Dear
friends and family,
Should one travel
slowly, relishing each unique locale, or fast, knowing as many lands as
possible? Right or wrong, we have always roamed toward the vigorous end of the
scale. We enter a place, walk it, talk to some people, then move on before it
gets stale.
It has been seven years
since we ran away together, first in the little pickup truck with a canoe on
top, then in Thurston. To help keep
our memories straight we often play a game whereby one of us, reminiscing on a town
or campsite, gives the other clues until they guess it, which they usually do rather
quickly.
Lately, however, we
have been experiencing “town blur” as we descended the Araguaia River quickly in
order to reach the Xambioá rapids before the low-water
season. It doesn’t help that many towns have had similar names: Aragarças,
Aruaná, Araguacema, and Araguaná, for example. We were there so recently, yet we need quite
a few clues to distinguish one from another in our memories.
We last wrote from
Conceicáo, Pará, where a pawn-broker named
Geraldinho (Little Gerald) welcomed us into his home. Steve plugged our laptop
into an outlet, sat in a corner, and typed. Later Ginny uploaded photos at a
cyber café while Steve, with George on his back, explored the city’s edges,
where paved streets became dirt, the houses became poorer, and green hills poked
up in the distance. It was hot, and whoever carries George in the carrier can’t
reach around behind, so Steve periodically stopped at shops and asked the
proprietors to feed him some water, which they were ecstatic to do.
On May 15 we left
Conceicáo. We rowed two hours per day and motored maybe
six on average. Now and then we passed a planked canoe with a little-tail motor.
Whereas in Barra do Garças the dry season had fully arrived, here we started
experiencing brief but fierce storms of wind and rain, thunder and lightning.
The tempests always came from the east, so we learned to camp on the east bank,
where the waves couldn’t build. The days remained seeringly hot, and the nights
offered little relief. Ginny’s heat rash has spread all over her back.
The land became higher,
less swampy. Tall, wispy palm trees appeared. Lagoons and creeks became rare.
Dense emergent brush grew along the shores, making it difficult to reach land.
Often a floated line ran along just outside the brush with short hooked lines
dangling every couple feet, for intercepting the fish that hang out in the
immersed vegetation.
In the towns, in
addition to brick houses we now saw wooden ones as well, with vertical plank
siding and thatched roofs. The waterfronts often had rustic shelters, half
underwater, where beer and snacks would be served when “summer” arrived and the
beaches became exposed. The locals spoke eagerly of the crowds that would then
flock from all over to party, enlivening the local economy. For now, though,
these settlements were quiet.
People hearing us talk together
sometimes overcame their shyness and initiated conversations. English is greatly
esteemed in Brazil. Many knew some words but few had heard it spoken except in
movies. Most people were of mixed European, African, and Native American descent.
They often marveled at the whiteness of George’s skin and the blueness of his
eyes.
Our GPS maps being
based on low water, the rocks they showed were still covered. In these places
the river roiled and ran two or three knots faster than usual, nothing more. We
hoped that we could also transit the serious rapids that commence at Xambioá (the “X” is pronounced “Sh”), but upon arrival in this
lovely town on the Tocantins side, refreshingly hilly after so many flat places,
we learned otherwise. The local boatmen, who earn their living ferrying people
to a sister city across the river, decided that it wouldn’t be safe even to tow
us through. Just downstream of Xambioá is a long rapid whose roar
is audible from town, and after a gap comes another rock-patch extending to a
point sixty kilometers downstream. A month sooner high water would have covered
all the rocks, but now they were exposed, and the whirlpools and gushers were
too violent in an under-powered boat such as ours.
Fortunately, across the
street there lived a man with a long flat-bed truck. He had no engagements and
his price was reasonable, so we reconvened at a nearby ramp where many hands
helped load Thurston, and we were off
on our twelfth transport.
Our route took us down
seventy kilometers of paved highway then fifty kilometers of rough dirt road with
little traffic. We passed through rangeland and forest, arriving finally at a
hamlet called Antonina where there was a ferry to the Pará side. Ferry
employees, an agricultural inspector, and a local teenager helped us lower Thurston into the water.
Relieved at having passed
the rapids, but sorry we wouldn’t see them, we spent half a day observing life
at this remote ferry crossing. Antonina had about ten humble houses and an open
store/bar. Now and then a vehicle would appear. If arriving at the other side
they would honk their horn to make their presence known. Then the skipper would
saunter down to the landing and fire up the diesel in a tugboat whose bow was
attached, via a pivot, to the midpoint on the downstream side of a barge. A
deckhand raised the ramp. The skipper, pushing with his propeller and rudder,
rotated the boat 180 degrees while the barge remained stationary. Then they
chugged to the other side, lowered the ramp, and picked up their passengers,
whom they seemed to know well. When the sun went down we drank beers at a patio
overlooking the river, while George played with local children and two men
tinkered with a little-tail motor.
In the Araguaia’s final
two hundred kilometers it flows through wild forest. We passed through long
stretches where patches of emerging brush, and barely-submerged rocks, pocked
the surface of the mile-wide river. There was no main channel, just an
imponderable volume of greenish-brown water passing through a sieve of rough
bedrock. We kept our eyes well ahead, picking our route, slipping over low
shelves, swirling left and right as the water sucked and surged, not violently,
but impressively.
On May 21 we reached
the juncture of the Araguaia and Tocantins rivers. Though the Tocantins is the smaller
of the two, its name applies to the combined stream, so we had finished with
the Araguaia. Downstream there would be no more rapids, and the state of Pará
would occupy both banks.
Later that day we went
under a bridge, passed a flat where upside-down boats were being caulked and
tarred, and reached Marabá, population 230,000, on the left bank. Needing to
extend our tourist visas, we hiked blindly away from the river, asking
directions to the Policia Federal. We eventually found it and got another
ninety days. In the process we learned that this city is divided into three
parts, separated by large expanses of swampy floodplain.
The only section of
interest to us now is Marabá Pioneira, the old town. Here the houses are small
and the sidewalks are a mish-mash of irregular and broken surfaces, often
encumbered by rubble. The riverfront is a tall seawall with park benches on top
and, at intervals, stairways leading down into the river. We are tied to a
heavy, 30-foot wooden passenger boat, one of about ten at this landing, whose
livelihood is to carry passengers to a party beach on an island in the river.
The beach is visible from here, a line of colorful tents and golden sand,
surrounded by boats, with music loud even from a kilometer away.
The boatmen are expert.
On a busy Sunday afternoon they zip back and forth, their open, roofed craft crowded
with gay passengers, their poorly-muffled Diesels bellowing and belching smoke.
The landing is crude: just a narrow stairway disappearing into the river and a makeshift
float streaming parallel to the waterfront. They compensate for the current and
jostle each other to get their bows onto the stairway so their passengers can
clamber on and off. When the sun goes down and everyone wants to go home at the
same time, they squeeze in together at the landing, newcomers wedging their
sharp bows and round bellies between the other boats. When the skipper has
finished his loading he stands on a stern deck, pushes a tiller hard over, and
gives a deep pull to a string by which opens his throttle. “Brraammm!” and he’s
gone.
There is a park here
with a play area covered with shiny brown pebbles that George loves, and good
shade trees. A new friend has made their living room and electrical outlet
available to us. Here we write.
Some new photos may be
found at: https://picasaweb.google.com/ginnygoon/Brasilpart4
Lots of love,
Steve, Ginny, &
George
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