rolling on the rio (negro)

Sun blazing, sand burning our feet, we trooped toward the dock, where a boat would take us into the jungle. We kept doing the awkward, apologetic turn-back-and-smile at the muscle-bound dudes carrying our luggage. (For the record though they weren't even sweating and seemed to find it funny that we felt bad.)

Coming into view by the dock was a brightly colored, multi-story yacht with a bar, live music, two sun-decks, a dude-sized cooler-bin of full of beer-and-ice, and an on-board village of festive marquees and cardboard decorations.

And parked immediately next to that noise was the boat we would be taking, which looked a bit like a canoe with an umbrella taped to the back.

Its name: the Pantera Negra, translation: 'Black Panther,' which would have been funny even if its peeling shreds of paint hadn't been baby blue and white.

So I mounted the black panther, crossed that shit off my bucket list, and started getting excited all over again. I'd wanted to see the Amazon since third grade, and here I was.


Plus, the losers on the party-boat next door were doing it all wrong. They might as well have been in a gross college bar or on a Hudson River booze cruise. Here on the black panther I could feel the spray of the rio negro in my face (and did for the next two hours). I could smell the water and gaze out at the wildness we were heading into.

(Or pull my hat over my face and fall asleep, you know, whatever I felt like in the moment.)

And there was a cooler full of sodies too at the front of the Black Panther. So we had our own party.

But for miles and miles we just motored. I think it was a little over two hours. From the sweeping Rio negro, onto some smaller, 'side-streets,' laughing and taking pictures of each other.  I wish I was capable of describing how happy I was and how special that place is, instead of just making fun of stuff.

Like most tourists, my favorite part was that stretch where the Rio Negro and the Rio Solimoes meet and run alongside each other for like six kilometers without mixing and you can see - vividly - the two different colors.

And i guess my second favorite was that first view of our Hotel-in-the-Trees.

:)

heggy

Tickby and I landed in Manaus early in the morning.

Staggering out into the terminal, we saw materializing a distractingly beautiful youth holding a sign with the name of our hotel on it. He looked like male Zoe Saldana in Avatar but you know, not blue.

When we approached him and identified ourselves, he grew very excited, telling us what a great time we would have at the Ariau Towers.

"It is very nice!" he beamed. "Any time, you can call to the front desk from your room and ask for - if you want - a hammock and some cheese. They will bring it to you!"

It was probably three hundred degrees celsius and the idea of swinging in a hammock while eating cheese was a question mark, but this dude's joie de vivre had a way of flooding your mind with sparkles. For example, when he explained that we had to stay there at the sweltering terminal for another two hours because more hotel guests were arriving on a later flight, I felt a surge of euphoria.  He flourished his beautiful, attenuated arm around the dirty room featuring the Brazilian equivalent of Amtrak snack cart food, and said, 'You may sit, relax and enjoy something to eat!' And Tickby and I became downright giddy at the idea.

Also, if memory serves, his name was Stefani. Like gwen.

All morning we rode the waves of Stefani's bliss and bathed in the rays of ecstasy projected from his impossibly large almond-shaped eyes. By this I mean we sat at a filthy table that was nailed to the ground and crusted with old cheesebread and drank Coke Zeros, periodically laughing and waving to our irrepressible new friend.

Stefani's joy eventually carried us to the shores of the Rio Negro, where a a boat was waiting to take us on into the jungle and the Ariau Towers.

We noticed an enormous concert stage being erected on the beach, complete with posters for caffeine energy drinks, Coca Cola, and I think beach balls (?).

'Yes!' Stefani exclaimed as though we had asked aloud, 'Tonight will be a Heggy concert. Do you like Heggy?'

the radiant stefani

Heggy, Heggy, let's see now... nope! Don't know who Heggy is. Feel dumb. Certain she's a very important Brazilian pop singer. Or maybe it's a he? Or a band?

'Who is Heggy?' Tickby asked.

'Heggy! Like Bob Marley, like Ziggy Marley. Heggy music.'

Ahhhhh yes.

Reggae.

Still getting used to these R sounding like H shenanigans.

