march, 2005

i dont think anyone in brazil could ever starve, there are so many
fruits and veggies just growing wild.  we have been pigging out on
the juices; they have juice bars with about 30 kinds of tropical
fruit juice that they serve blended with a bit of ice and often sugar.
the brazilians sure eat a lot of sugar, bet being a dentist is a good
profession here.  often when you order coffee it is pre-sweetened with
about 2-3 teaspoons of sugar per cup.  i drink mine with just milk so
it was hard to enjoy my morning coffee in a cafe.

the day we arrived in salvador, peter's (our crew for the crossing) wife,
sophia, came to visit and enjoy carnival.  peter and sophia are my age
or there abouts and a week of all day, all night partying was plenty,
more than plenty for them.  they did an excursion north on the bus one
day and tried to be normal tourists, but museums etc. were closed so
they just had to party anyway.

carnival is amazing.  about a week of parties, both daytimes and at night.
all businesses are closed except some restaurants.  there is music everywhere
and dancing everywhere.  scheduled events include parades of bloco's that
consist of a band on a big flatbed semi truck and then a bunch of people
who have paid quite a bit of money to walk along with the band and dance
inside a moving roped off area.  there are also cameroches, which are places
to watch the blocos go by.  most are at a hotel and include some stuff inside
the hotel as well as a place to watch.  they also cost money.  we decided to
do the cameroche because dancing for 6 hours of a parade route with the same
band/music didnt appeal to us as much as watching several blocos go by and
dancing to their music as they passed.  the hotel had food and drink available
but we opted for street food which was very good and easily half the price.
also in the hotel was a band with music (disco-like), a massage place where
you could get a free massage, free internet, and probably other stuff we
didnt find.  you wore a special t-shirt to get into the cameroche and also
to dance in the blocos.  we were novices and just wore ours. locals cut
and re-decorated theirs so they werent just the dull boys tank ytop style.
apparently the tailors are very busy just before carnival modifying carnival
shirts.  blocos were about 250 reals ($100) and the cameroche was 150 reals.
but after doing our cameroche we saw that most people are just in the streets
along the parade route, dancing as the blocos go by.  there are plenty of
porta-potties and drink/food vendors so there is no need for a fancy hotel
to see things.

brazilians bodies are different that americans, their hips move in ways
that mine never thought of going.  its like their hip joints are ball
bearings, susha's are roller bearings, my other nieces are well oiled
hinges and mine are rusty old hinges.  and they love to dance.  many tried
to teach me the hip movements but i was hopeless.

after our cameroche, we just went to an area called the pelorhino, the old
part of the city, where there were little parades all the time, music in
the park, and crowds of people day and night.  i managed to do carnival about
half the time, the girls were out till dawn most nights.  we had been warned
to not take any money or valuables with us, so would just tuck a bit of
cash in our clothes so we could buy drinks and not take a wallet or wear
a watch.  had no problems with theft, although some other boaty folks did.

the parades in the pelorhino often included kids playing the drums with
adults as the band and costumes.  some costumes were quite wild, one
group was wearing nothing but a g-string with their bodies totally covered
in gold paint.  quite spectacular but not very good for their health i bet.
others seemed to have costumes made out of tree branches but most were not
in costume, although in rio i think more costumes are used.

a custom of carnival that we learned after a few misunderstandings is
that if you make eye contact with someone of the opposite sex, its an
invitation to be kissed.  the dancing is mostly without partners but
its hard to dance in the street and not make eye contact with someone.
so we all got extra kisses during carnival.

also in the pelorhino we found wonderful icecream and a brazilian thing called
"acai na tigela" that we loved.  acai is pronounced oss-aye-ee. it is made
from a berry from a kind of palm tree that grows in the north of brazil
in the amazon area.  "na tigela" means in a bowl.  they take the
pulp/juice of the acai and mix it with a sweet syrup, bananas,
and ice and blend it to a consistency of a smoothie.  then they
serve it with fresh fruit (we did mango) on top and granola in a
cup that you add to it.  very yummy.  we eat it whenever we find it.

