20 Miles off the North Coast of Brazil

17 November 2012

It’s been more than 2 weeks since I tackled a blog, and certainly a lot of water has passed under the bow in that time. At the moment, I’m sitting on my small balcony looking across the Atlantic waters toward the equator, which is about 120 miles to the north. The weather is warm and very humid, a wonderful change from what has been a surprisingly cool voyage. Since boarding in Boston back in mid August, we’ve seen only a few days when it’s been comfortable enough to sit out here and do anything prolonged, more the shame because, for a strange reason, here is where I have the best internet connection. Go figure.

We’re cooking along at about 12 knots heading for the mouth of the Amazon River, which is about 600 nautical miles (NM) west, near as I can figure. We enter the Amazon Tuesday morning, anchoring first off the city of Macapa, where we drop off a couple of US diplomats who joined us in Rio de Janeiro, pick up a pilot, who will guide us up the river, and also welcome onboard the US Ambassador to Brazil and his retinue. The Ambassador will sail with us to Manaus. I’m not sure why he’s joining us other than because we’re 700 mostly American students, faculty, and staff. I’m guessing he’s also partial compensation for the fact that Desmond Tutu decided he couldn’t join us because of other commitments.

(That’s not a joke; Tutu is a board member of ISE and has, in fact, been on several voyages, including a couple of years ago when he sailed the entire itinerary around the world. He was supposed to have been onboard with us from Ghana to South Africa.)

I’ll be having Thanksgiving dinner with the ambassador Wednesday evening, a few hours before we dock in Manaus.

I just finished teaching my last class before we begin final reports—oral—in my business communication and intercultural communication classes and final speeches in my public speaking class. What that means is this: my class prep days are over! From now to the end of the voyage I face only about 23 hours of oral reports and speeches. Three years ago, these culminating exercises were surprisingly good, so I’m looking forward to listening, watching, and, of course, evaluating. Over the same period, I also have 2 batches of final papers to grade, so the work is far from finished. But the end is, definitely, in sight.

The flying fish are furiously dashing away from the oncoming bow of the ship. And every now and then, a white boobie—large gull-like bird with terrific eyesight and remarkable maneuverability—soars high above the 7^th deck of the ship to scan the water then folds its wings and dives like an arrow into the water off my balcony, rising a moment or two later with a fish that lost the lottery in its bill, wings (of the fish, not the bird) still buzzing.

I’m keeping an eye out for large fish or mammals: whales, porpoise, sharks, anything. Over the past couple of days, though, it’s been only flying fish and boobies.

But I digress . . .

Buenos Aires and Montevideo

We arrived in Buenos Aires 2 weeks ago yesterday—2 November—after an overnight trip up the Rio de la Plata, surely the muddiest river (in addition to the widest) in the world. The water is the color of dark milk chocolate, mostly, I’m sure, washed from the Argentine interior—it was an especially rainy winter and spring, so runoff is heavy—but also from flotsam and jetsam coming from Argentina and Uruguay, which border the river on the south and north banks, respectively. Despite the color of the water, both Argentina and Uruguay have beaches lining the river’s banks. The water looks more suitable for slicing than for swimming.

Jim Cooper and I had intended to play golf the first morning in Buenos Aires (“B.A.” to those in the know), but when we disembarked and stopped by a travel desk in the port’s terminal, we discovered that the course we were heading for had been closed for over a week because of flooding. Bad news. A few days later we managed to get in a round of golf at the Golf Club of Uruguay, but we had hoped for more than one round during our one-week stay in the two countries.

After lugging our clubs back up the 47 steps of gangway leading to the ship’s 5^th deck, Jim offered to give me a walking tour of BA, which I, of course, accepted. He and Shamim had rented a condo in the city several years ago and stayed 4 weeks, getting to know the layout and haunts fairly well. Our dock was only a few blocks from the “Centro” section, so walking to see the sights made sense. We headed out around noon, stopping at a cafeteria for a ham-and-cheese sandwich, then walking west to the Recoleta section of the city.

Recoleta is one of the several up-scale neighborhoods of Buenos Aires. The city, as a whole, lives up to its billing as the “Paris of South America”: very wide boulevards, low-rise office and apartment buildings, tree-lined streets, and many structures with the characteristic balconies and design features that look straight from the banks of the Seine. Unlike Paris, BA is also dirty and seems to be crumbling just a little. The sidewalks, filled with potholes and broken tiles, are in desperate need of repair. And the trash on the streets was exacerbated by the overflowing bins of garbage on each street corner. The city had been experiencing a garbage collectors’ strike for several weeks; it showed. Argentina is experiencing another in a long string of economic crises, facing inflation that, unofficially, is moving at a 25% pace. The result is a lack of money to keep the city clean and in repair. It’s a very pretty place as long as one doesn’t look down.

The Recoleta area is best known for its cemetery, a 5-acre garden of lavish mausoleums, final resting places of Argentina’s elite. And off in one corner, un-noted other than the family name above the crypt door, is the spot where Eva (Evita) Peron’s body finally came to rest.

It’s a dark marble structure with the name “Duarte” carved into the stone. Duarte was the name of Eva’s father, a name she took despite the fact that she was a love child, illegitimate, and rejected by the family when she was a child. When she died of cancer in 1952 or ’53—at age 32 or 33—she was initially embalmed and placed on public display by her widower husband, Presidente Juan Peron. Later her body was kidnapped by the military junta that overthrew Juan, sent to Paris and buried in an unmarked grave, then later repatriated when Juan (and his third wife, Isabella) returned to power in the early ‘70s. After Juan’s death, the body was re-emblamed—a grisly tale of an embalmer who fell in love with the cadaver—and eventually buried under the Duarte family crypt. Of course, none of this story made it into the Andrew Lloyd Weber musical.

Jim and I paid homage to Evita, stopped for a cervesa at an outdoor café near the cemetery, then returned to the ship around 4pm. That evening, the three of us—Jim, Shamim, and I—went out for an excellent dinner in the Palermo sector of BA.

The next day, 3 November, I flew to Puerto Iguazu in far north Argentina where Brazil, Paraguay, and Argentina meet. More on that in the next installment.