SALVADOR - 29 May
I can see why Salvador was so highly recommended by the people I´ve talked to. In hindsight, it would have made more sense to spend the majority of my time here instead of Rio. Salvador also has a beach coastline (although comparitively rocky), but it also has a notable cultural scene inland around the Pelourinho area.
I´ve given hostels a second try. This time, luckily, no one has kept me awake with their snoring, and hopefully I´ve returned the favour. The hostel is surrounded by a network of lanes filled with brightly coloured shops. It´s a tourist-oriented little niche in the town, centered around the Afro-Brasilian museum, cafes and bars. ´
There´s always a buzz in the streets. From the touts who, oddly enough, seem to get friendlier each time I decline to give them money. The plan is apparently to wear me down over time. One kid followed me across the square, having decided that "we´re brothers, no?" I told him I was pretty sure we had different mothers. Another girl, tried agressively to tie some kind of ribbon around my wrist. I don´t know why, and I don´t want to know why -- it´s times like that when you wish you could blend in a little better.
Still, it´s worth it, if only to be sitting in an outdoor cafe and to have an impromtu drum-band start a concert in the street.
I should probably spend a bit longer here. A concert last night has just begun to show me what the nightlife has to offer. Unfortunately, the urge to keep moving is a little stronger, as I´m anxious to take a boat-ride on the Amazon.
And so, I look forward to Belem, but not necessarily the 36-hour bus ride that will get me there.

SALVADOR - 25 May
I´ve been fairly disappointed with the cities in Brazil until now. Off of the beach, urban Rio is not particularly impressive. Very few remnants of colonial architecture exist, what does is cracking, crumbling and graffiti´d. Belo Horizonte had even less to offer. Filled with uninspired blocks of concrete, you would hardly be inspired by the city´s beauty, with a few exceptions around the city hall.
The only saving grace was it´s park. A wonderful mix of evergreen, palm and twisted trees of the jungle variety, it was very pleasant as I was killing time until I had to catch my bus to Salvador. Unfortunately it wasn´t so pleasant that I wanted to stay there for the 7 hours I had to wait. It´s fairly hard to wander about for 7 hours in Belo Horizonte. There is not even the option of sitting in a mall, as mega-malls don´t really exist here. The streets are open markets for cheap goods.
So, I was happy to be back on the bus even though I was facing a 23 hour ride to Salvador. At the time, though, I was blissfully ignorant. I didn´t know how to ask when the bus would arrive, so I just waited.
In the middle of the night, I awoke and saw the most beautiful night sky I´d seen in a long time -- possibly ever. It looked like something from the planetarium, complete with milky way nebula stretching across the sky. It was something you could only see from our vantage point in the mountains with no city lights nearby.
The rest of the trip varied between nice hilly landscapes and rainy fog. It was raining when we arrived in Salvador, but I didn´t mind. Salvador was seemed to be what I was looking for in a Brazillian city. I knew it would be because they dropped us in front of a mega-mall.

RIO - 15 May
I bought a bodyboard and tried bodysurfing. I ran out into the waves looking like a pro. After gracefully sliding over a few waves, I noticed that the next one appeared to be curling over my head. As I was taken under, the bodyboard was pulled from my arms, but thanks to the wrist-cord it was returned to my groin. After similar cases of my having the sand pummelled out of me. Eventually, I started to think, "maybe there's a skill to this..."

RIO - 12 May
Feliz Dia Das Maes
Last Sunday I sat out in the sun and became Lobster-boy. This Sunday I'm peeling so badly, I can't take off my shirt. Still, there's something strangely satisfying about peeling off a huge swath of skin in the privacy of your own own. In public, it's less acceptable.

RIO - 09 May
Does it still count as a scam, if you know you're being taken?

"Hey, my man,"said Slick, a guy with dreadlocks and a red tank top. I tried to wave him off in my usual way, but he said "no -- I just want to talk. This is where all the English-speaking people come to talk."

I saw that he didn't have anything to sell, so I was willing to indulge him. Besides I was in no hurry to get anywhere. He pointed out that I was in the middle of an triangle marked by the club "Help"a restaurant called "Maia Pataca"and the beach. He invited me to come down to the beach and "meet the pretty girls."

Ok, so now I'm thinking he's a pimp. "Nah -- I gotta go."
"Go do what?"he said, "you walk, walk and keep going but where are you going? No where." There was a certain truth to his argument. I figured out on the beach I could still keep from getting pulled into trouble. He goes and talks to a group of people and then introduces me to Maria. We sit down on beach chairs, that Slick happily points out and then he runs and brings me a beer.

