for the most part, but wondered if this was actually true. The spectacular graffiti in the upper streets of Valparaiso rivals any of the fancy buildings in beauty.

Valparaiso gives birth to one of the largest New Year´s fireworks celebrations in South America, perhaps in the world. Being in town, I couldn´t help but check it out. I was joined by tens (hundreds?) of thousands of others of course. Mohawks (the Israelis brothers would have liked this scene), dreadlocks, and tattoos were abundant. I even saw gothic-dressed Chileans. This was certainly different than anything I´d seen in Chiloe or Patagonia, which is perhaps more old-fashioned or less hip. I bumped into a French volcanologist named Sebastien, a fantastic guy who´s spent two years in El Paso, Texas and two years in Detroit, and spoke English perfectly. We decided to check out more graffiti and then check head t a lookout to watch the fireworks, which began at midnight.

And fireworks there were! For a stretch of something like 14 kilometers, stretching the coastline down to Viña del Mar, fireworks exploded for a continuous half hour. By far the most spectacular fireworks I´ve ever witnessed. All the while Sebastien and I were two among a sea of thousands of Chileans, all of us squished together as tightly as any overcrowded fraternity basement. People were on roofs, on porches, on top of fences and in trees. The sea included 80 year-olds and parents with babies, although we all swelled together and had huge energy, it was surprisingly completely peaceful . “A-ya-ya! Yi-yi-yi! Vi-va Chile!” chanted the crowd together, and cheap champagne was sprayed in the air. The streets were alive and wild and people peed wherever and whenever. Dance parties erupted all over the city. The next morning the street smelled spicy with the aroma of cooked urine.

Chilenos have beautiful cinnamon-colored skin and big, warm smiles. “Waivon” (something equivalent to dude) is used on the street in every sentence. A land where pelligallo, the strange elephantfish, and almeja fill the docks. A country with good shellfish plates, empañadas, mote con huesillos (a popular drink- peaches, peach juice, oatmeal), and completos con palta (hot dogs with avocado). A land where bus companies with names like Tur-Bus and Cruz del Sur run amazingly on time. Warm mariscos for sale in the streets and salmon-skin jewelry. Where Nescafe is coffee and milk is never a part of the tafecito, and where yerba mate is either nonexistent (in cities) or an integral part of life (in the country). A place where traucho, a midget man of mythological lore with strong sexual powers, lives on on Chiloe and beyond, and where Patagonian men wear beret-like hats and moustaches like they were born with them. A land of “sí, pó!” and “Puta la wea!” Quickly, my time in Chile came to an end. The Chile that I saw is a fantastic place.

Just as quickly, an instant introduction to Brazil began. Bueno become bem, just like that. I found myself in Sao Paulo, the largest city in South America. Completely overwhelming and fantastic. The first Brazilian I met was an especially friendly security guard by the name of Alessandro, who spent a good half hour advising me on cheap hotels, and then insisted that I take his umbrella as a gift (it was pouring and I accepted). After a quick bus ride, I commenced a four-hour slog through wet streets, mostly back and forth on the same damn streets, looking for mysterious, evasive cheap lodging. The umbrella constantly got wedged between objects. One hotel had a room for much more than I was willing to pay. The smooth, seductive language that I´ve heard in Brazilian songs isn´t nearly as suave on the streets, and it isn´t as instantly interchangeable with Spanish as I´d thought. My inquiry for hostpitaje ended with me walking a long sweaty way to a hospital.

I finally ended up at “Amar Hotel”, the only hotel within walking distance that wasn´t bent towards high-fliers. Here, you could rent a room for one hour, three hours, or 12 hours. A per-hour love shack. No sheets included, a huge mirror on the ceiling above the bed. A see-though shower stall, and five TV stations, two of which seemed to be bad porn (fuzzy reception left me happily uncertain). I set down my packs and headed out to find a bite to eat.

After a couple tasty and new calzone-like creations from a little street corner store, and free of the weight of the packs, I finally took the time to look around. Next to the store was the base of an immense tropical tree, soaring skyward. The sky had finished gushing rain and was now a complex spectrum of pinks and purples and grays. The food was much better than a completo, even a completo con palta. Back in the hotel, I found the sheets, there all along, neatly ironed and folded and very clean. The fan made the new hot humidity easily tolerable. Even though I had to stare at myself in the mirror before shutting off the lights, the spot was just fine. Maybe a little weird, but fine.

