I love food. It’s probably my favorite part of traveling. I also love saving money. That’s why on a recent trip to São Paulo, Brazil, where I was staying on the expensive Avenida Paulista, I was excited to learn about the Mercado Municipal.
Located on Cantareira Street, off the San Bento subway stop on the blue line, is a massive market selling various kinds of fruits, meats, cheeses, cakes, nuts, candies, oils, wines and more. It’s a very cultural experience, as locals rely on the market to get specialty items and when they have a lot to buy. It’s also a great way to introduce yourself to high-quality, local foods in Brazil. In fact, the food sold at Mercado Municipal is so good, most of the restaurants in the city purchase their ingredients from there.
The best part is the people selling the foods, especially the fruits, stand with cutting knives and napkins ready to give you samples. I got to try various fruits I had never seen or heard of before, and even some I had, just to see if they tasted different. I’m not sure if I was just excited to be in a new city, but strawberries definitely seem sweeter and juicier in Brazil.
Even when the stands didn’t appear to be giving away samples, if you ask to try something, it’s usually not a problem. Even though I don’t speak Portuguese, looking hungry with a longing stare got me a sampler of nuts that filled me for hours.
Still want to continue your journey of São Paulo’s unique flavors? Take the subway to the Ana Rosa stop on the green line. On the corner of Rua Joaquim and Rua Aurea is an off-the-radar popsicle shop called Frutos do Cerrado. While tiny in size, the shop sells ice pops, gelato and sorbets of more fruit flavors than I’ve ever seen in my life. Along with typical varieties like mango, banana and grape, there was buriti, amora, jatoba and tamarindo, to name a few. They even have a flavor for the caipirinha, Brazil’s national drink.
It’s always an odd experience to see a familiar name in the news. Dr. Robert Benfer was a professor at the University of Missouri-Columbia when I was getting my master’s in archaeology. I was studying the early medieval Europe while he taught about prehistoric Peru, so our paths didn’t cross much, but I did go to some of his lectures. I especially remember his skewering of the controversial book “The Bell Curve” for its shoddy use of statistics.
Dr. Benfer has announced that he has discovered several effigy mounds in Peru — artificial hills in the shapes of birds, including a giant condor, a 5,000-year-old orca, a duck and a caiman/puma monster.
“The mounds will draw tourists, one day,” Benfer said in a university press release. “Some of them are more than 4,000 years old. Compare that to the effigy mounds of North America, which date to between 400 and 1200 A.D. The oldest Peruvian mounds were being built at the same time as the pyramids in Egypt.”
An interesting aspect of this discovery is that it shows how science works, and occasionally doesn’t work. Because it was thought there were no effigy mounds in Peru, nobody looked for them. Benfer himself admits to not seeing one that was right in front of him. Once he noticed several animal-like patterns on Google Earth, however, he rethought his assumptions. He set out to survey six valleys and found effigy mounds in all of them. Another old theory is discarded in the face of new evidence.
Some of the mounds are more than 1,000 feet long and are only clearly visible from above, much like Peru’s famous Nazca Lines. Dr. Benfer suggests they may represent the Andean zodiac. Indeed, many appear to have astronomical alignments. A giant condor’s eye, for example, lines up with the Milky Way when observed from a nearby temple.
Dr. Benfer’s discovery has been published in the journal Antiquity and he is heading back to Peru this summer to look for more effigy mounds.
Photo courtesy Dr. Robert Benfer. More photos, including Google Earth images, can be seen here.
In a landmark move, Whole Foods has just announced that starting on April 22 — Earth Day — it will no longer sell seafood from depleted or otherwise unsustainable fisheries, or species harvested with ecologically damaging methods such as trawling. The industry ratings for these species are determined by the Blue Ocean Institute and California’s Monterey Bay Aquarium, which produces a popular “Seafood Watch Recommendations” pocket guide and phone app for shoppers. Say bye-bye to Atlantic halibut, skate, octopus and sole.
It’s a bold move for the world’s largest, most powerful green grocery chain to defer customer demand for better buying practices, but according to Whole Foods’ seafood quality standards coordinator Carrie Brownstein via an AP article, “In the long term, what we’re really looking to do is help reverse trends of overfishing and by-catch, so that really we can move the industry as a whole toward greater sustainability.”
So how does what you eat here at home have a global impact? Depletion of any fishery always has a negative effect on the food chain because of a ripple effect. Foreign fisheries may also employ unsound fishing methods that increase by-catch (think dolphins and other aquatic species, albatross, etc.). You may love Chilean sea bass (it’s actually Patagonian toothfish) but it has long been a fishery on the verge of collapse and by purchasing it at the store or ordering it at a restaurant, you create demand for that product. Once a species is extinct, it can seriously throw a marine ecosystem out of whack. Plus, you know, extinction kind of sucks.
It’s harder for world travelers to be on top of what’s sustainable and what’s not, especially if, like me, you love street food. In developing nations, especially countries with a coastline, fishing is usually a key part of the local economy. But saving our rapidly depleting oceans trumps putting a few pennies in local pockets: they’re not looking at the big picture, which is the more seafood we consume, the less there is to sell.
