Snapshots of Fortaleza, BR

Fortaleza turned out to be really something. It's not just industrial city & port in the north east end of South America. It's not a rich city clearly, it is more on the modest side of a developing country, and has yet to overcome many obstacles. But it's a pleasant and beautiful surprise.

The Beach

Since i live in a country where the sea temperature hurts your bones and your forehead just for trying it with your foot, I love tropical beaches and warm water.

Fortaleza has a fantastic beach right by the city; Beira Mar, and another one on the other side of it facing the Atlantic (more open and windy), Praia do Futuro, both have white sand, palms, warm and clean waters, and you can get your caipirinhas served right up to the beach if that's your kind of thing... The food is also great and can be had under a forest of palms.

Nothing new yet, right? Another tropical tourism city...

The Cathedral

The Metropolitan Cathedral construction Started in 1939, and took 40 years to complete. It was designed by french architect George Mounier. The sheer size of it is amazing, you suddenly approach it by car and see this huge towers beginning to rise out of a very modest neighbourhood.

It houses up to 5.000 people and it's the third in size in all of Brazil (Fortaleza is the 5th largest city).

The Central Market

Right by the cathedral there's another giant, a modern one, the Central Market is a five story very modern building (i have yet to research the architects), that houses everything from fresh seafood and vegetables on the first floor, to clothing, toys, hammocks, and you name its. But the most impressive thing is how the stores appear as you unwind the twisting halls that's cross the market and change levels. (Click on the pictures to enlarge them).

The Cultural Center

Walk two blocks (unfortunately one of them with empty lots or demolished building filled with trash, and badly lit, hope they fix this) and you'll get to Dragao de Mar (Sea Dragon) Cultural Center. Built only ten years ago it is another breath taking structure, not only because of it's size: Four blocks with streets between them, joined by modern bridges, but by it's ambitiousness. The Cultural center houses theaters, a contemporary art museum, halls for the performing arts, a planetarium, typical restaurants housed in old buildings, and I can't remember what else, but Google surely does.

The thing is, this is not a rich big city, it just has a little over 3 million people in a developing country, yet the Cultural Center rivals the ones of much bigger and richer cities. There was a Picasso exhibition, among others, the day I went over there.

Brazilians are rightly proud of this place and no doubt it will help the next generations appreciate further their strong cultural legacy. Quite an amazing place.

The people of Fortaleza are reaching higher and farther, they do need better streets and highways in terms of infrastructure, and you do see poverty on the streets, but it's very livable city.

Money Exchange in Sao Paulo

In one Brazilian airport money exchange booth, up to 8 people are employed every 24 hours, and close to 500 white pages are printed, 300 of them signed. Anybody uses this? All this is done to give service to only about 100 customers. Based on a single booth observation. Your mileage may vary.

The lesson: Don't open a currency exchange in Brazil, open a Bar.

I’m in the Sao Paulo airport - Guarulhos - waiting for my connection to Fortaleza, drinking Smirnoff Ice in a check in area, not in a restaurant or a bar, they are all full, in the US i could get arrested for this... but Brazil is very unlike the US. Besides, I worked hard for this Smirnoff, since I had to wait 15 minutes for two lady’s at a currency exchange booth to exchange a zillion of local notes into a couple of thousand dollars.

Exchanging one single bill in Brazil includes showing your passport and signing 3 papers, two of them get stapled together so they won’t separate on the road to nowhere, where they are read by nobody and then begin a slowly rottening process in a far away warehouse, because of the heat and humidity. The third copy get’s stapled with another two papers you don’t have to sign, and they get piled on a different tower of paper, that will take a different route via somewhere, until it’t gets to the warehouse in nowhere to follow a similar process.

All this is done by just one clerk and the small glass office is guard by a guy who died about 4 days ago, according to fis facial expression and body odor.

The important part of all this is neither you, or the clerk read any of the stuff printed, 5 sheets in total, for similar reasons, the guy doesn’t give a rat’s ass about his job, and after 15 minutes neither do you, you just sign, donating all your earthly posessions, giving him licene to kill you and sell your organs, and leasing your soul to the devil for a thousand years, you just don’t care.... in the small glass office you are holding your breath unless your are a fan of eau de armpit.

