Sao Luis to Santarem... boats, drums, dance, 10,000 views of an Instagram reel, indigenous benches, language, and not getting locked in a toilet!

It's April 2025, I've been home for nearly three months, and I promised myself that I would spend six months reflecting on my travels before I did anything else. I've been connecting with my family - my nieces and great niece and my sister... I've been doing lots of cycling along the beautiful river path near where I live, I've been continuing with my Portuguese classes in the hope that current-Fiona will pick up what travelling-Fiona wanted for me, which was to go back to Brazil and Peru.... 

I've been sorting out my photos and videos - a long job, helped by setting up a Monday morning 'get that project done' club - my ADHD finds it hard to get down to doing specific things without other people around me.  I've got lots of 'themes' in my photos and have got three talks set up, two on zoom and one real (neither of which i've actually properly written yet, but the first 2 are still a couple of weeks off...). I've been invited to help with the publicity for the Lancaster launch of the book that Dom Phillips was writing when he was murdered in June 2022.  And I'm vaguely cooking up an ambitious global zoom cabaret bringing together some of the amazing musicians I played with while I was travelling, particularly in Canada and the US.  I only did my blog properly up to May last year, i carried on taking loads of photos and writing diary notes after that, but there was always more to do each day that didn't involve sitting down and writing.  I've just opened my blog and found this piece, which I wrote at the beginning of October last year.... so here it is! 

Dear anyone reading this

I have no idea who is reading it, but I really want to do some writing and reflecting about my trip in South America.  I put my last blog out in August, two months ago.... it was about things that happened in May, travelling Santarem to Manaus, so I'm quite behind, which illustrates the fact that it's fallen off my priorities a bit. 

But now I'm in Canada, Montreal to be precise. I'd planned to spend a month here then go on to Nova Scotia (which is very beautiful and special this time of year) but then someone I was staying with needed a cat sitter for 2 weeks in october, and someone else was going away for the other two weeks in October, so now I have the next three and a half weeks in this beautiful city doing house sitting and then cat sitting, ie living in two beautiful and well-situated apartments on my own completely undisturbed.  And I hope to allocate an hour a day writing and reflecting.   This might go wrong... there's a lot of music going on, you could go to sessions of Klezmer/Quebecois/Irish music most days - and twice on Sundays! Which indeed I pretty much do.   I'm about to join the YMCA gym that has lane swimming every day and pilates three times a week, and there's Yom Kippur, a two day trip to Toronto to see my osteopath and go to a Jewish storytelling event, a 4 day Montreal Couchsurfers crash event, I have to get my accounts done this month, and I'm doing a talk about Lancaster Cohousing - in French - next week.    BUT... I've found someone who understands the concept of 'body doubling', ie showing up in the same cafe and doing her own work while I do mine, so we're not totally alone.... so hopefully I'll be able to get this writing done. 

In the meantime, an overview... 

this is the whole map of my trip so far!   

The long straight lines represent... on the right a ship Tenerife to Salvador; on the left a plane (sadly) from Sao Luis to San Diego; and at the top a four day train between Edmonton and Toronto.  

Here's a bit more detail of the South America leg: 

and here's a bit more detail of the north america leg (July to present, trains and buses up the west coast of California and across Canada from Vancouver to Montreal

I was looking for a way to track the distances and found this app Track My Tour which tracks the places on a map (it doesn't do the distances but the map is pretty nifty). You can see more detail here . 

One thing that's been amazing on this trip, is that I managed to get to the indigenous village in Peruvian Amazonia that I first visited in 1984 with Pete, who'd died in 2021. It was one of the reasons why I came, to try and get back there 40 years on, but it seemed very unlikely that it would happen when I set off.... noone I knew could take me, Pete's former student was going to be away, and you can't just sort of turn up.... I decided to go to the general area, just so that I could kind of send thought waves, and see if there was someone who could at least send a message to the village.   I also managed to look up a friend's long lost sister while I was in Puerto Maldonado, and had a couple of beautiful animal-spotting river trips with our host.   But JUST before I was about to spend $200 on a trip to an indigenous village I didn't really want to go to, I got an email from Pete's former student saying that he'd found someone who could take me to the village.... and four days later I found myself in a cafe in Atalaya being greeted as 'comadre' by a wonderful woman who I'd thought about many times since I last saw her 16 years earlier.  We went the next day in the canoe to the village (I was travelling with my Polish friend Agniezska) and it was really moving to be there...  Things have changed somewhat - there's a toilet! they have internet!  (Starlink is a mixed blessing). I'm not going to post lots of photos from there; but now I hear regularly from some of Pete's godchildren on whatsapp and facebook, and I hope to go back ....

[here's a bit I wrote earlier... it's all a bit disjointed I'm afraid, but i'm sure loyal readers can make sense of it]

 There's so much more I did in Manaus before going on to Tefe and then Peru via Colombia.....

including...

a couple of fascinating museums including the excellent rubber museum (weirdly, built on a site which was originally a film set!);  a three day 'jungle experience tour' (that just left me depressed, tbh, but  I have also had a perfect rainforest experience later on in Peru and a much better community led ecotourism experience out of Tefe too...);  attending an international online conference broadcast from Yale in honour of Dom and Bruno, at the house of Nelly Marubo, where we both knew several of the participants.... 

Then we have ...the amazing Mamiraua Sustainable Development Institute in Tefe to which I was lucky enough to be invited by a former Lancaster resident(!)... three weeks in Peru, which was fantastic APART FROM the effect that the Spanish had on my fledgling Portuguese ..... and back to Sao Luis for a mesmerising Sao Joao festival that utterly lived up to its hype of being the best Sao Joao in Brazil. I'm now in Canada and although I'm having new incredible visual experiences daily here, I'm utterly enjoying being absorbed in my photos and diaries and memories of my Brazil trip.  I am hoping to get quite a bit of time to write over the next 16 days on the 4,700 km bus and train journey from Vancouver to Montreal.... (we're stopping off in Kamloops, Canmore, Edmonton and Toronto)....[spoiler, I DIDN'T ....!!!]    I've also just signed up for daily Portuguese language conversation classes again, the same ones I did before I left the UK (highly recommended for anyone with basic Portuguese, the link is here...)


Over and out for now! 
 

love, Fiona