brazilians are very friendly people and we quickly made friends at the
marina we were staying in and up in the pelorinho.  one of the friends,
rogerio, who had our phone number would call in the middle of the night.
he spoke no english and my portugese is not up to having a conversation
on the phone with a random guy at 3:30am.  the conversation usually went:

	me			rogerio
	--			-------
	halo			annah?
	no hannah		susha?
	no susha, tia (aunt)	click (hang up)

even after being told not to call in the middle of the night rogerio
still did. after a couple more of these late calls, we started turning
off the phone at night.  rogerio was a bit miffed that the girls were
out partying without him or were asleep.  carlos, another friend of the
girls was much more reasonable.  he was an artist, supporting himself
doing tatoos and drawing/painting on the side.  he gave us a nice drawing,
just right for the boat.

after carnival we explored salvador bay.  we have 2 guide books, one
written by a brazilian that has good info and understandable (usually)
english and one from the british royal cruising club (RCC). our first stop
was the island called itaparica about 8 miles across the bay.  the
bay is shallow so you had to actually navigate to get there.  as we
went behind the island and to the anchorage we discovered that the RCC
book was total fiction, referring to buoys that dont exist and totally
ignoring big oil rig thingies that do exist and need to be avoided.

the island of itaparica had several neat things, first was spring water
that is good to drink, good to fill your tanks with, and supposed to make
grandmothers feel like their daughters with its medicinal powers.  i didnt
notice it, but we did fill our tanks with 3 loads of jerry cans (2 5 gallon
ones, 1 2.5 gallon one, and 5 1 gallon ones.  fortunately the marina where
we parked the dinghy was close to the spring and had a grocery cart to use
to carry the water.  another thing we liked was an awesome ice cream parlor.
they had about 20 kinds of icecream that we had never hear of, matching the
20 kinds of juice in a juice bar that we dont recognize.  it was self service
and you could taste each kind before you chose what you wanted.  there was 
a table of toppings and sprinkles too.  and it was very cheap.  the final
thing on itaparica was the mangos, they were ripe and we didnt find the
trees, but found an old man with a wheel barrow full, selling them for
50 cents (20 cents US) each.  they were very nice and ripe, smelled like
i have never smelled a mango in the stores at home.  sliced mango and plain
yogert is our standard dessert now.

our next stop in salvador bay was a little town about 5 miles up a river.
we were there on saturday, market day and went to the market where all
kinds of unrecognizable friuts and veggies were on sale. most were brought
to town on donkeys or big brahma cows with baskets tied to their backs.
after the market was over, the towns bars were crowded and outside were
parked 20-30 donkeys, bulls, etc.  looked like an old western town from
the movies.  from the looks of some of the drunken farmers, its good that
their donkeys know the way home.

on the way back to the marina we stopped at a snorkeling/diving spot. we
anchored a ways off shore out of the way of the local schooners that bring
tons of day tourists to the beach.  i stayed on the boat because the dinghy
is challenged carrying more than 4 people (hannah, susha, peter, sophia)
and because the anchorage was a bit iffy.  when they came back i asked 
how the snorkeling was and after the giggles, found that they had not gone
snorkeling, but gone to the beach on the other side of the point and had
a few caipirinhas - the local brazilian drink made from a sugar cane alcohol
(not rum) called cachaca and lime and sugar and sometimes a bit of water.
quite tasty, quite strong and together with the hot sun goes quickly to
your head.  might be best that they didnt go snorkeling after a few 
caipirinhas.

after our trip exploring salvador bay, peter and sophia left and it was
just us three on the boat for a while.  susha and hannah took portuguese
lessons for a week and i puttered on my boat chores and book.

