TRAVEL DIARY the Dartmouth College  Fall  2004 Portuguese LSA +  Program in Salvador, Brazil.

 

Participants

Dartmouth 2004 Students:  Brent Clayton, Jessica Elfstrom, Jordan A. Garrow, Shaina  Landau, Amy Shaw.

Dartmouth 2004 Director. Professor Piers Armstrong. <Piers.Armstrong@Dartmouth.EDU>. Tel. Office (Vitria Campus) 71-336-4411. Cell:  (71) 9918 2536.

ACBEU Portuguese Program Coordinator  and Family Placer:  Professor Clara Ramos.   Email: <clararamos@acbeubahia.org.br>. Tel. Office (Vitria Campus) 71-336-4411.  Cell:  (71) 9982-3524

 

Technical note regarding the pictures ...  we are experimenting with formats to send these pictures back to Dartmouth.. if you are looking via the web and it is hard to see, please let us know by email to Piers (<Piers.Armstrong@Dartmouth.EDU>). If you are looking at them in a Word document, use Normal View mode rather than Print Layout (both in the View drop-down menu).  Remember you can enlarge or reduce the photos as you look at them by clicking and dragging...

 

 

 

Week 4:

 

After our first trip, focusing on the Portuguese conquest and the coast north of Salvador, and our second, deep into the interior and focusing on geology and ecotourism, our third is a tour of the Recncavo, the  region around the Bay of All Saints. Salvador sits at the tip of this very large bay. The Recncavo is a historical area which played a central role in the agricultural development of the Portuguese colony in the sixteenth and seventeenth century, and prospered again in the nineteenth century. Sugar was the first major cash crop and is still farmed. Later, cotton, tobacco and other crops boomed. Trade was triangular, i.e., not just between Brazil and Portugual but also between Africa and Brazil. The influx of slaves was constant but reached its highest proportion in the nineteenth century until the slave trade was banned (50 years before slavery itself was banned in 1888). The Recncavo region is the most concentrated agglomeration of the Afro-Brazilian population and presents a dense cultural landscape both in living practices and historical heritage. It is also a physically beautiful area shaped by gentle hills, rivers and an tropical abundance. Our trip can only touch the surface of all these features, but off we go!

 

___________________________________________

 

Part 1.  On the road ...

 

OK, friends back in Dartmouth have told us this flaming Fall is popping with leaf-peeping.. BUT  check out dem rolling hills...  and open the window and feel the breeze - its 80 out there.

 

 

 

 

___________________________________________

 

Part 2. Willie Wonker and the Chocolate Factory meets the Sendero Luminoso...

 

Our first stop is an encampment of the MST Movimento Sem Terra, or Landless Rural Workers Movement. Brazil has a serious problem of land distribution which goes all the way back to original settlement by the Portuguese. The MST squat on under-utilized farms owned by rich absentee owners and struggle to gain legal possession. A successful settlement is located on the road to Santo Amaro, a Recncavo town.

 

 

An MST man who now works his own small farm, carved out from the large property the group is squatting on. He grows cocoa thats chocolate  - just add sugar!

 

 

The houses are modest, but theyre theirs... many other rural workers in Brazil are sharecroppers

 

 

 

We visit Dona Bilu, the spokesperson for the settlement, in her little house, where she sells farm produce notably dried fruits and fruit-liquors. The red and the yellow fruits are the husk of the cocoa..

 

 

 

Here you see the MST flag between Jordan and Brent socialist red, with a map of Brazil and a couple...

 

 

 

Like Elvis, Che lives... but more importantly, thats chocolate Jessica is trying...

 

 

 

Dona Bilu takes us out the back where cocoa is growing, takes a green cocoa-husk and cuts it open.

 

 

 

Inside, fat bean pods consisting of dark cocoa the stuff we think of as the basis of chocolate sit in a white paste the stuff white chocolate is made of... it can also be used to make a truly delicious and rather indescrible fruit-juice.. of which Brent has become a connaisseur... but more about that in Week 6....

 

 

 

Just in case you are as curious about chocolate as the author of this diary, this picture shows the pods after roasting, being shelled, leaving a coal-like lump of intense chocolicity...