So if you wonder why the hell the Amazonas forests are dissapearing? it’s because each time you exchange a 100 dollar bill, in or out of the country, 5 pages of perfectly white paper get printed, and stored to decay, until they become a paper goo, that may or may not become paper again.

It’s a fantastic slow process creates jobs for two people that have the capacity to process 32 exchanges in a 8 hour shift. If you consider the airport may have it’s exchanges booths 24 hours a day (don’t count on it), each exchange booth can require three or four shifts, that means jobs for 6 to 8 people to be able to produce 96 exchanges in 24 hours. Isn’t it fantastic? ( Yes... you the engineers out there noticed i'm assuming that there's and endless supply of customers, which with Guarulhos traffic is about right).

That why you see so few ATMs in Sao Paulo’s airport.

Ok, they are announcing in perfect portuguese (and I only understand the imperfect version I speak) on the incredibly loud speakers, that chirp incredibly loud at the end of each sentence, that my boarding gate has been changed to somewhere. Gotta go.

Update: I'm at beautiful Fortaleza finally, the day is perfect and so is the endless beach, so I'm out of here. We got here last night after waiting 90 minutes on the plane for guess what... Paperwork !

Why Peruvian Food?

Why on Earth is Peruvian Food so Good?
(just based on opinions and table talk, no research)

On a recent trip to Peru for the day this week, i had two excellent meals, and though I have often wondered how is it that Peru has a more elaborate cuisine than all the other latin american countries, I had never stopped to analyze why. This trip's food was so great that during digestion my brain had the chance to to pause and wonder how is it that Peru has developed such a wonderful culinary talent.

Yes, you can have good Peruvian food all over the world these days but trust me, in Peru it's still best. I had the luck this last tuesday to have lunch at Señor Limon and dinner at beachside Cala. The choice of the first one was a simple one, it was close to the office and had a big projection TV for my two companions to watch the soccer game of the current world cup currently held in South Africa, I sat facing away from the screen as i'm not a soccer guy I decided to concentrate on the plate.

I started with a mixed fish Cebiche (fish marinated or cooked in lemon, not really cooked, just oxidized), it came as usual accompained with this delicious giant corn, pumpkin, purple onions and just the right amount or very spicy rocotto.
Then came the main course and I ordered more fish, a fried Chita, where they fry the whole fish, and it comes with baked banana and covered on thin sliced baked garlic (luckily I sat alone in the plane out of Lima that night). The plate looked so gorgeous that I had to take a picture of it and that prompted the idea for this article. I'll be posting the picture later in case you are interested in seeing it through my eyes.


All that fried fish needed something to help it go, and in this case a really good Peruvian Pisco Sour was the choice.

At night at the beautiful Cala, by the sea we had a great entree of assorted peruvian specialties, and then a very good looking and delicious baked Mero steaks that came with two varieties of risotto: pesto and mushrooms, they all went delicious with the Mero. Again Pisco Sour was the the drink of choice, this time the large size called Cathedral.



Desserts are equally good, i had a great Ponderaciones at lunch and my favorite Tres Leches at night, Tres Leches is a delicious and wet piece of cake that had some sort of milk based mix on it, like a very thin dulce de leche. Ok i'm not sure what it is, but it's delicious and you can look it up.

Then they picked me up and drove me to the airport. Just one day of worked but spiced with two excellent meals and great talk. AH yes, the talk, i got carried away with the dishes and forgot about the theory of why it is so good...

Maybe it's as my friend Tomas said, the fact that Peru was a hub for 300 years in the time it was a Virreinato as a Spanish colony, maybe it's the multiple immigrations that came after that from China and Japan, and the african influence received during the slavery years.
Most likely i's all of them together, but the good thing for Peruvian cuisine is that this immigrations and influences were not repelled or put away in ghettos but embraced, incorporated into the food and mixed to produce a great combination of flavors. Some more simple as the Chifa (Chinese food with a strong Peruvian accent) but most modern are more elaborated and produce a delicate fusion of flavors.

Today travelling to Peru is a culinary experience, and they are really proud of the fine food they serve, from the mother who cooks for her son, to the restaurant owner that loves do see his customers delighted.

Going south of the South

a bike travel essay by Marcelo Miranda Sk.

Here we have to descend slowly, LOTS OF BRAKE”, I half shouted, so that my wife Caroline would hear me through the helmets and the noise of both bikes. We were facing a long downhill straight with loose stones and mud from the ongoing rain. At the end we could see the beach of Caulín and the sea from the Chacao channel, at the north of Chiloe island, in the south of Chile.