we decided to do the sail from salvador to rio de janiero in one shot,
rather than stop along the way.  we had also decided to go to the amazon
to see the rain forest, but found that the airline tickets were 100 reals
cheaper from rio than from salvador, even though the amazon is way closer
to salvador than to rio.  its a 6 day sail and weather looked like we 
would have a reach until cabo do frio where the brazil coastline stops
going north/south and turns east/west.  we started out like a bullet,
logging two of our best ever days, 160 miles and 161 miles in a 24 hr
period.  of course we had the brazil current with us that added between
1/2 knot and maybe 1.5 knots to our speed over ground.  we will pay for
that on the way back north.

as we left salvador, at dusk as we often do for a passage, a freighter
also left, but he turned right and we were going left.  we assumed he 
was going north and didnt pay close enough attention to him.  he was
just following the channel out of the bay and once outside and in deep
water, he turned south and was coming right for us.  a very scary moment
when we tried to decide to continue on and go in front of him or try to
turn around and go behind him.  visibility was bad, distance judgement
is hard at night (it was dark by then).  turned on the radar, put our
spotlight on him and on us and our sails, and continued on our course.
we went in front of him, but way too close for my comfort.

we caught a big baracuda on the way down and it fed us for the whole
trip.  we are getting a standard set of fish recipes to use when the
fish is too big so we dont get totally tired of it.  the new one we
tried on this fishie was marinated in ginger/soy stuff and then cooked
in olive oil and some of the marinade.  yummy.

on the way down the coast you pass brazil's biggest oil field, about 10-20
miles off shore and 60+ miles long.  its so long that you cant pass all of
it in daylight.  we arrived opposite it at about noon and were still by it
long after dark.  its very confusing because the platforms are lit, but not
like ships.  some are so high or have such bright lights that your depth
perception is totally wrong.  some show on radar and some dont.  there is
lots of traffic going from the mainland to the platforms and also all the
shipping, both northbound and southbound squeezed between the oil field
and the mainland.  maybe a 5 mile wide strip at some points because of
shoals coming out from the mainland.  stressy time and i didnt sleep much
before my watch in the middle of the night.

at one point in the passage we hit an area of thunderstorms.  we had the
main at the 3rd reef and we rolled in the jib when the wind came up.  hannah
was on watch and called down thru the storm, what wind speed do we need to
worry about a knockdown?  yikes, i dont know.  and probably should.  we
saw winds of 27 knots and i knew that wasnt too much for wonderland.  but
how do you figure out when you should just wait with the main up but reefed
as far as it can go and when should you try to take the sail down. wind
speed of a knockdown doesnt sound like something i want to practice
determining.

all the way down the coast, we could have sailed more off shore, but didnt.
then at cabo do frio we paid for it by needing to sail close on the wind.
i always round points well off shore so instead of beating out to sea in
strongish winds and 6+ ft seas, i cheated and moved the waypoint to a 2 mile
cushion instead of 10-15 miles.  cut our distance to rio too and we did make
it.  once we rounded the cape, we lost the wind and motored or motor-sailed
the last 60 miles to rio.  the approach is spectacular, entering the bay
that rio is in, you see high hills/mountains/rocks jutting out of the sea.
one in the distance has the cross on it, rio's famous corcovado.

we arrived in rio with one day to spare for our trip to the amazon.  checked
into a marina there and were floored at the prices in this, the low season.
we were paying about $7/day for the marina in salvador and it was $35/day
in rio.  the amazon trip was 10+ days which quickly ate up the slight savings
in the price of airline tickets.  bad decision there.  the marina was also
so far from things that we had to take taxis or walk thru a dangerous park
to the metro/bus to get around.  rio so far is not one of my favorite places.

