BRAZIL IS THE COUNTRY OF THE FUTURE AND ALWAYS WILL BE

The first week into the New Year was our first week in Brazil.
Not quite what we expected: New Years eve was -apart from some fireworks- pretty much a non-event, the beach in Florionapolis nothing special and the sea too cold. We did not even get that much rest, due to the suffocating heat, itchy mosquito bites and noise (situation still the same). It is not all that negative of course. It was good to finally do a little reading, there is proper coffee here, not Nescafe (but now tea is a difficult product) and to confirm a cliché: the people are beautiful here. The women are very expressive and the men have a beautiful skin colour and generally are really fit (I am however keeping my distance, as nao is not easily taken as an answer).

Brazil is huge. Bigger than Europe. To get to the rainforest in the north, we had to fly. We flew from Sao Paolo and made a stopover there for a day. Still dazed of the nightbus, we were lucky enough to meet Lilian there, who took us around the town with her two small children by car. Sao Paolo has more inhabitants than the whole of the Netherlands and is, to say it simply: ugly. High buildings seemed to be planted all over the place, without any clear planning. Some streets are ´good´streets, but the next street is dangerous.

On the way to the airport we meet Dave, a loud Australian, who we would be seeing for the next 10 days. We arrive in the middle of the night in Manaus. Dave gets a free ride to his hostel, but they don’t want to take us. Some guy offers to bring us for less than a taxi. Sylvia bargains it down. He doesn’t bring us to the hostel we requested (´full´) and tries to sell us his jungle tours. We are so tired, we decide just to go to bed. I am still combing my hair the next morning, when this guy stands in front of my nose again, trying to make me buy his tour. If you want to get on my nerves, this is the perfect way how.
We notice this later too: once you show some kind of interest, they keep following you around, hardly giving you any space to move elsewhere.
We leave the hotel and go to the hostel of our choice, which of course has plenty of room.
We do our own little research and then pick one tour. It feels a bit like going on a Disney trip (not that I have ever done that). Luckily my nerves are good for something; we discover that the guy from the airport is a scam artist.
Excursions are expensive, so again, we bargain. Bargaining seems to work most of the time in Brazil. Sylvia has understood the trick. It is called patience. If you wait and ask long enough, they will lower the price. They don’t seem to mind spending that much extra time on one client. Instead of having a good tourist infrastructure, people just seem to be busy to get money out of individual tourists. Everywhere we go we find that everyone has paid a different price, both locals and tourists. It makes it hard to understand what we are supposed to pay and to trust anyone. What we have seen in other South-American countries seems to be valid here even more: no long-term thinking, only looking at short-term gain. Or as another tourist phrased it: "Brazil is the country of the future and always will be."

At night someone shows us the synagogue. We are surprised to find one, at the edge of the jungle. There are about 150 Jews left, who at first came here because of the rubber trade (which later moved to Malaysia and Indonesia, but the tree is still called Hevea brasiliensis).

It is odd that almost 20 years ago I collected signatures in order to protect the tropical rainforest. I had no clue that it was a possibility to actually go there. It is still very much under threat; farmers, soja plantations, log companies. I don’t know how much harm our presence does.

We travel with the loud Ozzie, three silly Swiss girls and one decent German about four hours by bus, boat, jeep and by boat again to get to the jungle lodge. You know, the kind of place where you find a frog on the toilet seat (gesproken over kikker in je bil). The next four days we are kept busy with a walk through the forest, caiman spotting, eating a lot of fish, piranha fishing (and swimming in between them), chatting and playing cards with people from all over the world, sleeping in the jungle in a hammock, watching rubber making from the tree and visiting natives. And getting constantly soaking wet, because of the rain. The Tropical rainforest consists of many rivers and many trees and (medicinal) plants, so we spend a big amount of time in a little boat (which of course had no life jackets *see comment). We didn’t see many animals, which was disappointing.
In the end it is all in the name: lots of rain and lots of forest.