PS. My Portuguese teacher kept telling me to visit the 'Museum of Hockey' here in São Paulo the other day. He was in fact recommending the Museum of Rock.

on the big rock jesus mountain * plus boobs

Rio de Janeiro is a heartbreakingly beautiful city with spectacular beaches, friendly people, tons of fun things to do, and a big rock Jesus perched impossibly high on a mountain.

But more importantly, me.

In Rio I learned that I'm cripplingly afraid of heights.

I started to notice something off on Day One, when we climbed to the top of the Jesus.

(When I say 'climbed,' I of course mean 'took the tram thing'.)

I felt oddly nervous on the tram-thing, and then a little off on the Jesus himself. I remember thinking it was probably just residual nausea from the previous day's road trip, combined with the light sadness that comes when I'm about to be separated from Mark. (I know it's lame, but it's the truth.) Mark was returning to São Paulo the next day and Tickby and I would continue to Manaus.

So I felt woozy and unhappy. I avoided looking over the sides of the thousands-of-feet-high Jesus pedestal on which we stood.

But it was just a little, and the rest of the day was great. Spent laughing a lot, taking pictures of the Jesus, from the Jesus, and about the Jesus. We met young Mr. T on the Jesus (not kidding). At night we went to a plaza where there was live music, cold beer, and funny people.

Cut to the next day. Tickby and I went to the Pão de Acúcar - 'Sugarloaf,' - essentially two giant boob-like mountain peaks busting out of Rio. You take a gondola up to the first extremely-high-up nipple, and from there take another gondola up and across to the even-higher boob.

My hands began to tremble in the first gondola. I started to feel extremely sleepy, and had this weird sensation that the areas beneath my eyes were hollowing out. This, I thought, would cause my eyelids to slam shut and the rest of me to crumple like a bathrobe falling off a hanger.

I turned away from the window- which is funny because gondolas are kind of just a bunch of windows- and concentrated like Tiger Woods on staring at the mid-sections of people in the middle of the gondola. I think my idea was to look for familiar vistas. Just seeing midsections made this look more like the normal subway-like crowd it was, and would further the premise that there was a floor in the gondola which was intact and this wasn't dangerous. It kind of worked.

I felt a little better when we got out onto the first boob. The first boob was big and had a museum on it and a sculpture garden, and looked almost like a normal city block. So you could forget that you were unnaturally high up and could die from sneezing too hard.

Also me and Tickby had a photo-shoot of me doing inappropriate things with the sculptures, which helped.

And lastly, when Tickby did go to the edges to take photos of Rio-from-on-high, it wasn't horrifying because if you looked over the edge you saw that there were other tiers right below. In other words, if you did fall over the edge you'd just land like six feet lower and feel dumb. Not die of fast-fall heart failure.

But then Tickby wanted to go to the other boob.

Mind over matter! said I. To myself. We got into the gondola and i did the stare-at-strangers'-crotches meditation again.

But still was overcome with the same limb-weakening symptoms as before. I also started feeling nauseous, and most interestingly: hysterical. I kept it all hidden inside because i'm a ninja, but I felt like my heart was breaking while a swarm of killer-Al-Qaeda bees were hating me in the face. I felt my pulse banging faster and louder until I was pretty sure I was going to die.

Predictably, I didn't die. Which was good. So I got off at the second boob. Which has no other tiers. And is just a slab of floor roosting atop a million-foot-high blade of grass.

The only thing there that separates you from becoming a blood-pancake is an old, rusty, wide open railing. Tickby ran off the gondola and right over to the edge to start snapping photos. I followed her on the WEIRDEST, most alien, rickety legs that used to be mine.

And here is probably the climax of this journey through irrational-fear-hell. As i wobbled toward Tickby --who had her back to me-- and tried to process the sight of my sister standing inches away from a million-mile drop, she LEANED FORWARD, over the railing, to take a picture. And I almost passed out.

It felt like the midsection of my body had been annihilated and my shoulders would now crash down to my hips. My hands were shaking so impossibly hard they looked like they were in disco lights.

I admitted to Tickby now that I was now learning I didn't like heights. We both laughed for a minute, at the weirdness of it all, and then I went to find a place to sit down. I came across a wonderful little pocket or non-death - an area between two buildings, with a bench! - and sat down to wait.