after a day of pouring rain, we closed up the boat and headed to the amazon.
our trip was based out of a town called tefe, well into the interior of
brazil and about 1000 miles up the amazon from the sea.  we flew to manaus
via brasilia and from there took a river boat up to tefe.  had a posada
(rooming house) for the night and had been told the boat to tefe leaves
at 4pm by our tour folks and at 2pm by our posada lady.  so we took our
stuff and leisurely walked to the harbor to find the boat.  we finally found
it and as we got to the end of the pier that it was on, someone said it was
leaving soon.  susha ran back to buy hammocks for us to sleep in while 
hannah and i carried all our stuff onto the boat and bought tickets.  we
had been looking for a money machine and just barely had enough money to
get our tickets.  han and i stood at the gangplank watching for susha and
telling the ticket seller that we didnt want to go if our 3rd person
didnt come in time.  he said no problem, if she was late she could get a
small boat who would catch our big boat.  we didnt want to risk it since
there was no way to tell susha that is what she should do.  fortunately,
we never had to make that decision, she came sprinting down the pier with
3 hammocks in her arms about 2 minutes before they pulled in the gang
plank and cast off. our boat took 2+ days to go up river, 1.5 days to
come back down.  there are no navigation markers on the river, just
locals who know it.  at night they navigate by spotlight.  dont even
have a gps on board.  the fare included food, which was very good, but
the same every day, lunch and dinner.

sleeping in a hammock is ok, but it got cold at night and we hadnt brought
any blankets.  we each had a long sleeved shirt and rain jacket, which
became our pajamas and blankets.  we had no safe place to keep things 
so my pillow became my dry bag with passports, money, credit cards, 
blackberry, camera, etc.  not the softest pillow, but it worked.  hannah
met the owner of the boat (and 3 others), manuel and he befriended us --
lent us blankets, gave us sugar when we bought acai raw in a bag not
realizing that our favorite acai na tigela had lots of other goodies
in it but acai pulp.  he let us stay on the boat after we arrived in
tefe so we didnt need a hotel for the night before our amazon adventure
started.  has made gobs of money with his boats, but never does anything
but work, never goes anywhere, never travels, is afraid now that he has money.
we told him that travel was fun and invited him to the boat to sail from
rio to ilha grande.  he said yes, he would like to come, but didnt mean it.
took us a week and a few phone calls to realize that it wasnt going to happen.

i was amazed that whenever we passed a town with a cell tower, if i set
my blackberry to the right network, i could usually do email for about
20 minutes as we went by.  middle of the jungle, no cars, and the net
is alive and well.

in tefe we found an amazing market with little food places that served
local fare.  our favorite had wonderful juices for a few pennies and
a local breakfast thing called "pao com tucoma" which means bread with
tucoma.  tucoma is a fruit that is more like avocado in taste than like
most fruit.  we also had a thing called beju that is a tapioca flour,
heated and melted and then covered with cheese.  the tapioca thing is
like a crispy crepe. in brazil, especially in the amazon, they eat a
lot of mantioc as a staple.  the tapioca of beju is from the mantioc
as is a thing that is on the table at every meal and just called mantioc
flour.  it is added to beans and rice and most other foods.  sometimes
its small pieces that kind of blend right in and sometimes its larger
pieces that you can hardly chew and seem like gravel in your food.
there is also a version of mantioc that they add to coffee.  we became
regulars at our juice place in the market and bought a huge bottle of
guava juice for the trip back to manaus after our amazon outing.

the tour place we had signed up with is called mamiraua, an eco tourism
and ecological research organization. they control a large tract of land
that is a nature preserve.  it contains many villages and the villagers
are used as guides for the eco-tourism effort.  we arrived by speedboat,
but not like usual recreational ones, these were very long and thin and
went quite fast with only a 15 hp engine.  our rooms were in floating
houses.  this part of the amazon is called the flooded forest because
the water level changes by 12 meters from the dry time to the wet time.
all the trees and plants have adapted to being on dry land half the 
year and flooded half the year.  we were there in mid flood.  during
the flooded time, the hikes are done by canoe.  we stayed for 4 days 
and during that time did trips in big 10 person canoes with engines,
small 3 person canoes with paddles, a hike on dry land, a visit to
a village where we met local people, saw their school and community
building and learned a bit about their customs.  we also bought
handicrafts they had made.

