Our Journal

28 September

Alto do Chao notes

Preparations for the festival got more intense the last few days.  Stalls sprouted up everywhere and we could no longer walk down the middle of streets because of cars.  Buses of school kids arrived to practice dances in a stadium that had been constructed in a week’s time.  The festival is set up around the myth of a dolphin that swims to shore, gets out and walks around and dresses up as a man.  He woo’s a beautiful girl and then takes her back to the river.  There are two competing groups, the pink dolphins and the grey dolphins.  It boils down to a giant dance off that lasts four nights. 

The first night we entered the stadium to find one side in synchronized hysterics while the other side sits silently, like a sporting event they only support their team.  In front of the stands a dance leader stands on a platform modeling movements for the crowd moving in unison like a giant aerobics class following with religious fervor.  Props of hats, fish, flowers, and whatnot were quickly passed out for certain movements.  We got up in the stands with a couple of guys we had met before and tried to follow along.  It was a workout.  The history of the region was portrayed through dance, which, going by visual representation alone, since I couldn’t understand what the guy was screaming non-stop over the mic, looked like the Portuguese arrived, killed the men, stole all the women (wild applause), and made lots of babies.  A bunch of princesses danced in, and then some dolphins stole some more women.  We may have missed something.  The second group started (the grey dolphins) and the other side of the stands got up and started their aerobics workout.  We moved to the back, neutral part of the stadium, since the side we had been on sat down and refused to enjoy the enemy’s performance.  We were standing right where all the dances run on and off and we got separated in the mayhem.   Giant Indian figures, dinosaurs, and dragons were being pushed on and off.  It took about 20 men to push each one so I decided to join in the pushing and ran out on stage with them.  Then I look over and saw Matt doing the same as he screamed, “This is my third time out!”   When the dancing ended bands started playing and dancing continued until dawn.

The second night we were waiting for things to get started outside the stadium when the rain began, scattering the crowds like a car bomb in Bogota.  We took shelter around some drink stands and huddled in with everyone else.  It was impossible not getting wet but the caiparinhas (tons of lime, sugar, and cane liquor) helped with the cold.  The rain let up for a while so we walked in and stood in the front of the stadium this time.  The rains started again but the show went on anyway.  More two story tall figures with moving arms, heads, and eyes where pushed out, dancers appeared out of giant flowers, dolphins danced with princesses, and the crowd continued their synchronized aerobics.  If you have seen the Sambodrome in Rio on TV, this was a smaller version but the outfits just as excessively ornate.  The rain poured, lightning blended in with fireworks, but everyone danced through the night completely soaked.

By day three we were beat.  We walked to the beach midday to swim a bit and found another concert going on.  Guys were passed in the sand while people danced around them.  We ran into some people we had met the night before and danced with them for a while.  A small mosh pit started in front of us.  A guy insisted I dance with his friend, offered to hold my beer, and then drank it while we danced.  The show ended right at sunset and we walked out to the peninsula to watch.  That night we walked over to the stadium to eat at a burger stand outside, but with the understanding that two nights until dawn was enough.  Silly us.  More concerts started and we wandered in.  The stadium was in shambles with debris from the presentations everywhere.  I grabbed a giant flag and started running 360’s around the dance area.  Forro dancing continued until the wee hours again, this time the strange mix of Zydeco and Samba beats started to make sense.

Mid-30’s is not mid-20’s and by day four, we slept until afternoon missing some bands that played near our pousada.  We walked over to the stadium in search of food.  We sat there eating looking around at the vendors setting up for another night.  We assumed they were going through the motions with wishful thinking.  Within about 30 minutes the crowds returned and the music started up again and somehow stamina returned.  Another night of forro dancing.  By now the steps were starting to make sense, and I danced with as many different people as I could.  I walked two sisters home that I had seen throughout the festival.  One of them said it was going to rain.  I laughed seeing stars overhead.  Five minutes later I heard what sounded like a freight train approaching before we got another drenching.

Day five found us in a stupor and we sat in front of our pousada with a strange feeling of accomplishment, even though all we had done was abandon any attempt at accomplishing anything for a few days.  Everyone had their radios blaring.  All of a sudden hoops and hollers started.  People poured out of their homes and a makeshift parade began, mostly women and children, running through the streets of town chanting “Tukuxi, Tukuxi”.  The grey dolphins had won and another party started on the street corner.  The dolphin appeared for a while nudging people for cachaca.  The festival was now officially over.

