Changes in Latitude

Brazil’s best ambassador may be Paulo Coehlo, author of The Alchemist, Manual of the Warrior of Light, The Flowing River, and the most translated novel in the world. Does anyone know which title that would be? This beloved Brazilian said, “Everything that happens once can never happen again. But everything that happens twice will surely happen a third time”.

This seems especially true as we plan a reunion tour for a journey across Brazil, at the request of clients who met on our last excursion. What is so fascinating about Brazil that always takes us back?

1. First of all, Brazilians are among the warmest people on earth.
2. Brazil’s economy is 2^nd only to the USA’s in our hemisphere.
3. Cultural Contributions: Bossa Nova, Samba, Carnival.
4. The diversity of her nature is unrivaled.
5. Portuguese, the language of love.

And that is the short list!

So where does a journey in Brazil begin?  In Rio de Janeiro, of course. Rio is only half the size of Brazil’s biggest city. Why not stay in her sexiest neighborhood, Santa Teresa?  Then, get in the spirit of Que saudade! … by visiting Rua Montenegro, where Antonio Carlos Jobim first saw the Girl from Ipanema and penned the classic song of longing. Que saudade! describes intense longing.

Pele has as many fans as Paulo Coehlo.  The world’s foremost soccer hero is from Minas Gerais, our 2^nd destination, Brazil’s heartland, home of historic coffee plantations, mining villages, and romantic hideaways far from the beaches.  Here we visit the charming villages of Olimpio Noronha, Tiradentes, and Ouro Preto.

Nobody returns from Brazil without a bit of a tan, so our final journey is to beaches that are the favorites of Brazilians, found on the island of Floripa.  Here we enjoy carefree sun-soaked days walking beaches with stunning beauty, far from the chaos of Brazil’s major cities. This island embodies the spirit of Brazil, a perfect complement to its dynamic economy, a diverse culture united in warmth, sincerity, simpático.

Consider Seattle, once a Puget Sound paradise, now a concrete jungle subdivided by highways bathing once-pure air in smog seven days/week, pumping poisons into the lungs of everything that breathes.  Cement trucks pouring new parking lots daily. What interstate freeways did for Seattle, they could do for Glacier National Monument, the Amazon and the Andes.

Just such a freeway is being built from Brazil to Peru, from the Atlantic to the Pacific, across ravines filled by waterfalls and over gorges fed by the Andes Mountains, the source of the mighty Amazon River.  This freeway could be completed in 2010, giving birth to numerous other highways feeding off the mother road, increased illegal logging, burning, and poaching.  Why pave the last great undivided rainforest? 

Such a highway creates new horizons for Brazil’s continued growth, bypasses the Panama Canal, and opens up new oil and gas fields. The road has been called “The Road to China”.  Never mind that sea freight through the Panama Canal costs one-quarter the amount that land shipments will cost.  Never mind that this road spells doom for places like the Manu and Pacaya-Samiria National Parks, places where the biodiversity will be remembered as staggering.

This is where the automobile has brought us.  Corporations have no shame as they colonize nature and pump poison into the atmosphere.  Diesel trucks will soon harvest once-protected tropical hardwoods in order to line North American closets.  The highway is to be a private toll road, operated by a those with friends in high places, those willing to pimp their grandchildren’s legacy for today’s luxuries.

Our planet’s last un-colonized indigenous peoples will be displaced by this highway.  They will no longer be able to live in voluntary isolation from the material culture of consumerism.  Cultural, ecological and environmental factors were not evaluated prior to the granting of this no-bid contract to pave yet another paradise.  Former U.S. Secretary of the Interior Bruce Babbitt recommends countermeasures to offset the devastation of the Trans-South American Highway; namely, cooperation to create international conservation areas such as Amistad on the Costa Rican/Panamanian border.

Unfortunately, this solution will be “too little, too late” once the first toll booth opens in Peru near the headwaters of the Amazon.  Visit Northeastern Peru soon in order to know the immensity of what will soon be lost at the hands of the “Initiative of the Regional Infrastructure of South America” (IIRSA – an organization content to bypass democratic processes involving citizens).  Visit very soon.