Alto Paraiso

We are staying at a beautiful pousada, or inn, in Alto Paraiso, a town near Brasilia, the capital of Brazil. Our pousada is a beautiful place with rooms around a lush yard, full of tropical flowers and tropical fruit trees, such as limes, tangerines, avocado, banana and some things similar to cherries but in a different shape, more like a tiny starfruit, and other delicious fruit which I tried but can´t name. There are limes that are green on the outside but orange on the inside, and are delicious in drinks.

In the morning, Vasu, the pousada owner, serves a delicious breakfast of several kinds of whole wheat bread (which can be hard to get while traveling!), papaya, mango, other tropical fruits, jam made from the tropical fruit on her land, a special kind of cheese, avocados which are eaten as a fruit in Brazil rather than served with salty foods, granola, yogurt, Brazilian coffee from local beans, fresh squeezed juice, and herb tea made from herbs that Vasu grows.

Vasu speaks a bit of English, but only a tiny bit, which she learned while visiting India. Mostly we communicate in Portuñol. I speak Spanish sprinkled with a few words of Portuguese that I´ve learned, and she speaks Portuguese. I ask her to repeat, and eventually I understand 50 to 70 percent of what she has to say. Portuñol works pretty well for basic transactions like renting a room, buying bus tickets or eating at a restaurant, but it is impossible to have conversations with any depth. And after several hours of straining to understand Portuguese, I have a headache and feel exhausted.

As I write this in my journal, we are in a restaurant and I just learned that our waiter speaks perfect Spanish, as well as a bit of English and Italian. It is such a relief to speak with him in Spanish, and to be able to understand 100% of what he says. He is from the coast of Brazil, but recently moved inland because he is concerned about global warming and its effect on the coast.

I´ve always thought that Portuguese is a beautiful language, and I would like to learn it. Maybe I can take a course with the goal of returning to Brazil next year.

Vasu, the owner of our pousada, has three beautifully colored macaws (arara) which visit her to be fed bananas and crackers every day. They are brilliantly colored in yellow and blue, and one ate a banana out of my hand! Vasu´s four cats intently watch the daily feeding of the macaws.

Alto Paraiso is a hippie town, reminiscent of Crestone, Colorado. You can easily find meditation (we went to it), crystals, tie dye, buildings shaped like domes, skirts from India, people in touch with their chakras, and Hare Krishnas here. The hippie movement in the 1960s was different in Brazil than in the U.S. because Brazil was under a dictatorship at that time, and many people who might have been hippies accordingly opted for a more militant or communist stance. Now there seem to be plenty of Brazilian hippies in this town, anyway.

Yesterday we hired a guide to take us into Chapada dos Veadeiros National Park. Tourists aren´t allowed to enter without a guide, and in any case there is no public transportation to the park. Isael, a serious young man, speaks only Portuguese, but we managed to negotiate an itinerary and price for our tour. However, Isael´s explanations of medicinal plants were lost on me.

We hiked five kilometers down into a canyon where we saw three waterfalls, We swam in the Rio Preto, which Isael noted was the color of Coca Cola, and I was nibbled upon by fish. (no piranhas here, luckily!) Ther climate here is drier, nothing like the Pantanal wetlands. We saw a snake on the trail, which Isael said was a poisonous cobra.

We hiked back up, and then visited some beautiful hot springs in the jungle. There were three natural pools built of stones in a clearing in the jungle. The water was tepid, not hot, and refreshing on a hot day.

On Wednesday we will return to Brasilia, the capital, where we will visit United World College friends Christian and Camila, and their daughter Leonora, with whom we´ve already spent a couple of really nice days.