Order something besides seafood unless you’re positive it’s caught in a non-environmentally degrading way, from a healthy fishery. Go to the Monterey Bay Aquarium’s Seafood Watch Recommendations site for a global guide to what’s sustainable and what’s not. It offers alternatives, so odds are, you can travel and have your lobster dinner, too.
Eleanor Roosevelt and I have one thing in common: We both have stood inside of the Devil’s Throat.
Yes, those words came out right, and no, I haven’t been drinking.
Far less cult-like than it originally sounds, La Garganta del Diablo (The Devil’s Throat) comprises the most dramatic section of Iguazu Falls, a humbling series of waterfalls spanning the border of Argentina and Brazil.
Recently voted as one of the new Seven Wonders of the Natural World, Iguazu Falls was actually able to render me speechless. Not in that clichéd “I’m a travel writer so I should say ‘speechless,'” type of way but in the sense that I went into a zone, tuned out the world, and literally refrained from speaking for a solid one to two minutes.
As I mentioned here on Gadling while hiking in Oregon’s Umpqua National Forest, I believe that waterfalls, in their innate ability to entrance us humans, are akin to being “nature’s televisions.” If this reasoning holds true, then Iguazu Falls is nature’s IMAX theater.
Mrs. Roosevelt, however, was not rendered speechless by Iguazu Falls. Stoically staving off the instinct to mentally glaze over, she instead uttered a one-liner, which has been the foundation for Iguazu marketing campaigns for decades:
“Poor Niagara!”
That’s it. Poor Niagara. And really, what else needs to be said?
Iguazu Falls is so powerful in its intensity and so overwhelming in its scope that it arguably trumps any other waterfall complex on the planet. Comprised of 275 separate and distinct walls of water, which average 210 feet in height, at one point you can stand within the Iguazu Falls amphitheater and be surround by 260 degrees of waterfalls.
Sure, there are jet boat trips to the base of the waterfalls, swimming in roped off, calmer sections and photo opportunities at every conceivable overlook, but nothing in Iguazu Falls compares with walking out onto the metal gangplank and standing in the heart of the Devil’s Throat.
When planning a visit to Iguazu Falls, nearly everyone you meet will tell you to visit the Devil’s Throat last — logistically sound advice since visiting in the morning hours will leave you staring into the sun, however, the main reasoning for doing so follows the train of thought of saving the best for last.
An explosive crescendo, if you will, and what a crescendo it is.
Even the process of getting to the Devil’s Throat is an exotic adventure. First off, you have to get on the Ecological Jungle Train, which winds its way through dense forest teeming with crocodiles, panthers and fiery-billed toucans. Will you see any of these from your perch on the train? No. But the fact that they’re out there is exciting enough for me.
After departing the jungle train the next move is to walk out onto a metal gangplank, which slinks its way over the rushing, upper Iguazu River. It is one of those grated metal walkways where you can see right through the bottom; the proximity of the river to the bottom of your feet gives a sensation of literally walking over water.
Finally, at the terminus of the walkway, after crossing the expansive stretch of river, a viewing platform precariously peers into the depths of the Devil’s Throat.
A U-shaped chasm in the Earth, 492 feet long and 262 feet high, the water of the Iguazu River rushes with such ferocity into the “throat” that it’s impossible to see the bottom through the cloud of mist and foam. Staring down into the shifting white abyss, it becomes apparent that this is where water droplets come to die.
Peering out over the crowded platform, I am casually approached by a traveler from Peru visiting the falls with his family.
“You can tocame un fóto?” he inquires, nervously blending languages in his timid request.
“Por supuesto,” I agree as he hands me his oversized Nikon.
Backing up against the railing and motioning for his family to join him, I notice tears, like the falling waters beneath, begin to stream down the contours of his young daughter’s face.
This is because standing with your back to the Devil’s Throat isn’t fun. In fact, it’s terrifying. Even my wife in a wave of anxiety was only able to sneak a fleeting peek over the cliffhanging ledge.
To be fair, the construction of the platform is modern and sound, and I have zero doubts about its structural integrity. Nevertheless, there’s something about toeing the edge of a gaping cleft in the planet, which is aflame with the fury of nature that raises certain emotions in even the hardiest of travelers.
From the edge of the throat you cannot only watch rainbows emerge from the mists, but also feel the upward rush of wind in your hair. Cast your thoughts deep within the turbid foam as useless voices in your head are silenced by the sound of incessant thunder. Lazily watching a stick floating at the cusp of the river, you wonder if it has any idea of what’s in store. As many of us do while standing atop a waterfall of grandeur, you momentarily imagine what it would be like to be that stick.
Placidly floating, peacefully drifting and then, suddenly, this…
Want more stories? Read the rest of the “Vagabond Tales”here…
While traveling through Brazil, I discovered a new sport I had never seen before, but one I’d definitely love to try. The sport was created in 1965 on Copacabana Beach in Rio de Janeiro, as a way for football (soccer) players to be able to practice their skills without violating the terms of the formal football ban that was going on. It is similar to volleyball in that points are awarded to the opposing team when the one team “drops” the ball. To make the game a bit more challenging, there are only two players from each team allowed on the court at one time. While the sport is most popular in Brazil, it has gained international attention and is also played in the United Kingdom, Israel, Paraguay, Asia and the United States.
For a better idea of how the game is played, check out the above clip of a Footvolley match being played on Leblon Beach in Brazil.