Seth Kugel's Notebook:

The Amazon with back pain, Part II

I’m now back in Novo Aripuana (pictured), where the perfectly decent Hotel Tio Ze does not have perfectly decent beds for back pain sufferers. So, yesterday, with a nap aborted, I decided to take advantage of the two things the town seemed to offer me: a pharmacy, and a massage therapist.

Pharmacists take on extreme power over foreigners in small towns like this, presiding as they do over a limited stock of drugs with totally unfamiliar names. Sao Paulo has Advil and Tylenol. The pharmacy in Novo Aripuana had nothing of the sort. So I told the pharmacist my back was killing me, and she gave me something called Torsilax, which had no ingredients I recognized beyond caffeine, but sounded like something that might make my torso relax, which was vaguely reassuring. She told me to take one every eight hours, on a full stomach.

I figured I wouldn’t take one until after my trip to the massage therapist, whom the folks at Tio Ze told me about. The sign on the cute orange house read “English and Massage Therapy,” which showed that the family was somewhat sophisticated, maybe even a bit too much for this one horse town. (By one horse town, I mean 1,000-motorcycle town.) Turns out the therapist is from Goiania, a city I usually think of as a hick regional capital, but compared to here seems the center of the universe. She didn’t really give much of an explanation as to why she had moved here, but it struck me that if Brazil has a witness protection program, this would be exactly the kind of place it would send people.

She gave a decent massage, which relieved much of the pain. But the best part was meeting her husband — the English teacher.  And not just any ordinary English teacher: he had arrived in Novo Aripuana from India as a Catholic priest, met the massage therapist and … you can imagine the rest. (Though you may not want to.)

Walking back to the hotel, I decided it was time to pop a Torsilax, but soon felt my stomach churning and realized I had taken my Torsilax on a completely empty stomach. Bad decision. To be followed by a terrible one: a stop at the Rei do Espetinho, the "King of Kebobs," a street stand with a disco ball near my hotel.   

At the King of Kebobs, you choose your own mostly-cooked kebab, they cook it the rest of the way, and serve it to you with rice and coarse manioc flour. Could there be a worse decision than eating street food that involves fatty sausage and gristly chicken at a place with a flashing disco ball? I ate most of it, passed the rest to a surprisingly unmangy dog who was scrounging around for a bite, and went back to the hotel.  The good news … the pain has left my back entirely. The bad news … it's moved to my stomach.

The Amazon, with back pain, Part I

Somehow, woke up this morning with immense pain on the lower right side of my back. It’s the kind that when anything jolts, like you trying to get out of bed, pain shoots through your side.

It was also the day I came back from the Juma reserve, an hour down the river from the city of Novo Aripuana by small motorboat, city being a word I use only because that’s what they call it.  It was one of those times when it pays to be a journalist: an hour with nothing to do except watch the trees go by, try to spot the head of a jacare (the Amazonian alligator), or fantasize about getting home and looking up where you’ve been on the Google Maps satellite shot, knowing it will be a stark river surrounding by stunning green, the kind of place that I often look at on Google Maps and think, wow, it would be cool to be there.

But none of this is really much fun with a bad back, since the jolting of the boat kept me in pretty much constant pain. So I thought of all the other people in the world with bad backs that are not actually temporary, as I assume mine is, and I thought, how do they enjoy alligator heads?  

There was little time to ponder. A half-hour in to an hour ride, we figured out we had too many people in the boat – a bunch of teachers, adult students, and their kids from the school in the reserve I’ll be writing about were there, with their luggage – and realized there wasn’t enough gas to get us back to the city.  So we stopped on the side of the river, at a spot that didn’t look like much of anything. Some of us, including me, trudged about five minutes along a wide clearing through the woods, and came out at a lake.

A small community was perched on the other side of the lake, home to one of the people in the boat.  We whistled across, and someone came in a small motor-powered boat called a rabeta to pick her up. Her mission: to try to find 20 liters of gas in the town we could borrow.  Three of us sat around on a fallen branch, which (because of my back) did not appeal to me, so I tried to sit on the ground. I was quickly warned there was some insect that would cause some extreme itching living in said ground. 