In Alto do Chao we ran into some of the same characters we had met on the boat from Manaus to Santarem.  Flavia, a tiny woman who had lived in Manaus for two years but is from a smaller town on the Amazon, kept mentioning that she was a big city girl, and she smoked cigarettes to prove it.  On the boat she had noticed that I had a compass on my watch and asked which way north was, because one’s head should always point north while asleep.  She talked to anyone next to her.  She would put jewelry salesmen’s wares in her lap and peer over everything while babbling on, not buying anything, but would put a chocolate in their hand as thanks.  On the beach we saw her again laying in the sand with a plastic bag over her head, so she wouldn’t get diarrhea.  I had breakfast with her one morning and she explained something about her being a rare spiritual entity that had been reincarnated many times.  She has a fixation on Germany and believes all Germans are this spiritual entity as well.  She has some relationship with a 50 year old German named Dirk (she pronounced “Jerk”) and is trying to decide if she should move to Germany to live with him.  The idleness of the small town became too much for her.  She looked depressed after a few days and took the boat back to Manaus.  She kept saying, “I need the big city, internet cafes, dicotequas…” 

We met Allessandro the Italian photographer on the boat as well.  His mind was constantly focused on capturing his next image, the camera a mere extension of his hand.  He had come to Sao Paulo for his photography exhibition of Italian wine and vineyards, then flew to Manaus to photograph a ceremony of people taking the ayahuasca hallucinogenic common all over the Amazon.  His photos from the Amazon should be posted on his website later this month.

Wendell found us in the middle of a concert at the festival.  He introduced us to his girlfriend and her five sisters.  A few days later in Santerem we visited their house.  Poor dad, six daughters.  The oldest two help support the family by making clothes, in fact they had made all the sisters’ clothes.  They decided to take us downtown which required them all dressing up like we were going to a disco.  It was really important for us to see the only escalator in town, which they weren’t too comfortable getting on.  In the music section of the store I put some headphones on and as a joke started talking really loud.  One of them made sure to tell me, “Chris, you could hear the music, but nobody else could.”  They bombarded us with questions which seemed so incredibly naïve, but we soon realized there was nothing unintelligent about them, they just have no experience outside of Santarem. 

Wendell stayed out in Alto do Chao for the week.  One night on the plaza at one of the shops I picked up a guitar and started playing around.  Wendell sat and watched and then I handed it over to him.  It turned out, he’s a musician with a band and a cd in the works.  He played a whole range Brazilian music and then tried to get me to sing along with a Back Street Boys song.  All their richness of local music and yet they still love Brittney Spears crap.  We get asked to sing, a lot, and they get so confused when we say we don’t know any songs.  They have libraries of lyrics memorized.  Wendell and a couple of his friends came to get us to go fishing one night.  No poles, just line, hook, and some bread.  They caught several minnows that were later used for real bait, but the interest in fishing died down as some girls showed up.  We all went back to their house for caiperinhas.  Wendell got really excited about one of the girls (his girlfriend was back in Santarem) and rode his bike back to his house to shower and put on nice clothes.  When he showed up he immediately closed in.  The cell phone was soon out, which in other species is the equivalent of the male ruffling its feathers to attract a mate, and she was quick to send him a text message that read, “A woman’s heart is like a circus, there’s always room for one more clown.”  He was sad the rest of the night, rejected through the medium of the modern day black book. 

The next night the boys fished again, this time with a net, and pulled out several piranhas.  That’s right, piranhas, right out of the waters we had been swimming every day.  Turns out there are several hazards like a ray with a painful barb, a poisonous fish that people step on, alligators, swimming snakes, and some kind of skin epidemic people have been getting from the sand.  But people are swimming the river every day and it turns out there are many kinds of piranhas most of which aren’t aggressive unless they are in a school and trapped in waters without enough food.  One night we went for a night swim along the shore into the black.  Even if I had never seen Jaws or Anaconda, it would have still scared the crap out of me.  Walking back along the beach I had plenty of reminders that even though it looks like any other white sand beach, this is fresh water – there were frogs everywhere.  They croak loud choruses at different pitches moving like waves of crescendos though town.  As we got closer to town a pod of black dolphins swam right where we had just been.

