Keepin' it Rio: The Marvelous City

To cut to the chase: Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, is up there for my favorite places in the world. Our week in the Marvelous City was indeed marvelous, although I unfortunately didn't take my camera out often (I didn't want to lose it to a pickpocket). As for why I loved Rio, here's a few reasons that come to mind:

1. Beautiful beaches. You just can't beat long, wide, white beaches carved out of luscious green mountains.
2. Beautiful people. Everything you have heard about Brazil having a lot of beautiful people is true. The people here are tan, fit, and the products of a great melting pot of ethnicities. There's actually a good amount of psychological research that indicates people find computer "averaged" faces more beautiful -- I wouldn't be surprised if mixing lots of races achieves this effect too.
3. A happy, care-free attitude. Especially compared to the giant metropolis of Sao Paulo, any Brazilian will tell you that the people here are easy-going. Just walking around the streets, I have seldom seen so many happy and friendly people.
4. An emphasis on fitness and sport. Every beach is lined with sand soccer fields and volleyball courts. There are also always thousands of people running, biking, and skating along the boardwalks.
5. Easy access to trails, gardens and nature. There are lots of parks, gardens and trails here. Like most humans, I love being surrounded by greenery.
6. Good, fresh food. Rio is right next to the sea + in a tropical region + in a country with lots of livestock. The result is tasty seafood, amazing fruit, and superb steak.
7. Enjoyable music. This may apply to Brazil more as a whole, but there's pretty good music here. The Jorge Ben Jor concert we went to was exactly what I was looking for -- an awesome fusion of samba, rock, funk and bossa nova. He's pretty old, but the young Brazilians love him as much as their parents do.
8. Hoppin' nightlife. We had a lot of nights when the sun was out before we got back home. A central area called Lapa is crawling with Brazilians looking for a good time at one of the city's countless bars and clubs. We also explored a few other venues, like going to a giant "Favela Funk Party" inside one of the slums.

As for things that affect quality of life and daily living, it's hard to top Rio's offerings. There's a lot of people that move here after visiting, and I wouldn't rule out coming back someday.

What's missing? Compared to some of my other favorite cities in the world, it's missing the deep, rich history that Istanbul has and it's missing the sleekness and modernity that Hong Kong has. It also doesn't have quite as many museums and cultural offerings compared to other bigger cities (although we did love our visit to the city's Modern Art Museum).

Lastly, and most detrimentally, there is undeniable inequality here. The main Zona Sur is wonderful and mostly clean, but the city is surrounded by favelas (slums) that have been mostly left out of Brazil's economic progress. While the country has the strongest affirmative action policies in the world and other efforts to combat inequality, many Brazilians are cynical their effectiveness so far. Nonetheless, most people seem to think things are very slowly getting better for the poor.

The famous Lapa steps were made by Chilean Jorge Selaron as a tribute to the Brazilian people. The steps are made from thousands of tiles from all over the world, including even Minnesota.Copacabana Beach, down the street from our hostel.

Christ the Redeemer.

We had an awesome crew at our hostel. Here a few of us eating at Porcao, a Brazilian steakhouse.

I'm not sure who saw and who did.

Sculptures in Santa Teresa, the Bohemian area of town

Sunset from Sugarloaf mountain.

Christ overlooking the city.

The beach is chock-full of soccer fields. Talk about paradise.

Lots of green space.

All the inlets and curving shorelines make for an inordinate amount of beach.

We hiked Dois Irmaos, the mountain overlooking Ipanema. To get to the bottom of it, we took motorbike taxis through one of the slums on the outside of the city -- an exciting ride and a cool climb.

Ipanema from the mountain.

Snoop Dogg and Pharell appropriately filmed their hit song, "Beautiful," in Rio. 

After a traditional homemade Brazilian dinner at our friend Laura's apartment, we spent the night listening to her roommates play Niel Young and Johnny Cash. Too bad we have to leave Brazil, but South Africa awaits!

Friends, Not Miles

A journey is best measured in friends, not miles.

- Tim Cahill

My favorite part of traveling is the people you meet. Some of the interesting characters we have spent time with include:

• Todd, a gregarious CEO from California who took a year off of work to travel the world with his family
• Laura, a young Swiss physician
• Chistian, an entertaining head chef from Sweden
• Jason, an economist from the UK
• Ryan and Erin, Colorado pharmacists who, with a local shaman, have been experimenting with the hallucinogenic effects of Peruvian iowaska
• Fabian, a German who started an iPhone usability testing company
• Raissa, a director for a Brazilian children's TV show
• Mike, a microbrewer from Colorado who left the states after serving a short stint in jail because of his Occupy Wallstreet activity. He now plans to start a brewery and live in La Paz, Bolivia because "the USA is blowing up man."