Somehow the fact that we didn’t see the hotel in this beautiful picture didn’t ring a bell.

The loose gravel road wouldn’t have been much of a challenge for two bikes, except this were road bikes, a VFR 750 and a Buell Thunderbolt, with street tires, and with a weight of about 400 pounds each, and loaded like camels. When I started descending on the Buell I realized “lots of brake” wasn’t the method as my bike started moving with both wheels sliding and not too much control. I released the brakes so the wheels would start rolling again, I made sure I was in first gear, and dodged a couple of falls, I was on the beach in thirty long seconds.

One minute later Caroline was on the edge of the beach, also with a couple of very close calls (read near-falls) on her back.

The hotel was now in sight, it was at the southern end of a 600 feet beach. Again, lot’s of fun for an enduro bike, but a bat idea for these fat bikes loaded up to their teeth, the fact that it was raining and the tide was rising didn’t help either.

Caroline’s face said it all … “I’m walking!” she added anyway. So I volunteered to ride both bikes in the loose sand.

We arrived at the hotel just with the last light of dusk. This was the first night of our nine days vacation to Chiloe. After storing the bikes in a barn (it was raining like a revenge from something our ancestors did to someone really connected up there), reward came in the forms of a dry beachfront cabin with a hot fireplace, a hot shower, dry clothes (garbage bags in the saddlebags you know?) and a two generous glasses of pisco sour (think of a strong margarita but with the flavor of a grape distillate) we had bought a few miles back.

We would later recall the two previous days of our journey as we told them to other guests and out host Innes, in a hot tub of salty sea water under the rain right on the beach, with a lot more Pisco Sour and cabernet wine in our blood streams.

We had started the journey a couple of days earlier out of Santiago, where we live. We rode to my in-laws’ farm, about 250 miles south and spent the night there. The farm is close to the highway, so the next morning we were up early, and in two minutes we were on the highway, heading south, facing a 500 mile day, quite a bit for Caroline who had only one previous overnight trip experience the previous year. But she managed all right, we stopped every 150 miles to refuel the bikes, get some coffee and adjust clothing according to the weather.

We stopped in Valdivia for the night, a medium sized city with decent lodging and meals. Once we parked the bikes, unpacked and changed into civilian clothes we decided to walk the 2 miles that separated us from downtown to eat something, mainly because we feared if we didn’t walk we wouldn’t climb on the bikes the next day, and we had a whole week ahead of us.

After a good night sleep both of the bike saddles had been erased form our anatomies and we were ready to go again, this time we faced two challenges: extremely probable rain and wind and the ferry crossing, which in stormy weather I recalled was quite ugly because you had to hold the bike instead of being on the upper deck, where the people that don’t want to get seasick go.

Neither of the two menaces materialized and we had a pleasant trip up to the ferry, with little rain, and we arrived last onboard, so we crossed as soon as the bikes were up. Once we got to the hotel by the already described loose gravel and mud road and the rainy beach, we went on to have dinner, a wonderful Chilean salmon and a great wine, and after dinner a couple more pisco sours. This is the national cocktail, and it rules!

We went on to meet our wonderful guest who runs the Hotel de la Colorina (The redhead’s hotel – yeah, guess the color of her hair), and some of her local friends who were dining and partying there that night.

After a few hours chat we ended about 10 of us in a hot tub (all with swimsuits in case you were wondering), and drinking more red wine under a starry sky with the roar of the rising tide as background.

We slept like babies (like drunk babies probably) and the next morning after a good breakfast we reluctantly left the place under a postcard perfect sunny day, and rode 100 feet to discover the beautiful pavement road that arrived from the south to our hotel and that would conduct us to the rest of the island.

After 8 years of not riding in the area some of the roads were improved (this was a good example), and others were still in construction, as we found out later. But overall the riding was good and for this southern region the weather was superb.

We were headed to check out a piece of land by a lake I had bought a decade earlier in the middle of Chiloe island, 800 miles south from home. You’ll have to trust me, this purchase did made a lot of sense at the time. We had one more day to go first, to get a 4 wheel drive vehicle and check out if we could drive up to the place or boat was still the only way to get there.

To be continued?