Back at Wendell’s place later, we found him in his hammock reading the Bible looking sad.  His grandfather had died the night before and he had just heard.  We talked about spirituality and God for a while but it didn’t take long for him to talk himself out of his somber mood.  Soon, music was playing and we were thawing out the frozen piranha so we cold get a look at its teeth.  A couple of days later we heard he had the skin epidemic from the sand and his girlfriend has been staying with him until he gets better.  Interesting guy Wendell.  He’s pure indigenous, descendent from grandparents that grew up in Alto do Chao.  He’s been to Brasilia to work for a few years but came back to Santarem.  In an attempt to explain the situation with the rainforest he got frustrated and said, “I wish an international force would come and take this part of Brazil away from us and manage it, my country is going to mess it up.”  There’s a giant project to start paving the Transamazonica highways.  BR-163, which connects to Santerem, is one of the first to be paved which will then sprout more veins into the forest.

Sitting with Wendell in the plaza one night a kid walks by he had met that day on the bus.  He calls him over to sit.  This guy is 19, finished with his first degree in university, getting ready to start a second, and is taking some time off…  traveling around the Amazon by himself.  He had just come from a self sufficient communal work farm outside of Manaus where they manufacture the hallucinogenic ayahuasca.  He looked all skin and bones and had deep set eyes that seemed to glare straight into you.  He wandered off but soon after Wendell went to look for him to give him a place to sleep for the night.

There is a man of two chairs that has a bread shop right next to our pousada.  One chair on each side of the street so he can have shade all day long.  Clearly a man of routine and life adjusted at a quality level just right.  Every night he’s out sitting with the family listening to old classic Brazilian music that reminds me of early American jazz.  Matt and I have had a lot of conversations about this man and have wondered if anything happens in his week unpredictable.  Probably not.  We ventured in one afternoon and got two ham sandwiches from his wife.  He showed up a little later and looked a little surprised (I think one of us had taken his chair), but he meandered over and said, “Quase quente…”, almost hot.  As we chewed our sandwiches, those words just hung out there and settled in because, really, there wasn’t much else to say.

Two of the first people we met in Alto do Chao, Maria and Rafael run a tourist agency community center.  They walked us all over town looking for a place to stay but no one had vacancies, which was pretty absurd considering the festival was a week and a half away and there weren’t any tourists in sight.  We found a place we have labeled “The Cave” because of its little cabin-like buildings, ours with air conditioning lets no light in, a dangerous combination.  Rafael studied in France for two years, evident by his making fun of us Americans for eating our sandwiches and hamburgers.  He’s also the only English speaker in town and people were quick to run get him when we showed up.  His girlfriend, Maria, is incredibly helpful and loves the presence of foreigners.

Almost every night we have wandered over to the plaza to eat at a burger stand.  We don’t really have control and it’s almost becoming a compulsion.  The owner/cook is something of a master.  His grill always scraped clean, his meats cooked in neat spatial arrangements probably abiding by the rules of Feng Chei.  On weekends, when we aren’t the only customers, he wears a sanitary mask.  The menu is two pages but it basically comes down to the Big Frango, a double chicken burger with cheese, bacon, ham, a hot dog, egg, and crushed up potato chip things.  If you find yourself in Alto do Chao you have to try this thing.  You’ll also be quick to notice the presence of a tree nymph working there, or at least that’s what we assume she is given her ability to glide effortlessly around and her preference to smiling over talking.  She’s always a little nervous around us, maybe because she associates foreigners with tree cutting, her mortal threat since, as we all know, a nymph’s life is bound to that of her tree.

The Rock and Roll Legend.  This is difficult to explain because mostly he exists in our imagination.  We were sitting in front of our pousada on the first day of the festival and a skinny guy with purplish-red business in the front party in the back hair walked up with a boy to use the pay phone.  We, in Cockney English, started imitating what he thought the guy was saying, “I’m a goddamn rock and roll legend, I’ve played Wembley, and I’ve been booked in some village in the middle of the Amazon where they say ‘hockey hole’ for rock and roll, get my agent on the phone goddamnit… what, no you can’t put me on hold, I’m a *&^% rock and roll…- damn, she did it again.”  Later this built up into phone calls he would make to other rock and roll greats, “Yea Mick, it’s me mate, while you’re recycling the same crap for the same docile fans I’m out here in the jungle using my guitar as a weapon of change, I’m a &%$# rock and roll pioneer!”  This joke stayed with us throughout the festival and on the last night a band was warming up we imagined to be him.  They played forro all night but toward the end of the show they varied it up with a couple of rock songs.  I had just finished dancing with a girl I think was an elf and Matt came running over dancing in a frenzy screaming, “I’m a *&^% rock and roll…”  And later, “No, we’re not playing any more of your originals, they suck, let’s try The Wall by Pink Floyd, I’m a…”