I stood.

Maybe half an hour later, the boat chugged across the lake, with 20 liters of gasoline for us, which we brought back along  path and filled up the boat.

With a bad back, alligators may lose their charm, but running out of gas in the middle of nowhere was still pretty fun.

Back of the boat

I just started on a reporting trip in Amazonas state, so a word on the means of transportation here, which pretty much boils down to ABC: Anything but cars. Highways are few and far between here, both because historically it has been very difficult and expensive to lay down a lasting highway here, and these days, it is considered environmentally hazardous to the land it runs through. I've heard a few different slight variations quoted, but something like 52 out of 62 municipalities in the state cannot be reached by road.

I’m headed to Novo Aripuana, about 150 miles as the crow flies (and more like 300 as the fish swims) from Manaus, and there are three ways to get there by public transportation: the 36-hour slow boat, the 12-hour fast boat and $180 airplane. I suppose you could swim, too, but I don’t recommend it.

I’m on the fast boat, which costs 120 reais, almost $70 at the newly punishing exchange rates, and have an important travel tip for anyone planning any sort of trip via public transportation in the Amazon:

Sit as far forward in the boat as you can.

As I write, I'm sitting practically on top of the engine. Anyone who thinks the Amazon is a quiet place, it is. But not on top of the engine. I tried to get some sleep, and the noise was what I imagined it would be like to sleep in a foxhole with constant machine gun fire around you. Without the danger, of course.

In the short video I'm attaching, you will see one man asleep near the motor, and a couple of kids playing right on top of it. So it is possible to get used to it.

On the slow boats, which take days to go between cities that no highways link, you don’t get a seat, you hang a hammock. I was on one of those boats too, five years ago, and it was only a few days in that I ventured to the lower level where the engine was and noted that those who boarded later were stuck down there next to it. And it sounded like a machine gun as well. So a better rule: find the motor, and get as far away from it as you can.

The Rio war

If it had happened three weeks earlier, we might be looking at a 2016 Olympics in Madrid, Chicago or Tokyo, the three candidate cities where a police helicopter was not shot down by drug gangs this weekend.

To be fair, it is extremely unlikely that a battle like the one fought between two drug gangs that control neighboring favelas — by Monday evening leaving three officers and 11 suspected criminals dead — will happen during the Olympics in 2016. That is because in the likely event that drug-infested favelas do not disappear in the next seven years, the city and state will spend great energy to strike deals so that the gangs will behave themselves while the world is in town. But that’s energy that will not be spent preparing for the more basic security needs of something so complex as an Olympic Games.

The weekend’s violence is the kind that breaks out from time to time, but it took on an added significance so close to the Olympic decision. Some of the details, as reported by the Brazilian press, are frightening. That helicopter might have been downed Saturday morning by anti-aircraft machine guns, not your typical inner-city munitions. Ten city buses were incinerated. The police were completely aware (through intercepted phone calls) that one gang, the “Red Command,” would be attacking the other gang, “Friend of Friends,” but were powerless to stop it. The reason, according to the state’s security secretary as quoted in Folha de Sao Paulo: the favela has “hundreds of entrances.” He also said that though the police were on hand soon after the invasion began at 1 a.m., they did not take action until 7 a.m. because police do not enter favelas at night, as a matter of policy, “without proper preparation.”

And more: the attacks were believed to have been ordered by prisoners of a high-security facility in the state of Parana, hundreds of miles away. O Globo reported that police may now know the favelas where the instigators of the attacks are hiding — in several cases, favelas with high drug activity that the police have not entered in months.

O Globo, the city’s paper of record, is calling it A Guerra do Rio, or the Rio War. The helicopter incident, was followed by ten deaths of alleged criminals on Saturday and two more on Sunday. There was also a macabre scenario in which the police entered the favelas to track down two of the bulletpocked bodies of drug dealers that had been left behind. By today, 4,000 police officers had been mobilized for follow-up operations related to the violence.

