A Weekend at the Cerrado

This weekend I went with a friend to the national park of Chapada dos Veadeiros some hours north of Brasilia. It could have started better as the car we thought we should be driving there was not quite fit we had to rent a car, then my friend was chaught up in something which made us leave 3-4 hours later than planned which in turn we had to drive most of the way and all the part of the unpaved road in the dark. On top of that I had a very stressful week so it took a while before I could relax and stop being irritable. But what can be better for relaxing and getting out of stress than a weekend of hiking and swimming in beautiful nature with nice company?


Immediately on arrival at the pousada in the small village of São Jorge I realised this will be fine. A very laid back loungy atmosphere and beautifully decorated place under a lovely starry sky.

On Saturday we went for a hike in the park. The cerrado is a fascinating place. It is not in any way ingratiating, on first sight it might even look rather ugly and unfriendly in all its dry vastness, but if you scratch ever so little on the rough surface you find a wealth of beauty and fascination. There is a richnes in flora and eventhough animals and birds are difficult to spot in the hottes day hours the landscape and vegetation makes up for it.



And the water! Because amidst all dryeness there are plenty of rivers and creeks everywhere. Eventhough it is all a plateu there are big differents in hights and a lot of canyons and valleys that make room for a lot of waterfalls. Waterfalls with clear cool water that you can drink right from the creek and swim in. Lovely!!

A quite fascinating feature is that the ground here to quite a big extent is made of pure crystal and quarts. Therefore you will walk on paths all covered in white and pink quarts stone and in some places you can see completely clear crystals, sometimes leftovers from miners of old days.



This crystal has gatherd a lot of new age people, hippies and spritualists to the area and apparently it has certain energies, I was told you sometimes can see flashes shooting up from the ground, like flashes from thunder, but coming from the ground. I didn't see it and it sounds weird, but... That should also be one of the reasons for some of the many fires in the cerrado this time of the year, we saw several during the weekend, but those are also caused by self-igniting plants. We were told about the Candombá plant that has a self combustible oil that makes it ignite, but at the same time have features that protects itself from the fire. Very smart plant, setting everything on fire, but self be safe! As I said; the cerrado is a fascinating place.

Brazilian Stress

One thing that totally freaks us out here, and by "us" I mean internationals, non Brazilians and maybe specifically Scandinavians, is the queues at the counter in the supermarket. I have never in my life seen anything so unneccessarily ineffecient and frustrating. First of all, the area around the counter is really small and crowded and even if there is just two persons in front of you in the line, it takes for ever and you feel squeezed from all sides. The band where you are supposed to put your things is very short, and even if it is movable they never move it until they have finished with one customer. Instead they keep stretching and bending to reach all the stuff and you have to wait until you can unload your cart. And they will proabably all have their necks and sholders destroyed way before retirement age. (The Swedish unions would never have accepted these working conditions!)
Not even considering that all the moves are very very slow, there are so many moments that the poor cashiers have to do, so I can in a away understand they don't hurry to get the next customer. Enven before they start reading the bar codes of the goods there are at least three questions they have to ask every EVERY customer: "Cliente mais?", "CPF na nota?" "Nota fiscal?" In my case the answer is no to all three of them, but in case the customer before you says yes then it will take even longer time. Then the cashier has to register a lot of numbers before starting to registre the purchases and sometimes the customer has difficulties remembering their CPF or the cashier, doesn't hear or enters the wrong number it can take for ever.

Then, finally efter ages, the things are registerd, the sum is calculated and the payment done, which of course also takes for ever, as the customer needs to dubble check the bill and always need to discuss some matter, but then the cashier doesn't start with the next customer. No, instead he or she starts packing the purshases into one million minuscular plastic bags, which of course the client didn't start doing while waiting for the registration to be finished.

And often the clients just leave their shopping cart in the small gate betweein the counters for the one after to remove before you can even get close to the counter.
This is such a frustrating stress moment that I just can not get used to. Every time I need to remind myself to relax, breathe deeply and not start shouting or hitting at anyone. But this is definetly one of the moments I feel the cultural difference the most. No Brazilians seem to get stressed about this at all!!

To make a small comparison I sometimes think that if they would speed up processes in lines in supermarkets, banks, bakeries etc etc, they would have so much more time and would not have to stress so in traffic. Cause there all patience seems to have vanished completely all of a sudden...

And somehow, I still believe casualties are still higher in traffic than in the supermarket, so slowing down in traffic and speeding up in the supermarket would for sure have a double positive effect.

Burn Baby Burn

This time of year it is really dry in the central parts of Brazil, around Brasilia. That means wildfires are rather common. It is a natural part of the cerrado ecosystem and hence no one seems to care that much about it. It often seems they start spontanously and as it seems most of the time they also die by themselves after a while. From Brasilia you often see smoke rising towards the sky in the distance and flying back from João Pessoa to Brasilia on Sunday evening I saw quite a few fires on the cerrado, one quite big one and many smaller, some even very close to the city or even in the city. This is something that is very unusual to me; that you can have fires going on within the city and no one cares! No fire brigade is there to put the fire out! Sometimes there is a normal car from the Bombeiros, not a fire truck looking at the fire, but not putting it out.

Ice Surprise in perfect size.

Found the perfect concept for an ice cream parlour; self service and pay by weight! I normally always get irritated because I get too much ice cream only because I want to try many flavours. It seems to be some kind of sport to make the scoops as big as possible. Now I could try as many flavours as I wanted and only very small scoops. Perfect! Then I could try all those I had no idea what is was. Avocado ice was quite good. I don't know why I never give up on acai but manga-caja and pequi was ok, even though I have no idea what it is. The name of the place is Sabores de cerrado so I guess there are a lots of strange fruits from the savannah. Have to go back tomorrow and try some more. :-)

Sitting on a plane again. This time going to Joao Pessoa for the weekend. I realise that I more and more appreciate the time of transport just being time when I get to sit still and not doing anything and noone asking me questioons.

Birds of Brazil

Brazil has one of the richest bird diversities in the world. The avifauna of Brazil includes a total of 1832 species, of which 234 are endemic. This is enough for someone like me, who normally maintains that there are only three kinds of birds; big bird, small bird and duck, to admit that this might not be a sufficient classification anymore. And a little reluctantly I have started to find some interest in watching the birds and trying to learn the names of the different kinds. And here the birds are interesting, they come in all colours, forms and shapes, some rather funny-looking.

This morning however I felt like getting a gun and shoot some of them. Or at least one. At about five o'clock this morning I woke up by something that sounded like a very loud alarm. Several high, strong tones after each other at a regular interval, then silence only to be repeated again after some seconds, and then repeated and repeated and repeated and.... I thought first it was my alarm clock, but then rememberd it sounds completely different. Then I thougt "my godness, it must be the fire alarm", but then again no, it came from outside. Then I started to think about what kind of alarms we might have at the compound or what might actually be going on outside. It took me quite a while to realise the noise came from a bird!! And the bastard just wouldn't stop.

I had to get up and get some ear plugs to be able to go back to sleep. When you say you wake up to the sound of birds one would normally believe it to be a nice experience. This was very far from nice. This was actually the second time I was woken up by some bird, the first time it wasn't this one but some other very repetitive bird that just wouldn't stop. I hope this is not a new habit of our featherd friends.