jesseslife.com

Brazil is littered with little beach communities and we just finished up a 16 day stint of seeing them. I hope you’ll understand why my blog is so far behind – it’s hard to get up and go to a stuffy Internet cafe and write. Sit on the sand or sit on a hard chair? Ocean waves or CRT rays? Surfing the waves or surfing the ‘net? I’ll let you decide.

But I will admit, there is something like too much of a good thing. I am a mountain/hills/forest kind of guy. I eventually have gotten tired of picking sand out of odd places, my tools all rusting and the beer, while plentiful and cheap, isn’t all that great. Forget all these lagers, I need a nice Ale.

So when we stopped in Monte Pascoal National Park deep in the Atlantic forest, it was a nice change. Monte Pascoal National Park is interesting for many reasons. First, Monte Pascoal (586m) was supposedly the first point of land that sighted when the Portuguese discovered Brazil in 1500, making it sort of a Brazilian Plymouth Rock. Secondly, and more interesting for us, it was occuiped by 200 members of the Pataxó Indian tribe in 1999. They kicked out the national park staff, wrote a statement saying they were preserving the park, occupied the staff buildings and set up a small village around the main parking lot.

It was into that main parking lot we pulled and it was like being transported into some National Geographic magazine. While many of the people wore modern clothing, there were some men and boys decked out in more traditional garments – feather headdresses and grass “skirts” for lack of a better name. The houses were all small and thatched and smoke curled from each one. Naked babies ran shrieking away from their mothers while older children gazed at our large RV’s. Their life was simple, but not impoverished. We spent the afternoon trying to talk to the kids in Portuguese, and they taught us some words from their native language. Soccer was, of course, the big sport of the village, and our guide had brought a bright green rubber playground ball for the kids to use. Between that and two bags of microwave popcorn, we were quite a hit. We even got a tour inside the park and saw some of the forest and old national park facilities. The Indians had constructed a large monument to the native peoples of Brazil with a center garden containing samples of different indigenous plants. The old central administrative building was converted into a gift shop, and the guide attempted to sell us hatchets, spears and blow guns. Fun, but I couldn’t imagine getting any of the arsenal back into the states.

What I didn’t do was take any photos. I felt distinctly uncomfortable and out of place as it was, and taking photos is still so intimate to me. I was a guest in their village, and couldn’t bring myself to treat them like a tourist attraction. Somehow, someday, I will have to find a good way to take some photos in situations like this, or I’ll never have any readers.

When the sun went down, the villagers went home and to sleep. No electricity made for a dark, dark night. So when the evening rain rolled in, I sat in my camper and tried to pretend I was sleeping in the middle of the jungle. A call of a macaw in the distance made me realize with a start that I WAS sleeping in the middle of the jungle – no imagination required. I pulled the sheet a little tighter over me and listened intently for the sound of arrows and poison darts hitting the side of my camper. With that, I went to sleep.

The next morning while the rest of the group headed down the road, I hired a Pataxó guide to take me to the top of Monte Pascoal. I laced up my $200 Gore-Tex boots and grabbed my high-tech rain coat and camera. I was soon introduced to my guide, an 8 year old boy clad in shorts, a striped shirt and flip-flops. Great. I could just tell, he was going to kick my ass climbing this mountain. The trip itself was hard, working up the muddy side of the mountain. I think that switchbacks were a European invention, because this trail went straight up..and up. The whole way, me huffing and puffing, trying to coax some Portuguese lessons out of the guide. Him, confidently strolling up the mountain, smiling every time I wanted to stop, asking me if I was “cansado”. But he got me there, and I was rewarded with a view of clouds and the occasional distant green landscape peeking out from under them. It was a quick walk/slide back down, where I hopped back into Harold, waved goodbye to the village, and drove away.

Unforgettable.