The last night of the festival we met Elder.  Elder has been the dancing dolphin in the festival for the last five years.  But, the last night there were no dance performances, just concerts, and he came dressed in pink.  All pink.  Pink shirt, pink pants, pink belt, pink hat, pink socks, pink shoes, pink Kitty backpack, pink Kitty wallet, pink cell phone.  He introduced us to BigMac, or so I named him.  He’s supposedly one of the richer guys in Santarem and he had some critical comment of us saying we think we are the BigMac.  He kept telling us about his sky diving feats and I was looking at this enormous guy thinking, “Does he use a normal parachute?”  BigMac sat down and ate a big burger with us and then walked away leaving us to pay.  That’s ok, for everyone one Brazilian that treats us poorly, there are 10 behind as nice as can be.

Two nights ago there was a political rally in Alto do Chao, which is really a free concert and fireworks with a politician screaming on the mic for a while.  A giant portable stage pulled up next to the river.  The music was Brega, romantic music with dance percussion and a Dire Straits sounding guitar.  The singer looked and dressed like David Lee Roth complete with giant belly.  He was so disinterested in performing that he would stop singing mid-song to sign autographs, flirt with girls in the crowd, or throw out free t-shirts, posters, and panties.  Maria, the politician favored to win this Sunday, came out and screamed for a bit.  She seems to have perfected circular breathing because it all flowed out without pause.  A mob circled the mobile stage until the lead singer left and then, we timed it, 60 seconds later there was not a sole on the street.  There are strict rules for motion and activity in Alto do Chao and we are constantly amazed at how it springs from deserted pueblo to a bustle of activity.

Yesterday I drove into big city Santarem to send some emails.  I ran into some familiar faces from the festival and they invited me to another free concert, Maria again.  Maria is from the same party as Lula, the president, and receives a lot of funding.  She’s everywhere.  Cars with giant speakers tied to the top blare out songs praising her all over the city.  Evidently, one must sing their way into the Brazilian mind.  Another competitor, Alexander, had a small free concert which attracted about one tenth of the size of Maria’s crowd.  But he did announce, “I want to give all the women out there my number and if you ever have a problem, just call me.”  This time several bands played, a bossonova group, some romantic ballads, and then Maria took the stage.  She was sounding hoarse by now but she screamed out another tirade.  Fireworks were periodically lit off like giant exclamation points.  I was standing up on some stairs in the back of the plaza and hadn’t seen the launch pad 20 yards away.  I was standing there looking straight up at the explosions thinking, “What could possibly go wrong here?”  Right at the completion of that thought there was a huge explosion and lights all over the place.  One of the boxes of missiles had exploded on the ground.  Mass confusion erupted and it took a while to gather everyone from the group.  Everyone’s hands were shaking and some had been hit by projectiles but no one was hurt, except a tree whose branches had ignited.  Everyone pointed and chanted “fire” as it began to spread up the tree.  Maria finally lost steam.  The fire department showed up and then everyone was running around again trying not to get wet.  A reggae band from Sao Paola started playing and everyone started dancing like nothing had happened.  They played a Led Zeppelin cover and I told one guy from our group this.  He just smiled back having no idea what I was talking about.

I just ran into a German guy who put on this six day stamina run through the jungle.  They had asked us if we would volunteer and it sounded good as they took a boat further up the river and stayed for a week, but we were in no mood after the festival and just wanted to get back into pueblo pace in Alto do Shire.  It looks like we’ll teach free English classes at a community center this week and then we’ll try to catch a barge to Belem.

Thanks for all the responses, we are both enjoying hearing from everyone.

 um abracao, Chris

p.s.  Is seems Yahoo is no longer allowing mass emails like I had been doing, so until I figure out another way there won't by any notices of updates via email.

contact us:  chris@isabm.com   matt@isabm.com