the bank for these people is a cow.  if they have extra money, they
buy a cow.  grazing and food raising is communal.  they seem to use
the cows for meat, not for milk, in fact dairy products are very hard
to find, yogert is from switzerland (nestle) for example.  each village
has a head who settles disputes when they arise.  he is elected by
the village and everyone 14 and over can vote.  in the village we 
visited the head was a 36 year old man.  one of our guides owned 12
cows and was quite well off.  the houses in the village are either 
floating or on stilts.  if the water gets too high there are always
some houses that are further back and higher that folks can go to.
the school seemed like a one room elementary school.  we also visited
a research station that was classifying the fishes living in the floating
grass blobs that were in all the waterways, sometimes blocking our way.
we watched them take 2 samples from floating grass blobs and then classify
the fishes found there.

we saw lots of birds, about 50 species, 3 kinds of monkeys, a sloth whose
portugese name is pregeesa.  the girls started calling me a pregeesa
when i wasnt wide awake and raring to go at the 6am breakfast call.  also
saw cayman, an alligator that gets to be pretty big but isnt dangerous
unless provoked. the river also had 2 kinds of dolphins, one red and not
at all looking like a typical dolphin and the other called a river dolphin
that was just like his ocean cousin.  the howler monkey makes a loud
distinctive noise each afternoon as it stakes out its territory for
sleeping that night.  we now recognize that sound and are hearing it in
the jungle area that we are cruising in near rio.

one of the most spectacular thing in the amazon is the clouds.  i have
never seen such variety and depth, especially near sunrise or sunset.
tried to get photos, but somehow a picture just cant capture the beauty,
peacefulness, and quiet.  and the most unspectacular is a visit to a 
lake.  first of all it was the last day and the difference between a 
lake and a flooded waterway was indistinguishable to us tourists.
second it was raining hard, really hard.  third it was an hour away
by the fast boat, so our butts were pretty tired, and then when we
got there it looked just the same as all the other waterways we had
visited over the past 3 days.  the guides whipped out snacks and
offered them to us.  everyone wanted to just go home, but they wouldnt
let us refuse so we sat in the boats in the rain and ate wierd amazon
fruit and cookies.  then we started home and it got dark while we were
going.  in addition to the rain we had a storm of june bugs (big enough
to hurt as we zoomed home in the power canoes).  we all had our eyes
closed and heads down and just heard/felt things hitting us all the time. 
we were also being bombarded by bugs that looked like white worms. one
time a fish jumped into the boat and ended up next to me.  i was sitting
beside jonathan, an american from north carolina, who was a bit scared
and yelled for the guides to deal with the fish.  it was too slipery
and too agitated to pick up with your hand without being cut by its
fins.  one of the guides got it trapped between her shoe and the edge
of the boat and picked it up with the shoe (not on her foot).  we 
later found out that the same fish had landed on someones lap up front
in the boat and she had just brushed it off her lap and it went straight
to jonathans feet.  by the time we got back to the lodge, everyone was
seriously cold, wet, and miserable.  the porch of the lodge was peppered
with the june bugs, thousands of them, mostly dead.  they crunched under
your shoes as you walked.

that night after everyone had a shower (not hot because with it raining
all day the solar hot water heaters had not done their job), we had our
last dinner and the girls organized a dance party with the kitchen staff,
guides and fellow guests.  lots of fun.  they left the generator on so
that we could do the music.  since the kitchen help slept over the dining
room (party room) we quit early. breakfast was also at 5:30 instead of
6 the next morning so we could catch a river boat back to tefe.

very nice trip, the mamiraua folks are trying, and succeeding, to make
the amazon support the local indigenous population without destroying
the environment and leaving the rain forest in tack, the river not over
fished, and the young people in their villages instead of begging on 
the streets of rio.  they have a website, www.mamiraua.org.br, if any
of you are thinking of an amazon vacation.

