dogs, beaches , forests, boats and buses. Santarem.... and Alter do Chao (you'll have to wait for Altamira, Manaus, Tefe, Leticia, and... Peru!)
For a person who doesn’t make any plans day to day, my days are absolutely full, and up to today the only time I've had properly as Rest Times are the 2 day or 4 day boat trips or the overnight buses.... Today I am in Yurimaguas in Peru, somewhere between Iquitos and Lima.
I arrived on a boat this morning at 10 am and the bus to Lima goes at 4 am tomorrow morning, so I am having an enforced rest day - and it's wonderful! Finally having time to add the pix to this blog that I wrote about a week ago, sat around scrolling through my phone, went on a tiny walk round the town which, by the way, had more icrecream shops in the course of a ten minute walk than I'd ever seen before... it wasn't my icrecream day but I felt it would be rude not to try one. And I also bought some very sweet necklaces (the blue beads will go perfectly with my blue beach dress when I'm dressing it up, and the others are just very lovely...)
In most of the towns I’ve been in, there’s something to do in the time when I’m not meeting someone... a museum, an art gallery....a swimming pool! And of course I haven’t given up my daily “English person’s leisure activities” any time I have internet, which are made up of doing the ‘daily code word’, ‘wordle’, and the NYT ‘connections’, and my daily fix of keeping up with The Archers on the BBC and The Nursery Nurse on Facebook! (I think the most excitement recently on the Archers for me was - forget the car crash - what were they doing letting Joy call a dance at the Grey Gables barn dance held at Brookfield.... what's all that about!?)
Apart from that I’m managing a Hannah Frank art project in Glasgow and a Hannah Frank art project in Brazil (four students and former students are working on a new permanent gallery in honour of my artist’s aunt, in the care home where she and my uncle spent their last years; and nine of my aunt’s signed prints which have been touring in Brazil since December have just gone up in the prestigious Hansen Bahia Foundation gallery in Cachoeira, Bahia, along with ten engravings by Brazilian artist Artur Soar.
(Sharp eyed readers with good memories will remember that I visited this gallery in December... yep, I had a tentative chat with the curators then, and Artur's mum Maiza followed it up with a meeting, and here we are!!!)
Oh, would YOU like to help this
all happen AND have some beautiful art work?
Special offer till 14 June (for readers in the UK), three Hannah Frank signed prints for £100 plus p&p:
pick three of the 8 signed prints from the webshop www.hannahfrank.org.uk and email me on Fiona@hannahfrank.org.uk with your choice of prints and your address, and a
fourth choice for if one of your options is out of stock – and I’ll send you
info about bank transfer or paypal payment.)
Anyway, back
to the matter in hand... the story from Santarem to Tabatinga!
Although I'm finishing this in Yurimaguas, I began to write it on ANOTHER fast boat heading to Tabatinga, a week after the last edition which was ALSO finished up while I was on that very same fast
boat to Tabatinga a week earlier. What’s that all
about? It boils down to the fact
that I am utterly hooked on Brazil, and when I was offered the opportunity to
go BACK downriver to meet a friend of a friend at the Mamaraua Institute for Sustainable Development
in Tefe, halfway back to Manaus, where they also support two community owned tourist projects, I just went back there – despite being very
short of visa days.... and despite the boat fare....
Anyway back to Santarem
The boat from Belem to Santarem was beautiful, relaxing and such a nice way to pass three days, with my lovely friend Emilie for company.
On advice of Claire who’d done this sort of
journey with her family, I’d bought some playing cards, and played quite a lot
with some lovely new friends that Emilie had found.... Lots of photos of
sunsets and a few sunrises if I got out of bed soon enough... and photos of some
of the ports we landed in with lots of bustling loading and unloading, lots of
people coming aboard to sell food on the boats. One group had come in a motorised canoe;
three young boys came on board after our boat had set off; they came up to the top deck where we were, to
sell fruit... and then jumped off the boat into the sea, and swam to their
canoe...the jump was a bit higher than a high dive – and looked utterly
terrifying but also quite exciting!