And CRIED for like five minutes.

Even as it happened, I was weirdly fascinated by all of this. I knew that there was nothing to cry about. I knew in my head that I wasn't sad, that it was a great day. I was in a beautiful place. I knew I wasn't in danger, that people ride these gondolas and visit these boob-mountains all day every day and none of them die from fear-fainting over the sides. I knew all of this, and yet could not stop the woozies, or the super-sads, and this was very interesting. I thought that as soon as I got home I would find and scour tons of reading material on irrational fears and learn all about whatever psychiatrists have discovered and concluded about them.

I of course didn't do this, because, you know, BORING, but I sure thought I would that day on the boob.

thanksgiving aboboros

Last week i made a pumpkin pie that was so delicious my clitoris fell off. For serious, it was like, 'Sorry Cill, I can't compete with this shit. Peace. (Thunk.)'

It was disturbingly delicious. Mark and I tasted it at the same moment and both froze. I didn't know what was happening. Mark started talking in one word sentences: 'This. Is. The. Best. BEST. Pie. I've. Ever. Had.' My eyes felt like they were exiting my head in slow motion.

Context: I'm not a very good baker. I don't do it often, and when I do the results are middling at best. I almost never eat desserts and sweets and stuff, so the art of making them has never been a priority.

But I found myself two days before Thanksgiving with a long list of cooking and baking tasks because my GERMAN fiance said he would love to celebrate the holiday, and I don't have a job so felt obligated to make it happen.

Something I learned about Brazilians: They don't make pies. Something else: They don't seem to want you to make pies either.

Not one of the zillion shops I looked in had the things you buy before Thanksgiving. NOT ONE OF THEM.

So I had to make pumpkin puree, which involved buying a pumpkin, severing it Jeffrey Dahmer style, piling it into the oven Albert Fish style, pulling it out and peeling off the skin Eddie Gein style, blending it in batches Richard Chase style, and then cramming it all into tupperware like Dahmer again.

I also had to make pie crust. Do not read blogs that tell you it is easy. It is not easy. Or maybe the actual assembling of the dough is kind of easy, but the shit makes a huge mess and every second of it is a shrill reminder of how unhealthy pastries are, fistfuls of butter and flour and sugar. The only ingredient I actually include in my diet was the ice water.

Another necessity: 'pumpkin pie spice.' You can of course just buy a jar of this shit in the USA. But not here. Because Brazil tries to thwart pie. This was easy enough, just cinnamon and nutmeg and clove and ground ginger, but this seemed like a lot of things to to buy and then only use tiny amounts of.

So anyway, all this felt like a trail of rabbit holes, but finally culminated in a pie in the oven. And I had to admit that it smelled like nirvana-paradise-heaven. It also looked beautiful, because the puree was a very vivid bright orange. When i buy a can of puree in the states it's a more browny orange. This was like stoner-vision.

Anyway, I was cooking tons of other things and they smelled nice too and I let the pie cool and set in the fridge and forgot about it until we were at the table and it was time for dessert.

And then as you know I tasted it and my clitoris quit its job and left town.

Furthermore, something you should know about Mark: whenever something tastes good he says he wants to put his dick in it. He's said it about cashew cream, butternut squash bisque, and vegetable risotto. And he of course said it about this pie.

And a thought occurred to me.

"Do it," I said. "Put your dick in it. There's nobody else here, it's just us. No one else would ever know."

He hesitated.

I emphasized, "This might never be possible again. Nothing is stopping you right now in this moment from putting your dick in a pie at the Thanksgiving table. Do it. Put your dick in it. Put your penis in the pie."

And he said: "I would actually rather like to eat it."

Not after serious consideration, but he chose eating this pie over a ONCE IN A LIFETIME OPPORTUNITY to put his dick in a holiday dessert. THAT'S how delicious it was.

We have been trying since to figure out what is going on here making this pie so special. We made two more pies, thinking they wouldn't be as good. The plan was to make one for our neighbors who are always giving us fresh veggies from their garden. But we made two, because we figured my beginner's luck would run out and it wouldn't be good and our neighbors would choke on its horrible taste and die and it would be our fault and no more free veggies.