as soon as we returned to rio, we left for the nicest cruising area in
brazil (according to the cruising guide), ilha grande.  its west of rio
along the east/west portion of the coast line and therefore in an area
of little wind.  had changed oil and feuled up so we were ready to motor
if need be. there is a counter current of maybe .5 knots along that coast.
we left late in the afternoon so we would arrive in good daylight (60 miles)
but were foiled by the engine overheating if we went more than 1600 rpm.
usually i can go 2200 but it had been getting less and less as i got into
warmer water.  at 1600 we were only going 1.5-2 knots and 60 miles is a
lot further at that speed than at 5 knots.  we finally made it to the 
first anchorage on ilha grande in a lovely bay with a spring fed fresh
water pool and shower.  it also had mosquitoes that belonged to a network
that broadcast the fact that there were tender americans on the white boat.

started debugging the overheating: water was pumping out the exhaust as
it is supposed to. oil was a bit low (just changed and its difficult
to see how full it is when oil is clean and clear), the raw water
strainer was a bit dirty and silty, but i thought the real problem
was that the prop was full of barnacles, shaft too, strut too. there were
some on the hull too, but not too many.  cleaned them off the prop and 
shaft in the nice clear water of our little bay.  long job and i ended up
scratched up a bit on shoulders, hands, elbows, etc.  hannah helped and
was smart enough to wear a shirt and gloves.  we also checked the intake
for the seawater to be sure there werent barnacles there, removed a small
piece of coral growing there.  thought we had fixed it.

but when we sailed to the next bay, we had gotten back to 3 knots, but
not to the usual 5.  were also up to 1750 rpm before the engine would
overheat.  i call it overheating if it wants to be hotter than 195-200
degrees farenheit.  checked the impellor on the salt water pump and it
was ok.  had fred from tangaroa help and he thought it was the radiator
cap.  my engine has a radiator looking thing that i add coolant to and 
connected to it is a reservior with min/max lines and a hose leading
from the bottom to the radiator and from the top leading to the bilge.
fred said that this reservoir should be higher than the hose connection
to the radiator so that coolant goes automatically from the reservoir
to the radiator instead of just as an overflow from the radiator to
the reservoir.  when he lifted the reservoir up, the coolant filled 
the radiator and then ran out, thus his thought that the cap was bad.
the cap does hold pressure, but maybe not enough.  cant find a cap that
will fit, so far.  tried a volvo diesel one that was about $125 and
tried an automotive one that was about $2.  neither quite worked.

still have the heat exchanger to check, but it doesnt seem to be leaking.
ran the engine without the radiator cap to get rid of any trapped air.
havent checked things since then.  thinking i should go to a boat yard
and haul out and have the bottom painted - the paint i put on in spain
didnt last very long.  also should check the thermostat, but i changed
it about a year ago so it should be ok.  another possibility is that the
temperature gauge is wrong, but when it says the engine is hot, it smells
hot, so i sort of trust it.

if anyone has ideas on what it could be, please shoot me an email.

aside from the engine overheating, ilha grande is a beautiful place.
the whole island is a national park and there are trails all over it
that are beautiful walks thru the jungle.  we went for a walk yesterday
and harvested a jack fruit.  it was half rotten, and that half had been
harvested by the bees and bugs.  but the other half was more than enough.
a jack fruit is about the size of a volleyball and mostly edible yellow
flesh that tastes like a cross between pineapple, apple, and banana.
the girls dont like it very much, perhaps because they saw and smelled
both the bugs half and my half, so i have a lot of fruit to eat or
give away.

libby, another niece who was my mediterranean crew member has come to
sail with us for a month.  its great to have her, 3 handed bridge gets
old real quick.  and our cooking rotation gets longer and better. the
first few days she was here, we played bridge, snorkeled, played bridge,
 ... pretty lazy, ignoring boat chores and staying in the same anchorage.

i loose my crew (nieces) in june, anyone wanting to sail from brazil
to trinidad in july/august this year, email me.  its about 2000 miles.

hugs.

-evi