Miasma – Belem, Brazil – [01/13/2012]

The first thing that strikes you about the port city of Belem, is the smell. This is not the musty, incense laced smell of India, or the humid floral perfume of Costa Rica and Dominica, this is the unmitigated smell of too many people in too small a place, of dogs in the street, of meat markets where the meat has been hanging unrefrigerated for longer than you care to consider, of fruit stands where the fruit is over-ripe. And of heat, heat poured over all of it like a miasma in the air.

As we walk up the creaking ramp of the gangway, we look down, and see that – under our feet  – a local bails out his boat seemingly barely keeping up with the level the water is rising to. And to our left are a horde of buzzards, giant ones. You do not dare look to see what may have attracted them, but I heard later that it looked to be a dog – or what was left of one.

I would say it was a broken place if it had any indication of being anything other than that which it is – but there’s no tarnished grandeur here, no ruined beauty, merely a ramshackle town, crouching on the banks of the Amazon – feeding on it like a ravenous crocodile, and pouring its remnants into a river that will – if it knows what’s good for it – one day rebel against it.

I have been to Brazil once before. My second ship trolled her way up the Amazon river in 2010, I was struck by the same thing then. This is a country of extremes, when we get to Rio of course, we will see the other side of the extreme, but here, here there is little in the way of conventional beauty. Fishing boats lie grounded in the harbor, waiting for the high tide to pick them up again, but looking for all the world like rusting or rotting hulks, paint peeling, derelict and abandoned. Like children’s toys lost and broken in a giant garden, forgotten about for better things. Only here, there are no better things.

The tender ride to the port is half an hour, the tender ride back from it turns into a grueling hour and a half as the huge shore-side ferries (pressed into service as tenders for the day) fight against the powerful current of one of the mightiest rivers in the world to deliver us home safely. Even once we’re alongside the ship it takes fifteen minutes to tie us up safely. The river seems determined to either send us back to shore or take us for its own. Neither prospect is particularly appealing.