A Visit to Changuu Island and Wedding Rehearsal at the Sea Cliff Resort

Breakfast today was hard boiled eggs and toast; this was my first encounter with white egg yolks

Nafisa later told me that, when she first moved to the United States at age 12, yellow egg yolks came as quite a shock.


After breakfast, we headed out to Prison Island (Changuu), formerly the site of a prison for escaped slaves, later of a quarantine hospital where arrivals to East Africa with infectious diseases were confined to wait out the course of their disease before they were admitted into the general population.  Today, it hosts a colony of 100 Aldabra giant tortoises; this, and snorkeling on the reefs around the island, were the reason for our trip

Ten of us went out in this boat



which took about a half hour to travel out to the island, which is in the Indian Ocean a bit more than three miles from Stone Town.

 

Walking Tour of Stone Town -- and Our Zanzibar Wedding Celebrations Begin

The entire Levydicks family has come to Zanzibar to celebrate the marriage of son Sam to Nafisa, who grew up here; her parents are hosting the wedding ceremony as well as a series of parties (there will be a second celebration in DC at the end of the month).  Sam and Nafisa came here straight from the World Cup so that they could spend nearly a month preparing for the wedding; Joe and his girlfriend Avita flew in from New York (by way of Cairo, where their layover was long enough that they got to see the pyramids and tour Cairo); Nancy and I used frequent flyer miles to come by way of Addis Ababa and then Dar es Salaam (I do not recommend long layovers in either airport), from which we caught a short plane ride on a single propeller plane to cross the strait separating Zanzibar from the rest of Tanzania.  Nancy and I are staying in an apartment int eh Victoria Flats in the Vuga neighborhood of Stone Town, the older part of Zanzibar city, the very apartment where Nafisa grew up; her parents recently built a house in the suburban part of Zanzibar city, where many of the gatherings are being held.

We arrived at the Zanzibar airport in the late afternoon, whence we were picked for a first visit to the home of Nafisa’s parents, Mwanaheir and Mohammed.  We dined at Mercury’s restaurant (started by Freddy Mercury of Queen, who was born in Stone Town), a pleasant place which, amazingly considering that it caters to tourists, does not take credit cards (we were told that many places do not and, indeed, that those who do tend to tack on the sort of 5% charge that the credit card companies  forbid in their merchant agreements in the United States).  But we got to sleep pretty early, because it had been a long series of flights with not much sleeping on the planes.


A Walking Tour of Stone Town

Wednesday morning, we had a nice breakfast prepared by a part-time housekeeper who works at the city apartment, then headed out for a walking tour of Stone Town, which Mohammed had arranged through a friend who runs a travel agency.  The houses and shops of Stone Town date only from the early part of the 19th century, though it has the feel of a much older European or Arab community, with narrow streets and alleys.

It wasn’t at all clear to me how people navigate these alleys because I did not see any signs identifying the alleys by name

Street art in Rio de Janeiro -- part two

Although our Santa Teresa neighborhood had the greatest concentration of murals, we saw a good number of them in the Lapa neighborhood just below

This mural was near the bottom of the tram up to Corcovado

Street art in the Santa Teresa neighborhood of Rio de Janeiro

Although we saw many murals in other parts of Rio de Janeiro, the greatest concentration of murals and other art that we saw was in the neighborhood where we were staying, Santa Teresa (a few other examples appear in my first blog post from Rio).

Even the light poles got painted

Most of what we saw, however, appeared on the walls.  Sometimes artists painted copies of museum works

The favelas of Rocinha and Vila Conoas, and beyond: our last day in Rio

For our final day in Rio de Janeiro, we made reservations for a tour of some of Rio’s favelas, the internationally notorious shantytowns that we had previously known only as the crime-ridden slums depicted in the movie City of God  as well as frequent press reports as we were preparing to come to Brazil.  We took taxicabs down to a very fancy looking hotel facing the Copacabana beach, where our tour guide, from the Marcelo Armstrong favela tour operation, met us with the vans that we would use for traveling to and within the favelas.  As we made our way along Copacabana, then Ipanema and Leblon and around Vidigal favela to the entrance to Rocinha, our guide laid out the company’s the perspective – that favelas are just communities like any other, where working people live because that is where they can afford to live; that the notorious criminality was the product of drug cartels that ran and ruined the communities; that, in at least some favelas, police-led pacification campaigns (UPP or Unidade de Polícia Pacificadora) have driven out the cartels and established peace and security for the residents; and that through constant police surveillance and massive allocation of police resources, the cartels have been kept at bay; and massive policing is all to the good.