To be on Copacabana Beach when the Olympic decision was made was to be reminded that this city knows how to organize a heck of a party. The violence over the weekend reminded everyone that this city does not control what goes on within its own borders. So, with seven years to go and billions of dollars of expensive infrastructure projects to undertake and challenging security tasks to tackle, which characteristic is more important?

Tegucigalpa 2009, Rio 2016

There’s only really one story in Brazil these days: whether this country of 190 million is ready for prime time as a major geo-political player. Or perhaps more accurately, how far along is Brazil in its inevitable march toward that status. Being the “last in, first out” of the financial crisis was a real PR bonanza, and President Lula’s political skills on the world stage, backed by a skilled diplomatic corps providing support (or pulling the strings, you be the judge) has resulted in glowing coverage from the world press.

But chinks have also appeared in the armor. To cite one rather silly example, Barack Obama’s only barely on-the-record statement to Lula in London (“This is my man. I love this guy. He’s the most popular politician on earth”) has become comically overused and blown out of proportion here that it almost makes Obama look like a political genius. Lula is forever indebted to him for a phrase that cost him maybe two breaths. How seriously do you take a country that is so tickled by 10 off-the-cuff words from the president of the United States (and ignores Obama’s next sentence, “It’s because of his good looks,” that seems to imply he is not entirely being serious)?

Now, the same week Brazil is crossing its collective fingers and hoping the International Olympic Committee picks Rio de Janeiro to host the 2016 Games — which would make it the first South American city to do so — it finds itself in a mess in Honduras. Brazil has been positioning itself as at the very least a regional mediator (and at most a U.N. Security Council member) steering a moderate middle road between Chavez and Co. and the United States and more conservative Latin American leaders. Honduras’s elected president, Manuel Zelaya, has holed up in Brazilian embassy … or, more accurately, has taken over the Brazilian embassy and is using it to organize/rile up his own supporters. Lula has come down hard on the what he calls the “golpistas,” or coup leaders, the government of Roberto Micheletti, who took power three months ago and kicked Zelaya out of the country. This is hardly the stance of a middleman, and seems to align Lula with Chavez. Doubts remain whether Chavez and Lula planned the whole thing beforehand, though Brazil vehemently denies it and notes it didn’t ask for this role, but had to take in Zelaya when he appeared at the embassy door.

Meanwhile, most of the Brazilian press has taken Lula’s side, at least semantically, adopting the term “golpista” and barely mentioning Micheletti’s argument for taking power; by comparison, The New York Times calls Micheletti the “de facto president” and notes high up in its story today that Congress was part of the coalition that “ousted” Zelaya.

There doesn’t appear to be a clear way out. Micheletti’s government has issued an ultimatum to Brazil, to define Zelaya’s status — presumably as an asylum seeker — or face the consequences of international law, whatever those may be. (The worst case scenario would seem to be an invasion of the embassy.) A group of Brazilian deputies — the equivalent of congressmen — are on their way to Tegucigalpa, where they will meet with the Honduran Congress and visit the Brazilian embassy. That does not sound so good. They will apparently be let in, unlike the diplomats from the Organization of American States who were expelled recently. 

In other words, quite a mess. At exactly the same time that the most potent criticism against Rio’s candidacy for the 2016 Games is, more or less “It could be a mess.”  As Andrew Downie pointed out for Time, the much, much smaller task of running the Pan-Am games in Rio in 2007 was, while not technically a mess, evidence that Brazil is more skilled at putting together pretty proposals than carrying them out. And, it what may be a coincidence but surely has the Chicago boosters overjoyed, the New Yorker has a feature this week about the uncontrollable Rio favelas. (Luckily for Rio, it’s not available in full online, and the New Yorker is not exactly on every corner newsstand in Copenhagen, where the vote will occur on Friday.)

The Rio proposal was the highest ranked of any of the four finalists, gaining a “very high quality” rating. But then again, Lula gained Obama’s ranking the most popular politician in the world,  and it’s not doing him much good in Tegucigalpa.

(Stay tuned, I’ll be in Rio on Friday for the announcement.)

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