Downtown Sao Paulo. Wow. Many people warned of danger in the streets around the city center. I didn´t see anything too alarming. Lots of other hotels advertised hourly rates, but then again maybe all hotels should. Maybe it just makes sense. The center of the city is for pedestrians only, very pleasant. Many of the streets are white and black stone laid in endless stemming patterns that seem to have no beginning and no end. Loud, angry, spontaneous sermons going on in the plaza just outside a stunning Sao Paulo Cathedral , while at the same time a dozen bums sleep on cardboard along the plaza edges, and a woman casually walks by, smoking a cigarette and vomiting at the base of every tree in the plaza. Sao Paulo has a skyline that is at once beauty and decay, with tall buildings looking like they were never quite finished to the top, and have since started to fall apart. Under these are beautiful old, well-kept buildings. Here in the streets you can get little cups of coffee for the equivalent of 50 cents, or fresh-blended juice for just over a buck. Saltados, some combination of meat and bread which can take many shapes, can usually be found for under a buck. Brazilian music erupts out of a few restaurant patios. Six musicians- four with just their voices and percussion instruments- sound like 15, and playing songs that rise and fall but have no end. There is every sort of look here- tall dark-skinned women wearing alarmingly short cutoff jeans, modestly dressed Palestinian men, many woman wearing shirts designed specifically to show off large portions of their back. Even a couple natural blondes.

Despite my initial shock, it seems that sex is unabashedly a part of the core of Sao Paulo life. It is flaunted and eluded to in everything. One very modest Japanese-Brazilian, a craftsman who etches personalized messages on rice-grain jewelry, spoke to me for half an hour about politics, about his work, and about the economic situation in Brazil and Japan, then casually shifted subjects and asked me, “You looking for a woman? Want to have a look? Just 20 Real for a nice one.” Here the cleanest-minded Paulista (Sao Paulo resident) was shifting into pimp mode. Displays of affection were rampant in Chile, but here sex is just around the corner. I steered clear, perhaps my loss.

As a side note (or perhaps all of this other nonsense is a side note note and this is the on-topic bit), here is a list of fish offered in a major supermarket in the city. I couldn´t find a fish market, although there likely is one. English translations to come if I ever learn them:
Atlantic salmon, merluza (hake), marapa, sardine, cavalinha, anchova, pescadinha, taina
Also, Alaska merluza, for about $2 US/pound. All the way down here!

Enter the urban jungle. Manaus is unlike any place I´ve ever seen. Two and a half hours north of Sao Paulo by plane, to where it is decidedly hotter and more humid than the big city. Street vendors sell skewers of marinated meat of all sorts for about 50 cents, which you then reheat over a fire they keep kindled just for this purpose. This is eaten with some sort of dry pulverized matter resembling rough cornmeal and tasting about as bland. I don´t blend in here nearly as well as I did in Sao Paulo, and some stares are pretty intense. The streets are certainly not for the faint of ankle- holes and rebar abound. Don´t let me mislead you- Manaus is not the jungle. It what Anchorage is to the Alaskan bush- an urban staging area for the jungle. But it´s a wild city. Perhaps the most aggressive people in town are those trying to talk an outsider into a “jungle tour”. A short, sinewy guy with an attitude fit for a giant latched himself onto me, declaring himself a buddy of mine and a friend of everybody. His nickname, Portuguese for “Cockroach”, might give some clue how others feel about this particular amigo. Another man, a strong, heavily-tattooed man, an Amazon native staying in town for a few days to sell medicinal leaves, herbs, roots, and pulverized bark, gave me a great tour of his production facility (a cheap hotel room). He, unlike Cockroach, is the real deal. In Manaus just this afternoon, I watched a mother nursing a baby in the back of a church, in service. I saw a teenage boy, working in a shop that sells women´s underwear, clear his snotty nose onto the store floor; a balloon-artist clown drinking hard liquor before starting his afternoon work. Natives just outside of Manaus, I´m told, traditionally fish with bow and arrow, spear, and with a paralyzing powder rendered from the bark of a certain tree. Now many use nets and steel hooks. This is the frontier.

Today I explored the market, complete with a big area devoted to fresh fish. Fish of many shapes were present, including several species with the general shape of piranha, but very large. Catfish, peacock bass, and a shad-like fish. Also, lots of saltfish- not cod, but salt-brined and preserved in the same way. Which brings me back to Kurlasky´s book, Cod. And Portuguese influence down here in Brazil. Books intertwine with life.

Today I arranged transport to spend a while out in the Amazonian “bush” with a fishermen, and the book in hand is a bunch of short stories (many jungle-based) by Joseph Conrad. How can these two twist together? We´ll have to wait and see. I promise, regardless, that it´ll be more fisheries-related...