Che Guevara and the Motorcycle Diaries

At 22, Ernesto traveled for nine months across South America.

The revolution is not an apple that falls when it is ripe. You have to make it fall.

- Che Guevara

Many of the most vivid images I had of South America before coming here came from a superb film, The Motorcycle Diaries. The movie depicts the 5,000 mile motorcycle journey of Ernesto (Che) Guevara, an Argentine who traveled all across South America in 1951 during a year off from medical school. His travels were transformative; the striking poverty and exploitation he encountered radicalized him into believing fundamental change was needed to improve the world.

Ernesto the medial student later became Che, the legendary Argentine Marxist revolutionary, and his image is one of the most recognizable on the planet. He was extremely intelligent (and athletic too), but more than anything, he was a man of action. Fomenting revolutions around the world, perhaps most successfully in Cuba, it is incredible he was able to live and influence the world's ideas and emotions as much as he did before finally being caught -- and executed -- in the jungles of Bolivia.

Few would defend his liberal use of violence to effect change. However, Che's story is nonetheless illuminating when it comes to South American history and the ongoing struggle of the indigenous and the poor.

The Motorcycle Diaries and its images are not far off from some of what I have encountered outside the cleaned up city centers of South America. To be sure, it can be overwhelming sometimes to think of how many people in our world are still without education and resources, still exploited, still left behind.

Like many of the most memorable names of history, Che carries with it a complex, flawed and hypocritical legacy. Too often those like him who intend to do long-term good commit short-term evil to accomplish their greater goals. The only way we can avoid this, I think, is to follow Martin Luther King's imperative of constantly making sure that our ends are pre-existent in our means.

And the leaders of the world today talk eloquently about peace. Every time we drop our bombs in North Vietnam, President Johnson talks eloquently about peace. What is the problem? They are talking about peace as a distant goal, as an end we seek, but one day we must come to see that peace is not merely a distant goal we seek, but that it is a means by which we arrive at that goal. We must pursue peaceful ends through peaceful means. All of this is saying that, in the final analysis, means and ends must cohere because the end is preexistent in the means, and ultimately destructive means cannot bring about constructive ends.

--Martin Luther King, Jr., "A CHRISTMAS SERMON" 24 December 1967

What makes history tough is finding things admirable in those who did evil. How do we value the good in Che without giving undue honor to a violent man? I was struck by the literacy campaign he helped organize in Cuba, a great example of how willpower and mass action can overcome what seems on the surface like an intractable social problem. From the worth-reading Wikipedia article on Che:

Before 1959 the official literacy rate for Cuba was between 60–76%, with educational access in rural areas and a lack of instructors the main determining factors. As a result, the Cuban government at Guevara's behest dubbed 1961 the "year of education", and mobilized over 100,000 volunteers into "literacy brigades", who were then sent out into the countryside to construct schools, train new educators, and teach the predominately illiterate guajiros (peasants) to read and write. Unlike many of Guevara's later economic initiatives, this campaign was "a remarkable success". By the completion of the Cuban Literacy Campaign, 707,212 adults had been taught to read and write, raising the national literacy rate to 96%.

While traveling through many parts of the world, we must inevitably encounter and grapple with the poverty that so much of humanity lives with. It is difficult to come to terms with the enormity of the world's problems; even more difficult is answering the questions we ask ourselves about what we should be doing to help.

Horses vs. Llamas

Our last days in Cuzco have been quite pleasant, with the exception of spending a couple of days upheaving everything I ate on the Inca Trail. Stomach bugs are no fun, but they can be useful as a test of one's attitude I suppose. Plus, it seems a real journey would be lacking without a certain amount of physical discomfort anyway.

Besides continuing to enjoy the city and its cheap food, as well as the good company at our hostel, Dave and I went to a soccer game and rode horses with a guy from Poland. I'm reading Jared Diamond's Guns, Germs and Steel right now and so it was fascinating to think about the substantial roles horses have played in world history while riding.

Most of the conquistadors who came to South America grew up on ranches and farms in Spain and were masterful horsemen. The horses they rode into Cuzco were their prized life partners, bred for 4,000 years not for meat, milk, or hides, but for their incredible strength. Meanwhile, the only large domesticated mammal in South America was the llama, which though hearty and intelligent, unfortunately could have never pulled anything larger than a wheelbarrow -- let alone a human. Nonetheless, while horses may have revolutionized communication, transportation, agriculture and warfare in Eurasia, it should be recognized that they will never be able to compete with the divine softness that is baby Alpaca fur.