 

 

__________________________________________________________________________

 

Part 3. Cachoeira

 

After a lunch-stop in Feira de Santana, Bahias second largest city, we head for the town which for many is the historical epicenter of Afro-Brazilian culture, Cachoeira. It sits on a river a little upstream from the Bay. In the good ol days (nineteenth century) ships went there like the whaleboats that would go right up the Hudson River Valley in New York... Ah, twas a Belle epoch, mon cheri.  Alas, times change.. the boats no longer go there, what with the decline of tobacco and everything else, and the dam upstream which removed half the water from the river... what we have left is not so much a ghost-town (the fertility rate is too high for that) as a sort of dinosaur of the late nineteenth century, quaintly rotting at tropical speed...

 

--

 

We arrive in Cachoeira by crossing the river on a bridge built in Britain, sent over and assembled on-site. Even though its creaking wooden beams wobble under-foot and the fat cracks amply reveal the water below, somehow a genuine train engine (a huge lump of metal, that is) crosses over several times a day.

 

 

 

 

The train station vaguely recalls the Taj Mahal... probably because it was originally designed by the British for a town in India...

 

 

 

On closer inspection, however, the classic retro interior could do with a little touch-up...

 

 

---

We are only 60 miles from the sea of apartment towers of Salvador... but clearly also separated by a time-warp...

 

 

 

Cachoeira is full of curio buildings... like this one across from our hotel...

 

Literally alongside this Victorian pomp is a little grocery with odds and ends hanging (sea-sponges and jute bags)... you may be able to see the African-style wooden sculptures inside on the ground...

 

------------

Anyway, were all pretty tired.. time for R&R in our hotel... in keeping with the time-warp effect and the many mysterious buildings, our hotel is actually a former convent..

 

 

 

Its full of interesting features like this door to the restaurant, which was so heavy it couldnt open and is now propped up next to... the door-door... see if you can spot the Franciscan brother in the carving...

 

 

 

Then there is this picture..  is it a nun?  but nuns dont wear golden bangles... hmmm....  theres something different about this picture...

 

 

 

Everything is a little off. Is this convent haunted? Rumors start to circulate amongst the students...

 

 

 

 

Eitherway, we are hungry.. we are only 7.. but evidently the house also wants to feed a collection of un-departed spirits that we cant see and are not worried about just yet..

 

 

 

It turns out to be a rough-night.. Jessica has trouble sleeping, what with the ghosts...

 

 

, or was it indigestion... anyway, we head down to breakfast and try to do our duty what with all that food...

 

 

and find a full bar strangely perched right next to the breakfast.. some-one, or something is definitely trying to get through to us... and to think, this was a convent!

 

---

 

We are in need of instruction here.. Fortunately Professora Florentina arrives and gives us a lecture on the most famous institution of Cachoeira, the Irmandade da Boa Morte or Sorority of the Good Death... thats the English translation, but the reference is still a mystery..  Anyway, Florentina explains that the Irmandade is a Christian entity whose patron saint is Mary but consists exclusively of older Afro-Brazilian women who practice the Afro-Brazilian religion of Candombl... the Irmandade da Boa Morte is considered Brazils richest manifestation of syncretism the partial fusion of Catholicism and African religions... We head off to see the Irmandades headquarters and by good fortune find Dona Anlia, who will preside over the famous annual celebration, in 2005..

 

 

Now we can understand the painting we saw in the Convent... but that leads to some questions about this syncretism... Hey, Professora Florentina?!

 

----------------------------------------

 

Time waits for no man.. we squeeze in a visit to the market... Jordan looks a little off-put by the mix of UFO-MoMs Unidentified Flying Objects Made of Meat...

 

 

 

We head off on individual adventures. Across the bridge, in the twin-town of So Felix, Prof. Piers finds a Saturday morning corral which draws the farm-folk..

 

 

 

and two young bulls who put their heads together to decide who is smarter..

 

 

Amy decides to walk to that cross at the top of the triangle of houses above the So Felix waterfront...

 

 

Brent, in a more decadent mood, heads for the Danneman Cigar Factory, which still operates...

 

 

 

now a closer look... at the roller... cigarettes sit in a roll of paper; cigars are rolled in themselves, i.e., in whole leaves of tobacco.. definitely aesthetically superior...

 

 

 

but no better for ones health, you note... Still, whats good enough for Arnold (Dont give a hungry man a fish, give him a fishing-pole) Schwarznegger and Bill (I did not inhale) Clinton is good enough for this factory employee who believes in supporting the local economy ...

 

 

 

___________________________________________

 

Cachoeira is full of anomolies    simple creative ones, others created by regimes of racial, religious and economic domination, and still others created accidentally by time. We see past and present mixed together in a new way. We have also come closer to poverty at the MST encampment, and then seen much too much food served at our dinner table last night. We asked if we could donate it somewhere and were told about a local creche, where we now head,  doggy-bags in hand...