But we tasted the control pie and it was every bit as terrifyingly delicious as the Thanksgiving one. Mark had it for breakfast, with lunch and before and after dinner.

And our stoic elderly german neighbor saw me on the sidewalk later and shouted, with a GIGUNDUS GRIN, 'The cake is fantastic good!'

And his wife returned the plate within two days and asked for the recipe. She too is now on the case for what is making it so confounding-ly good. And she's going to make it for her family at christmas.

We think it's a combo of awesome Brazilian produce, the American kinds of spices, and maybe even the condensed soy milk i found somewhere, which was surprisingly not disgusting.

This mystery may never be solved. and Mark will likely never put his ween in a pie. And I, clitless, return to the familiar, quiet peace of no desserts.

pippo

Before we leave Paraty I feel you should know about Pippo. Because it's going down in history as one of my favorite dinners of all time, because it's beautiful and you should go there, and because funny things happened there.

Of the dozens of restaurants we passed and admired, we chose this one because it started to rain just as we walked by its door. I love Italian food, and the dining room was elegant and cozy and way dryer than outside in the rain, so we immediately started drinking wine to celebrate all of this. I'm usually not a big fan of vino but Tickby and Mark were into it, so I joined.

Well, the wine was delicious. and the little bruschetta and eggplant-on-toasty appetizers they brought out were delicious. In keeping with my reputation as the cheapest drunk ever, I started giggling halfway down my first glass, and Tickby and I turned our attention to the following page in the menu:

I honestly don't know what we found so goddamn funny about it.

So the owner is a dude named Pippo with a soulful gaze and a huge pepper mill. So what?

But it's kind of a little bit funny, right? He's all 'Hello. I grind you pepper so hard you eat make love it.' he's all 'hello. you eat you noodlies i make cannoli. hello.'

I don't know. We were drunk. And in hindsight, maybe loud. Um, I hope not.

My dinner was so good. It was a pumpkin and sheep cheese ravioli with herbs and I don't remember the rest. But it was so so delicious. To celebrate this I drank more wine.

'Hello. I shake my pepper mill you face you love the ravioli. Hello.'

After a good and thorough laugh at the founder of the restaurant we were enjoying so much, guess who came out of the kitchen to eat his own dinner at a table right near ours?

'Hello.'

Doubly intense: we were, at that point, the only people left. So we had to chat with him and, you know, say hello.

I'll be honest, I didn't feel so bad about having spent a long time making fun of him a lot because I knew i was 100% sincere in gushing about how delicious his food was. Also I was 'drunk.'

PLUS we discovered we have a mutual friend! The manager of a hotel in Sicily near Pippo's hometown, where my best friend got married.

PLUS - and this is where it all gets fuzzy, so I'm going by Tickby and Mark's telling of it - but apparently I was babbling to Pippo about how our mutual friend made the most delicious limoncello I'd ever had and how I had learned in Sicily that I love limoncello.

So guess what pippo sent us.

pippo's fave limoncello

OK in more hindsight I'm embarrassed. He couldn't have been lovelier or awesomer, and I worry that he needed his limoncello to be better than Nunzio's because maybe Nunzio's pepper mill is bigger? But nonsense. Pippo's pepper mill was so huge!

Pippo asked us to send a photo of the three of us to our pal Nunzio in Sicily. So we did.

me, tickby and pippo

Um, this is the end of the Pippo story. Yeah sorry, I guess it's not that funny. But drink some limoncello and read it again and see what happens.

schoonie love

So you know by now that at night in Paraty you're supposed to get drunk and fall down and hang out with pirates. But I bet you're wondering what you're supposed to do during the day. Well, i'll tell you. You're supposed to go on a schooner tour.

our rival schooner

Right near the historical cobblestone area of town, there's a HUGE, maybe quarter-mile long pier with hundreds of yachts and schooners lined up, waiting to take you on a schooner tour. Some of them are pirate themed. There are small private ones and big crowdy ones. They leave around 10am and return at maybe 6pm. In between those times your job is to find a spot anywhere aboard, plunk down, order drinks and food, listen to the live music playing in the cabin, and ... well if you're Tickby, get a massive sunburn. (If you're a normal person you wear sunblock to this kind of excursion, Especially if you're as true a snowflake as Tickby.)