We arrived in Santarem and I was met by Artemezia, friend of a Lancaster Brazilian friend Juliana. Juliana had said she’d agreed to show me round, but when I contacted her she said I could stay with her! So we went back to hers, met her kids and her 15 little dogs (!) and went straight out to Alter do Chao, which is 20 km away and is the hangout place of choice for everyone who’s in Santarem. Tom Phillips from the Guardian (who spoke at our conference in 22) said it was the best beach in brazil’ ... You have to get a boat out to the best beach bit... which was slightly marred by me falling INTO the boat and Artemizia falling OUT OF the boat as a direct result of that... and three men having to dive in to find her car keys (they did). No photos of that, it was all a bit too embarrassing, but below is the rather strange way we were sitting in chairs having our drinks!, and one of me and Artemizia when we'd recovered a bit and had a swim.
I then booked to go on a tour of the FLONA, the Tapajos National Forest, the next day from Alter do Chao, with Emilie who was staying in a local hostel. I went to stay with her for the night as it was a 9 am start for the tour.... but I’d had an icecream from a street trader in the afternoon. And, for only the second time in Brazil this time, that street food ‘got’ me – I was up all night , and had to spend the whole morning sat on the sofa in the hostel lounge dropping in and out of the loo. It was also tipping it down, so we postponed the trip for later in the week. *
Eventually I
was well enough to go home and Artemizia came for me...
I took it easy the next day until the evening, when I was just about well enough to go out to meet the Santarem Sephardi Jewish Community for their Passover Supper. They were lovely and friendly and just like the Salvador and Recife community, it felt like being among family again. It’s so strange that you travel 5000 miles and still find people with a seder plate and all the same things on it at the same time of year.
At the end of the night they presented me with a special Passover Haggadah that had been made for their community: I’m normally trying to refuse books because of the weight and bulk but this one is *very* beautiful.
The amazing Brazilian health service
We spent Tuesday getting my bites checked out at the local health centre – it turns out I don’t have Leichmaniasis as my hostess thought i might, but the service – which was completely free – was amazing. We arrived.... we saw the receptionist... she pointed out a specialist, we went to see her, she took us into her clinic room, she took my details, examined my bites, took samples, and said she’d whatsapp the result to Artemizia later that day... and if it was Leichmaniasis I could have the first of two injections to sort it out starting the very next day. As it was negative, I stayed in Alter do Chao and the next day I was able to go on
The FLONA TOUR
This ended up being a 12 km trek as far as an enormous and wonderful Sumauma tree, a guide telling us all about the medicinal uses of the trees on the path, a fantastic late lunch of fish and vegetables, and a sunset beach stop on the way home......
And then Artimizia came for me and brought me back to Santarem to catch the the late bus to ALTAMIRA.... I’d been invited there by Jon Watts the Guardian journalist, way back when he spoke at our conference in honour of Dom and Bruno back in 2022 and I’d told him I was going to be travelling to Brazil in 2024! So I took him up on it and it was a really rich and worthwhile trip, much more about politics than about tourism and beaches... To prepare for the trip I'd reread the latest book by Brazilian journalist (and Jon's wife) Eliane Brum: the amazing, hard hitting, and HIGHLY recommended Banzeiro Okoto: The Amazon at the Centre of the World and I'll spend time reflecting on this visit (and the book) in my next blog.
So, in my next instalments we'll have Altamira, back to Santarem, the boat trip to Manaus, Tefe, Tabatinga, Leticia, Iquitos, and up to Yurimaguas where I am now, about to get a bus tomorrow morning to Lima and then another one to Cusco.....
*Post Script. Emilie went on the tour on the Tuesday but I couldn't go till the Wednesday of that week. It was on that Tuesday tour that she seems to have met the new love of her life: they've been spending lots of time together all over Brazil, he had to go home but is coming back soon to spend a few more weeks with her.... so, it's an ill wind that blows nobody any good! If I hadn't had that icecream, Emilie and I would have gone on the FLONA tour on the Monday, and the two lovebirds would never have met :-)
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