 

the slope is pretty tough...

 

 

 

As we leave the center, and the river-front, the buildings become humbler

 

 

The creche turns out to be a elementary school for 450 kids, run by the Catholic Church..

 

 

and indeed much in need of food. We meet a very energetic lady in charge of the kitchen.. and her son...

 

 

She  takes us for a tour and we can feel the good vibes in the pre-school area, even though its Saturday, so the kids are not there... we take a group picture to remember.

 The sign on the wall says: To be a kid is... to eat gooey stuff, lick your chops a whole lot and think it all very funny right on!

 

 

The best view of the historic town turns out to be from the creche, up on a hill, where the poor people live.

 

 

around noon its time to leave Cachoeira and get back on the road again..

____________________________________

 

Part 4. Lunch at the Santa Cruz Fazenda

 

We head back across the bridge and up and out of the river valley. Just as we get to the top we turn into the Fazenda Santa Cruz (Holy Cross Ranch) for lunch. The view down to Cachoeira and So Felix is panoramic...

 

 

 

 

For all its historical patina, Cachoeira is a bustling provincial town and the cobblestones are hard after you have walked around awhile. The Fazenda Santa Cruz offers a quiet, green respite...

 

 

 

 

Lunch is served in the stately former dining-room of the Fazenda.  Prof. Florentina (far right, back to camera) and two of her grad students from UFBA, the Federal University of Bahia, (facing the camera, on the right) are here too, not to mention Prof. Maurcio (far left), telling us about the big fish he caught with his bare hands last week... Amy is more honest with her version; Jessica, the vegetarian, looks on, thinking any fish you catch should be thrown back in the water.

 

 

 

After lunch, we give up on our plan to reach our next destination before nightfall because the pool is just too pleasant...

 

 

 

____________________________________

 

Part 5. Vale do Jiquiria

 

Back in the van, in the late afternoon, the gentle landscape rolls by.

 

 

 

and the shadows grow longer

 

---

 

By the time we enter the Vale do Jiquiria (Jiquiria valley), night has fallen. We spend the evening with the locals, who have organized a seminar on cultural and eco-tourism, then turn in, sleeping in large cabins. The next day reveals the beauty of the Hotel Vale do Jiquiria, nestled on the bank of a hill by the Cachoeira dos Prazeres, (Waterfall of pleasures). The hotel has one side of the waterfall, while the townsfolk use the other side.

 

 

 

The unofficial princess of the hotel is Leopoldina the arara (a large species of parrot, as you see)

 

 

--

The main activity of the day is a horse-ride through the valley and on to another waterfall.

 

 

 

Since this is the first horse-ride ever for 3 of our 5 students, lets take a look at all 5, one by one, as they head off...

 

For Jessica, our animal-lover par excellence, this is a special moment

 

 

New Yorker Amy has seen just about everything in her time except a horse, from above... fortunately her horse is impertubable and it all works out..

 

 

 

Fellow New Yorker Shaina uses sunglasses to play it cool and tells the horse to be cool, too, please. He has a tendency to stop by the wayside to snack, but is otherwise cooperative enough...

 

 

 

 

Brent is definitely our alpha horse rider, and his horse is the most perky even if it is smaller than him

 

 

Jordan is quietly comfortable and ready to go..

 

 

We begin the track with the unlikely feat of crossing the river fortunately the horses are more used to it than us. Jordan is settling in already..

 

 

 

Over the river we go and off down the road.. a good way to spend a Sunday..

 

 

The landscape keeps changing as we move, from pastures...

 

...to forest

 

 

To chocolate-trees

 

 

Hmm.. the washing.. theres people in them there hills...

 

 

There they are... Mum is washing while the kids make the most of living next to a river..

 

 

We reach our destination, park the horses and head along a short path

 

 

 

which takes us to the next waterfall...

 

 

 

Brent wastes no time in exploring

 

 

And then we head back to the hotel the way we came...

 

--

 

After a late lunch the students enjoy the pool, the hotels nature-walk and the Cachoeira dos Prazeres, while Prof. Piers heads off to a session in the community seminar at the local school..

 

 

 

The seminar concludes with a swashbuckling display of capoeira (Brazilian martial arts dance) by a group from the next town, Mutupe..

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

---

 

Alas, time to head for home. Our route completes a broad circuit around the Recncavo and travels through some very interesting terrain, onto an island, and finally back to Salvador on a big ferry boat. Unfortunately, its night-time, so no pictures...