Maria and I talk for a bit. She asks me where I'm from, where I'm staying, etc. When I've met people under shady circumstances I always mentally preface their questions with "presuming I have some friends who could beat and rob you, would you tell me..." and then I decide if I should give an honest answer. But as I asked more questions, I became convinced that she wasn't out to scam me. Maria talked a lot. She also travelled a lot, to Paris and Italy. She'd be headed to London in a few weeks. "So, what do you do?"I asked. She had wanted to go to the US, but she'd been waiting 3 weeks for her visa. "What is it you said you did again?"

As it turns out, she was a dancer at Help club. She explained this and then frowned and added "But I don't strip the clothes!" I told her that I didn't think she would, to which she replied, "No, but you have to say this, because men's minds is... dark. You tell them you are a dancer and they smile and they think you strip the clothes, so I tell them 'I dance but I don't strip the clothes', so now you know!"

In the meantime, Slick had brought me another beer and then a Capirinha. When it was time to go, he was back, telling me that I owed R$65. "What?"I said standing up, "Do you think I'm a stupid tourist or something?" Of course, I am a stupid tourist, but this was the capirinha speaking. I had him price out the drinks, correctly thinking that he wouldn't be able to do the math fast enough to come up with that rediculous fee. We arrived at $31 reais (which is still too much.) He looked frustrated, and then said "and the chairs. You sit on the chairs -- R$65."

"Look, you're real Slick,"I said, maybe with an additional expletive in there somewhere, "from now on when I see you I'm calling you 'Slick'." He laughed at this, and then changed his tact. "Look, you come out here and you talk to the beautiful girls right? Now, you get angry..."

Slick wasn't a big guy, but my rational mind was beginning to tell me that he knew the lay of the land, so I probably didn't want to start trouble. So I settled on paying R$50, and went home feeling like I sucker. That was meant to be my money for groceries.

RIO - 03 May
Cats and ducks. Upon entering the Parque Julio Furtado, downtown Rio's central park, that's exactly what I found at the gate. Cats and ducks. They were all lounging around on the rocks, and strangely, it was almost hard to distinguish them from each other. They both came in a similar variety of white, black, and orange-brown. As I went further in I saw another creature. It's interesting where people draw the line between fauna and pest-problem. This animal was a rodent. It was bigger than the cats, putting the cats interestingly at the bottom of a pecking order, beneath bird and rodent. It's funny how some big rodents, like bunnies, are cute. These weren't cute. If it weren't for the fact that they didn't have tails, I would think they were giant rats. The people didn't seem to mind them though.

Again, I wonder -- why is that? Squirrels good, rats bad. Chipmunks good, mice bad. It's so subjective.

In the meantime, I'm looking for a 3x3 foot piece of wood so I can start building some traps.

RIO, BRAZIL - 01 May
As the plane descended in to a brown dome of smog, I was a little skeptical about whether Rio would live up to my fun-in-the-sun expectations. Luckily I found that the air thins out as you move away from the airport (and the poor shanty-town favelas) and out to the coast.

I took a taxi from the airport to Copacobana. En route, the driver starts crossing himself vigorously. I start looking around for whatever peril is about to kill us when he points to a church on the hill. "90% of the people here are Catholic." he says. The other 10% must be content to have a big statue of Jesus perched above the city as if about to do a swan dive.

Usually you see pictures of this statue from behind, looking down on a panoramic view of the city. From down below, however, I find seeing Big Jesus up there in the clouds a little creepy. I can imagine mothers telling their misbehaving kids - "look over there- Jesus is coming to get you if you don't stop that!"

Next to the beaches, the hills in Rio are the most striking feature I've seen so far. They seem less like hills, and more like 'protrusions'of rock emerging abruptly out of the mostly flat landscape. I thought I'd take a stroll up a hill one day, only to find myself facing a vertical wall of stone at the base.

So instead, I've been roaming along the beaches. Gazing at the beautiful people with skin tanned in various degrees from golden-brown to jerky. The walk is fairly uniform. Every so often, you pass a vendor selling beer, Coco Gelado (coconuts with a straw in them) and R$3 caiprinhas that would cost five times as much in London. But the stands are all the same. As you walk for an hour along the Copacabana and across to Ipanema, it's almost as if you're going in circles. The only thing that changes is that rather than having the Barry Manilow song running though your head, you think of the song about the girl.

On Sunday, I decided to head downtown. I ignored the fact that the metro was closed, and didn't think about the implications of a 90% catholic town, so needless to say, I was surprised that downtown was a ghost town. Almost all of the shops were boarded up, and the only activity seemed to be surrounding the church at the end of the main avenue.

As I looked up in frustration, I couldn't see him clearly, but I'm sure Big Jesus was laughing at me.