May 15, 2005
EdsGoneSouth Part 2: O Cabroncito, Where Art Thou?
Ok, I know the whole idea of this blog was to post stories and photos from the road while I was traveling, but something happened on my last sojourn to Brazil. I got distracted. Maybe it was the all the music, maybe it was the equatorial sun, maybe it was the hours and hours on smelly buses missing good ol' El Cabroncito, but nine weeks in Brazil and Buenos Aires came and went, and I didn't post even one photo. Les pido disculpas...
Before I get ahead of myself, I should provide a little background here. While whisking off to Brazil for two months was not always part of the grand plan, it was always a possibility. Brazil was the one country I felt I did not do justice to on my 2003 trip, and having left Rio a week before Carnaval in 2004, I figured Brazil deserved one more try some time.
The stars seemed to align around Christmas when I landed a contract to do some conservation work in a threatened wetland area in southwestern Brazil, the Pantanal. I was scheduled to do some contract work with ProNatura, a Brazilian non-profit organization working to protect some of the country's most threatened wild areas. It seemed like the perfect job for me, until the contract fell through as I was getting on the plane, that is. Having rented out my apartment for a few months and with a ticket south in hand, I decided to go forward with the trip and make the best of it.
Made the best of it I did, of course, and the photos and stories that follow are a sampling of the mis-adventures that followed in the first few weeks of the trip. More on the second half of the journey to come...
First Stop – Punta del Este
My trip to South America for EdsGoneSouth Part 2, began with a few sweltering days in Buenos Aires. The place was a ghost town, as I soon found out most Portenos had gone off to the beach for the month. I decided to follow suit.
I soon moved on to the coast for a little sun and surf. First stop was Punta del Este, the IN destination for the young and fashionable from Buenos Aires. The beaches are packed with bronze-skinned portenos nuking themselves for hours on end, sleeping off another all nighter at the many boliches (night clubs).
Punta del Este, Uruguay is a playground for the rich and beautiful of Buenos Aires. In this neighborhood, one house had two Porches and an Audi in the driveway.
My Punta Crew! Vicky, Ayelen, Mercedes, and Luciano picked me up my first day in Punta while I was hitch-hiking. I must have looked desperate (and I was since all the hotels, hostals, and campground were totally full!) because they invited me to camp with them. I slung my hammock in their campsite, and spent the next three days hanging with my “Insta-Punta-Crew” from Buenos Aires. Muchisimas Gracias por todo, chicos!!
The Yoney Hair Stylist. I know at least one person who will find the humor in this photo…
Steeckers! In Punta, don’t drive a car you don’t want to have covered in stickers that promote everything from cell phone brands and nightclubs to supermarkets and banks. All day girls in mini-skirts and bikini tops wander through the parking lots en masse putting stickers on the rear window of every car in the lot.
World Social Forum
Porto Alegre, Brazil -- The World Social Forum is an annual meeting of tens of thousands of progressive thinking people from around the world. It began in 2001 in response to the annual World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland where every year the world’s most powerful financial and political leaders get together to discuss the economic future of the world – and most often that of the third world.
In an effort to express self-determination and unity among under-developed peoples, the World Social Forum is ideally a platform for critical thinking, collaboration, and planning for the people of the world to set their own agenda for economic development. This year’s slogan for the Forum was, “Another world is possible.”
In practice, the Forum is somewhere between exactly what it purports itself to be and a huge 24 hour hippie dance party. Luckily, the party-goers rarely ventured out of the communal campground, leaving the rest of the Forum site for those people truly interested in social change. Many of the Forum goers were actually disgusted by the spectacle of drugs and violence in the campground this year. Flavia from Foz do Iquazu told me, “When people act like that, another world won’t be possible.”
Eugenie from Montreal, on the other hand, told me the campground was supposed to be an experiment in communal living. With over 20 reported rapes and hundreds of incidents of robbery and violence, including a band of 25 guys running through camp on the last night with knives slicing open tents and grabbing anything of value, I’d hesitate to tout the level of “community” actually achieved in the campground.
The Forum itself boasted over 50,000 participants from over 200 countries. I met people from no less than 22 countries myself, and I think I’m forgetting a few. As far as political events go, I’d really never seen anything like it, despite the delinquency.
As you’ll see in the photos below, the forum was kicked off with a parade/demonstration highlighting the various issues and organizations that were represented. The signs and banners ran the gamut, but I will say the vast majority had a distinct anti-war and thus anti-Bush theme. Like other demonstrations I’ve been to outside the US in the past, I felt certain that the protests were not against the American people (well, at least not against 51 million of us!), but instead were directed at Bush and our history of economic imperialism and colonialism throughout the third world.
Throughout the forum, event after event impugned first world corporations and governments for their complicity in actually creating global poverty and not alleviating it. There were literally hundreds of various workshops and discussions to choose from through the day, all put on by the participants in the Forum. While this made for a few pretty disorganized discussions, it also allowed for an incredible variety in topics, spanning continents and political orientations.
The actual nuts and bolts organization of the forum was truly impressive. From the hundreds of tents and meeting spaces that were constructed along Porto Alegre’s beautiful waterfront to even little detail like there actually being paper in the very clean porta-johns, I was totally impressed.
In all, making the World Social Forum the hub of my trip to South America this year was a great decision. I established a number of very important contacts and made some real friends along the way. Check out the photos below for a decent yet, of course, insufficient taste of the 2005 World Social Forum.
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The Forum was kicked off with a huge solidarity march through the city of Porto Alegre. Thousands of people from hundreds of organizations marched through the streets, effectively shutting down the downtown corridor for three hours. The march was followed by a huge concert with artists from all over the world. I was TOLD that the concert wrapped up at 6:00 am with a drunken set by Manu Chau. I’d been in bed for six hours by that point.
Antiwar sentiment from around the world ran high. This crew was in from South Korea to protest the war. Their shirts say in Portuguese: No War!
The Arab world was impressively represented as well. From what I say, there were at least five groups in from Iraq and Palestine.
The Anti-US sentiment ran high. This banner says, “No to the USA. Resistance is necessary, Brazil!”
Other people had a much simpler message for President Bush.
Some of the meeting places were temporary mud huts built just for the Forum, including this adobe hut.
AS I indicated above, over 30,000 people camped out in a huge public park along side the Forum site. It was mayhem at night and I was happy to have the respite of staying with new friends Richard and Tania whom I met though fellow motorcycle travelers Erin and Chris of Ultimate Journey. Richard and Tania, THANK YOU SO MUCH!!
Despite the mayhem in the park, people had to stay clean and very public showers were set up right in the middle of the park, with drainage ditches running right between people’s tents. Every evening a crowd of young local boys would line up next to the showers to watch girls from all over the world bathe.
The Brazilian Hari Krishnas were in attendance in full force, and they had a sunset ceremony every day.
It was a beautiful site to behold and for about five minutes I thought about selling everything I own, giving them the money and living on their love bus for the rest of my life. Ok, just kidding.
Some images just don’t need captions...
Especially since the water the little girls above were playing in was terribly polluted. Sign reads: Danger. Polluted Waters. Area Unsafe for Swimming.
More on Carnaval, the falls, the beach, and the Three Week Surf Diet in the next edition...