Photos from the "Cidade Maravilhosa"

Here is a coast; here is a harbor;
here, after a meager diet of horizon, is some scenery:
impractically shaped and--who knows?--self-pitying mountains,
sad and harsh beneath their frivolous greenery,

with a little church on top of one.

- Elizabeth Bishop, Arrival at Santos

I know its been a long time since my last post, but I'm going to use the fact that I'm travelling in Brazil, with much better things to be doing than sitting in an internet café updating my blog, as my primary excuse. Since Farah is doing such a good job with her daily-log format (albeit a little behind), I'm going to give you guys some photos from Rio de Janeiro and a very short update about where we've been and where we're going.

Right now, we're in Olinda, an old colonial town just outside of Recife, the capital of Pernambuco, the most populous state in Brazil's North-East. Since we've increasingly realized how little one month is for seeing and doing everything in our truncated but still ambitious itinerary, we've travelled as much as possible by plane instead of bus. We've been fortunate to have flexible dates, meaning we've gotten some pretty cheap flights, but the downside is that we just hop from big city to big city without seeing much of anything in between.

After spending about a week in Rio de Janeiro, Farah and I flew north to Salvador with four friends we had met at our hostel in Rio: Ida and Aleksander, from Norway, and Tania and Steve, from Toronto. Salvador is the capital of the state of Bahia, and the Afro-Brazilian cultural capital as well. We had a great time in Salvador, and had a chance to get just a taste of the city, before we flew even further north to Recife, and took a bus the same day to Porto de Galinhas, a little beach town. We spent a few days there, waiting out the rain for the first day, and then spending the next couple days on the beach, and the nights listening to forro music in the main square as part of the Festas Juninas. We caught our last bit of sun at the beach, headed by bus to Recife, and found our way to our hostel in Olinda where we've been spending the last couple days. That catches us up the the present, but Farah and I will do our best to fill out the details and satiate your curiosity with some more in-depth coverage in the weeks to come. Tommorow morning (early enough that it really shouldn't be called morning) Farah and I are flying to Foz do Iguaçu, the Brazilian town nearest the Iguazu Falls. We'll spend a day and a half on the Argentinian side of the National Park before flying to the last stop of our trip: Buenos Aires, a city we're greatly anticipating.

I won't have time tonight to give you my impressions from what was my second visit to Rio, but I can include some photos which I hope you'll enjoy:

A view of the "impractically shaped hills" among which Rio is built, from Pão de Açucar, Sugar Loaf

Some houses in the Rocinha favela in Rio's Zona Sul

Farah, Me, Rapha, Gilberto, Marina, her mum, her brother Bernardo, and Mike at Grumari beach outside of Rio


Ale had to shrink himself a little for this photo, here he is in Santa Teresa with Ida and Farah wearing his signature cap and grin

Eating fish moqueca with Tania and Steve at the Mercado São Pedro in Niterói, across the bay from Rio


The Museu de Arte Contemporânea de Niterói, designed by Oscar Niemeyer, with Rio and the Pão de Açucar in the background

I'm sorry to say that's all for now, but look forward to me getting my act together sometime in the near future.