The favelas were originally created by people who could not afford housing in Brazil’s middle-class neighborhoods along the ocean and baysides and who squatted on the public lands that ran up the inland hillsides where there were no roads.  Brazil has a strict five-year rule on adverse possession, that provides that anyone who resides continuously on land for at least five years gains the right to stay on the land, if not right to official title to the land; and unlike the United States where adverse possession (with a much longer term of years) runs only against private landowners, in Brazil it runs against the public as well.  So, as the squatting gradually spread up the hillsides, and as the government failed to respond by removing them, the entire hillsides were eventually occupied and were under private ownership.

On our way in a van up the winding road up into Rocinha, the first of the two favelas we visited, we passed by the American school; this was where Nancy’s sister Jean, who has spent her career teaching in American schools around the world and who taught in Rio many many years, had been a teacher.  We stopped at a small crafts market hugging the edge of the hillside, where we were urged to buy some paintings or other souvenirs (and we did).

Across the street, floor upon floor of dwellings were piled on top of each other.  The round blue tanks, we later learned, are collective collection facilities for rainwater.

Eventually, the road left the edge of the hillside and we drove into the favela.  We stepped into an apartment building along the road, walked through a basement/garage and stepped onto a concrete porch that afforded a view of the favela spreading our below and running from the beach edge all the way up to a steep ridge

Rio’s heights but Brazil’s depths

On July 8, Sam and Nafisa’s last full day in Rio, we again traveled to one of Rio;s heights, but the day ended with one of Brazil's unhappiest depths.

We left promptly after breakfast to visit another of Rio’s most well-known vista points, the Pão de Açúcar (Sugarloaf Mountain).  Brazil would be playing its World Cup semifinal game in the afternoon, so we had to arrive before 2 PM when the attraction would close down as part of the national holiday declared for every game of the home team.  A cab took us quickly to the terminal of the first aerial tram we would be riding upward.  We were worried about crowds, but needlessly: it was a gray day with rain threatening, and unlike the previous day at Cristo Redentor, there was no occasion to look for the preferential line for older folk, in fact there was no line at all to buy tickets.  Also unlike the previous day at Cristo Redentor, our age gave Nancy and me a 50% discount even though we were not Brazilian citizens.

Pão de Açúcar is located at the end of a peninsula extending from the border between Copacabana and Leme to the south and west, and Botafogo and Flamengo to the north.  The trip entails a pair of aerial tram rides, first from street level to an intermediate hill, the Morro da Urta, and then a second ride to the top of  the Sugarloaf.

A Day in Rio de Janeiro: Sugarloaf and the Escadaria Selarón

On our first full day in Rio, we first visited one of the iconic sights of Rio de Janeiro, the statue of Cristo Redentor atop Corcovado peak in the Tijuca Forest National Park .  We liked the idea of hiking up the mountain, but Lance, our host, warned that tourists had consistently been robbed at gunpoint while trying this hike, even when walking in large groups.  We recommended that we register for the tram to the top, but the registration process was impossible to negotiate – he said the system was consistently down.  He recommended that we simply show up at the tram entrance to see whether there has been any cancellations – if not, we would easily find a van to the top.  He also noted that, given our ages, we should be able to take advantage of a special line for seniors and perhaps even a special price.

We took a cab to the upward-bound tram station; seeing no indication that any seats were available,. we found an agent who steered us to a small bus which, in turn, took us to the ticket counter where we bought a round-trip van ticket up the mountain.  The van took us to the National Park entrance where we would buy tickets for a bus to the top.  There was one very long line to buy tickets, and another to board the bus,            

but just as Lance had suggested, the seniors line was much better – in fact, we were able to get to the front of the ticket line with no waiting at all, taking Sam and Nafisa with us

 

We were told that the senior discount was only for Brazilians, but the preferential lines for both ticketing and the van ride saved us easily 90 minutes to two hours.

After a fairly short ride to the top, we arrived at the huge Art Deco statue