Diamonds, Waterfalls, and sleeping with Santa

This blog has missed far more than I can update in one entry. Since the last entry in London in June, many adventures have befallen me, mostly colorful and intense, hosteling through Wales and then getting to know my loving, open-hearted new family while learning Arapaho up on Wind River Reservation. We got a new puppy and named him Baxter, then the semester's computer programming classes were very difficult and stressful. It ended up not mattering; my mother died, my wonderful irreplaceable mother died, and the world ground to a halt anyway. Or mine did.

But time keeps passing anyway. Two years ago my friend Sarah (Banana from our time in Ghana) and I planned to go to out of the country for at least a week together every two years until we're forty. The first place we planned on was Brazil, because my old friend Ricardo owns a house in a little town here, out in the middle of the country surrounded by green forests and waterfalls where diamondhunters and goldminers hunted treasure hundreds of years ago. I started saving then and the trip was scheduled for this Christmas -- so despite my mother's death and the economic straits with which we're all so familiar now, we went on this trip anyway. I flew out of DIA on Christmas Eve and passed the night sleeping high over the earth somewhere, no doubt ever so close to Santa. Now I write from my amply-stickered laptop in a cybercafe in the little town of Pirenopolis, 3 hours south of Brasilia, right smack in the middle of the country, in mystically beautiful cobblestone hide-away no other non-Brazilian tourists seem to have discovered. The entry that follows was written last night in my friend Ricardo's ancient little house. More to follow...

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Outside my window dusk is falling on the moss-covered garden wall. Brazilian voices with prosody as rolling as the countryside filter through the house. Behind me on the half-lit cement floor, Banana is stretching slowly and silently. Today was perfect.

Her name is Luciana, I think, and she led us to a waterfall she loves here. The dark curls of her hair, her dark skin and her willowy movements embody the beauty these forests are famous for. She and her well-traveled friends Daniela and Luiz came over to Ricardo’s house to visit with Bianca, and within half an hour I was thrilled to hear them invite us to a chapoiera, a waterfall. We walked on slate stone sidewalks through the whole town, out to the Bom Fim barrio on the edge of a sea of green, rapt the entire time in conversation. Our new friends are around our age and of similar political and interpersonal mindset, very good at listening, mostly able to understand and speak English and very kind. We spent the whole day together, sliding through languages and musings alike.

After stopping for water (none for me) at Luciana’s house, we walked some 20 minutes down a paved road that ribboned over the hills, then turned off on an unpaved one with trees overhanging it and red dirt under broken white rock. A quarry stands in stark contrast to the forests some short ways outside of Pirenopolis, and it is obvious why this stone is popular: it glistens like water, shot throughout with sparkling flakes of metal that catch the sun in silver and gold. After we hiked through a vine-tangled stretch of jungle very reminiscent of Hawaii, the river to our right opened up into pools and waterfalls, framed in this same breathtaking rock. We all stripped down to our bathingsuits and waded into the flow since it was too shallow to jump in the part of the river where we were. After an hour of loafing about in the cool water and climbing the mossy boulders in the river, it began to rain steadily, and we turned to head home. The sun shone and the day was pleasantly warm; much of my body stings as I write, kissed into red by sunburn earned with my forgetfulness. They do sell sunscreen here, I just put off buying any until it was too late. Tomorrow.