The soccer game was fun and we went on Mother's Day, when mujeres entran gratis (women get in free!). The young male fans weren't too crazy that day, possibly because they knew their moms were watching.

All said and done, we have absolutely loved our time here in Peru.

These horses are chiseled and they don't even work out.

Fuzzy wuzzy was actually an alpaca.

The countryside is so much quieter than the city. I find it interesting that in addition to other pollutants, noise pollution too is associated with cardiovascular disease; indeed, the more decibels of nighttime traffic noise you live with, the more thoracic aortic calcification you're likely to have. 

Rural urban zone.

 A Christo modeled after Rio's Christ the Redeemer.

The sunny valley of Cuzco.

Dave -- to be renamed Red Beard at the end of three months without a razor. 

Some of the ruins outside of Cuzco.

San Pedro Market.

 Any part of a cow you could ever want.

For the soccer game, the ticket booth was a literal hole in the wall. There were just a couple of these spread around the stadium where everyone lined up for tickets.

A beautiful day for the beautiful game.

Four Days on the High Inca Trail

The Inca Trail was a sublime combination of nature, history, and mystery. The landscape-cloudscape fusions were beyond words, the hiking unforgettable. I was constantly in awe of the natural beauty, as well as utterly befuddled by how the Incas could have built such impressive structures so high in the Andes.

We did the four-day Inca Trail hike to Machu Picchu, for which the Peruvian government restricts access to only a few hundred hikers a day (we had to get our permits about 6 months in advance). Since our group was out in front, we had almost every path and ancient ruin to ourselves.

Machu Picchu was the final site. It was pretty amazing, though not quite as mystical as the other sites given it was crawling with thousands of tourists. During our time there, we climbed the steep Huayna Picchu that overlooks Machu Picchu; ridiculously, the Incas also felt inclined to build terraces on top of this even higher mountain as well.

The Inca Empire once stretched for 2,500 miles along the spine of the Andes, with a vast network of roads and trails. The Spaniards who first "discovered" them were awed by the roads too, which they recognized were unrivaled by anything in the Old World. Nonetheless, Pizarro and his conquistadors slaughtered thousands of unarmed Incas, taking their leader -- the "Sapa Inca" -- hostage for the greatest ransom in history. Once they had about 5,000 kg of gold and 9,700 kg of silver, they executed him. Most of the intricate gold and silver objects they collected were melted into bars to fund Spain's wars in Europe.

The Spaniards were certainly beyond cruel, but our guide, Marcelino, reminded us that the Incas weren't always perfect souls either. In addition to their diseases, horses, and swords, part of what made it possible for a couple hundred Spaniards to conquer the entire Inca Empire was the fact that it was engaged in a bloody, devastating civil war. By disease or brethren, most of the killing was already done by the time the Europeans arrived.

The brutal histories, however, can never eclipse the raw natural beauty of the Andes and the raw brilliance and manpower that went in to making them habitable.

Bridges, streams, and caves.

Flora

Fauna

Hikers

The Inca Trail guides recommend everyone chew on some coca leaves while hiking to provide energy and help with the altitude, here with some sweet-tasting charcoal from the quinoa plant. Coca leaves contain numerous alkaloids, including trace amounts of cocaine and nicotine. While cocaine can be purified from large amounts of the leaves in complex processes, at least as far as chewing is concerned there is not sufficient cocaine in the leaves to induce the euphoric or psychoactive effects associated with the hard drug. 

Nonetheless, the coca leaf is a mild stimulant that suppresses hunger, thirst, pain and fatigue -- making it well-suited to those hiking in the Andes. It also gives your mouth a Novocainesque tingling sensation after chewing it for a while (it has been used as an anesthetic since antiquity). Over 5,000 years of history though, there has been no evidence that coca leaves are addictive.

Finally, as you might guess, coca leaves are used in the production of Coca Cola -- although today the cocaine is removed from the final product. Coca leaves are still a Schedule 1 drug in the US because they contain cocaine.

Beers at the second summit.

Camping in the clouds.

Our awesome guide, Marcelino.

All species can appreciate a good view.

Dave and I woke up at 3am and were first in line to enter Machu Picchu's grounds. We all but sprinted to be the first ones at the Sun Gate. We had it all to ourselves for about 20 minutes before the next hikers arrived; unfortunately, the Sun Gate was temporarily ironically named.

Machu Picchu

On Huayna Picchu... never underestimate the crab-walk.