The schooners take you out to pristine beaches on tiny islands and sometimes just stop at places where the water is particularly blue and beautiful, or if there are cool fish or dolphins. Once they drop the anchor (heheheheh) people just start diving off the sides and swimming around. It's pretty wonderful. Tickby and mark swam, I didn't. Little motion sick. All the fresh air and gentle rocking did me a world of good though.

can you find tickby and mark?

One of my fave parts of this schoonie love was the lack of organization. I kept thinking that if we'd been in the states people would have had assigned seating and everyone would demand  the same comfort and service as their fellow schoon-tangs. This was a clusterfuckedy free-for-all in the best way. For example, on the front deck where we spent most of the day, people were sitting and lying everywhere - on the boat's equipment, under stuff, where ever they could dig out a space.

I went to the front tippy of the boat (is that the stern? what is that?) and climbed up onto the shelfy-storage thing where they were storing all the floaties and noodles. It couldn't have been cozier. Mark and Tickby joined me and we had a little boat-tippy party, really probably the best seats in the house. Cushiony with noodles, private, and with the best view.

Within minutes I saw a schooner-staffer heading towards us and was pretty certain she was about to ask us to get down from there because the tippy wasn't for seating.

In fact she was coming to take our drink order. (She must have thought we were a pretty big deal, sitting in the tippy, and wanted to get our drinks out first.)

paraty

I know what you're thinking, and I was thinking the exact same thing when i first read about the town of Paraty: the name is only one letter away from being 'party' and two letters away from 'pirate.' So it's bound to be great.

Accordingly, Paraty is a town that wants you to party, and is also a town that is all about pirates. We learned these things early on our walk around, by the plethora of shops selling nothing but cachaça, and the tour guide dressed as a stunningly hardcore pirate. If you've read my post about the meat-pirates of Fogo de Chão, you know that my keen eye can spot semi-pirates and ninja pirates from muito afar. But this was an uber-pirate. a pirate who wants you to know he's a pirate. He had a real parrot on his shoulder, full pirate robes and regalia, an undeniable pirate hat, an elaborate pirate moustache-and-goatee, and of course pirate boots. I think the tour he was giving was about how pirates used to hang out in Paraty.

(OK I just went against my principles and like, looked up real information: in the late 17th and early18th centuries, Paraty became a major port for the export of gold from Minais Gerais to Rio and on to Portugal. And pirates fucking love gold. so that's why there were pirates around. In fact, pirates changed the course of history in Paraty in a way. They became so ubiquitous and dangerous that people stopped moving gold by ships and built a whole road on land just to circumvent the pirates. Also, though it kills me to post irrelevant information, the word 'Paraty' is Tupi for 'river of fish.' But whatever. It looks like party-pirates.)

welcome to my home of cachaça

The other big Paraty thing: cachaça, which for those of you who don't know yet, is the KICKASS liquor used to make Brazil's signature cocktail, the caipirinha. Paraty has an annual cachaça festival, which is probably awesome in all the ways you might think a liquor festival in a pirate town would be.

(My Portuguese teacher tried pretty hard to also tell me about an international book festival that also takes place there, but I don't remember this much. Only cachaça and pirates made an impression.)

Another thing making an impression: the streets in the historical section. They are cobbled, and while I'm sure the cobble-job done was impressive in the 1500's, when paraty was first settled by whitey, it makes for a lot of stumblies nowadays, especially for people who have been drinking. Also hazardous: the multitude of adorable shops selling gifties and pirate paraphernalia and exquisite antiques and indigenous crafties. You can't look in windows and walk at the same time because the cobblies will trip you. Just saying. Cause like, someone else told me.
 





Lots of bars. Lots of little clothing boutiques. Restaurants of every level of fanciness, though most were fancy. People standing in the streets handing out flyers for happy hours and dance club parties. Oh! And torches in the streets, and very old street lamps.

Cachaça rules.