Hot in Many Ways

Hot in Many Ways: First Days in Brazil We arrive at the city of Santos, Brazil on February 13--an hour late owing to strong winds and currents going against our northerly direction. The port authority there sends 10 officers aboard the ship to inspect our passports and make sure we all have our required Brazilian Visas. It takes quite a while to check and stamp 750 passports, so we leave for our tours two hours later than expected. This is Saturday, the last day of carnival, so shops are closed near the port. Santos, the largest port in Brazil, was the center of coffee exports when Brazil controlled the market. A factory the size of a football field employed many women who made the jute bags for the coffee. Here the coffee was tasted and graded. There is a coffee museum in the town, located in an elegant building that was formerly the city's Coffee Trade Palace, a marketplace for buying and selling coffee. We visit this place on our tour, but find that the museum's exhibits are mostly explained in Portuguese, so we only get a general feeling for how important this place was, and how huge the coffee industry used to be in Brazil. Sumner and Alice have a cool drink made of coffee and orange juice, a specialty here. We plan to take a tram--a century-old electric streetcar in this case--through the city's old town section near the port. While waiting for the tram to arrive at the station, we step into the Pele museum across the street. It celebrates one of Brazil's greatest soccer players, who was born and raised in Santos. We don't have time to see the exhibits, but we find seats in the sunny museum café and immediately connect to their fast and free wifi, a rarity in this continent. We settle in for 10 minutes of email downloads and see that all must be well back home, but there is hardly any time to write anyone--a constant frustration on this trip. The tram ride is pleasant, but less interesting than it might have been since many shops are closed and the streets are deserted. Most of what we see is dispiriting: much graffiti on peeling paint, small storefront retail shops selling inexpensive tourist gewgaws that had the look of Chinese manufacture, mom-and-pop cafés, a few old buildings that might have been noteworthy had they been in good repair. Currently lacking industry and unattractive to prosperous businesses, our guide says Santos is attempting to remake itself into a tourist destination, as well as a bedroom community for those who work in São Paulo, the huge city about 40 miles north. The cost of living is much cheaper here than in the more urban setting. Once we get away from Santos's city center, we see the main tourist attraction: broad sandy white beaches. We visit Gonzaga Beach, lined with hotels and high-rise condominiums that are more prosperous-looking than what's downtown. The thong bikinis worn by the women leave little to the imagination, especially from behind. People of all sizes stroll around the beach nearly naked, but seem to think nothing of it. The flavor of Brazil is clearly different from Argentina; their respective national dances exemplify this: tango is precise, passionate, suggestive but dignified, and (most especially) stiff-hipped, while the samba and other Brazilian dances are anything but stiff-hipped. We visitors were agog, and snapped many pictures. We consider what muscles are used to create "the Brazilian walk," but are at a loss as to how one gets the sensuous piston effect. We are in Rio de Janeiro for Sunday and Monday, February 14 and 15. Rio has a breathtakingly beautiful harbor and a magnificent skyline. Sumner and Alice have scheduled a "Best of Rio" tour, which compresses the city's major sights into 9 hours of 95+ degree heat. Since Sunday is not a workday, the beaches are crowded, as are the lines for the cable car to Sugar Loaf and the cog railway to Christ the Redeemer. Not only are many Brazilians visiting these sites en masse, but several other cruise ships are in port, so we are competing with thousands of other visitors for a place in line. The contracted tour company handles things well, but long lines, waits and crowds are unavoidable. Midway through the exhausting and sweltering tour, we spend 90 minutes at a Brazilian restaurant that serves meat table-side from skewers. Of particular note: the barbecued chicken hearts, pork and sausage. Most appreciated, though, were the chilled beverages. Alice has a Coke Zero with ice, and to her at this point in the day it is better than champagne. Sumner has a Brazilian beer and tries the Brazilian cocktail specialty, the Caipirinha. It is a concoction of Cahaca (a liquor distilled from sugar cane), sugar, many slices of lime, and ice. We are allowed two drinks with the meal, and opt to take away much-needed bottles of water for later. Sugar Loaf is a stellar must-see attraction. It takes two cable car rides to arrive at the pinnacle overlooking the city and its surrounding environs. Many rocky promontories and islands punctuate the sparkling blue water; from here we can appreciate how huge the harbor is. We are struck by the ample greenery in the city, and note the favelas (slums) that seem to be pouring upwards in the valleys of the hills. From a distance, these look colorful and quaint, but later during the bus ride we see how unsightly and sad the derelict homes look close-up. The Christ the Redeemer statue is huge, but we're surprised how small it looks from most vantagepoints. It may be a symbol of Rio, but it is not at all comparable in prominence to, say, the Eiffel Tower in Paris. We get to the site on one of many rocky promontories by way of a very slow cog railway. The views from this point are wonderful, as they were from Sugar Loaf. Hordes of other tourists make the experience less enjoyable, especially given the extreme heat. We are told that Rio is usually 10 degrees cooler, but there has been considerable warming in recent years. Last week we hear that the temperature hit over 110 degrees Fahrenheit, unheard-of in the past. We drive along the fabled beaches of Impanema and Cococabana, both beautiful swaths of white sand, with impressive waves crashing to shore. All around them are upscale condominiums and businesses. Rio, we conclude, is a first-world city--except, of course, for those favelas. We learn that Rio's population is about 9.5 million; at least a million of that number live in slums. Since we missed Rio's fabled Carnival by a few days, on Saturday evening Holland America brings in a group of Brazilian dancers and musicians to perform in the ship's theater on Sunday night. There are Samba dancers, drummers, and acrobatic Capoeira performers, whose moves look like a no-contact judo fight. The show is spectacular and loud, very very very loud, with lots of skin showing--rather like a show in Las Vegas, but on steroids. On Monday, it takes a full day on our blessedly air-conditioned ship to recover after Saturday's exhausting tour. We occupy ourselves by reading, doing laundry, and attempting to access the free wifi available in the port terminal--a futile effort, because too many other people are also trying to use it. (Imagine waiting 30 minutes to connect online, only to get knocked off after a few seconds.) When we walk a quarter-mile to get to the terminal we are very glad we didn't go exploring; the temperature and humidity were again stratospheric. We encounter fellow passengers who also opt to stay on board the ship. This is a shame, of course, because there is much more to see. The art museums sound especially interesting, for example, but we don't feel too disappointed because we learn they are closed on Mondays anyway. We sail away from glittering Rio at sunset, and not long after we begin our northward path up Brazil's coast we are treated to a spectacular show of lightening during a heavy rainstorm. We now know how hot it may be as our trip progresses to the equator, and are reconsidering some of the shore excursions we've selected. Between the heat, humidity and the Zika virus threat, we just may pull back from some of our ambitious plans in the jungle!