Day 35 and 36: Ouro Preto to Belo Horizonte to Salvador- Gold, sushi, and a hot, beautiful colonial capital

Just when we realized we were getting a little "weird", when our private jokes seemed to be spinning out of control, when our secret language ceased to resemble English, when we felt as though we were playing both the role of Wilson and Tom Hank´s character in Castaway, we had several nice conversations with some people from Peoria and Colorado at a gold mine, Dierk (a very nice Dutchman) and a professor from University of Indiana.  We´ve had a wonderful time, just the two of us, but lately we´ve realized that a little social interatcion -- in English -- was very much needed.  And we got it.

 

We woke Monday morning in Ouro Preto hoping to visit a Natural Park and a mine, then to take a bus to Belo Horizonte.  Hoping is the operative word, because we found early in the day that the Park was closed on Monday.  We were pretty sure that nature happens 24/7, but apparently not in this part of Brazil.  So we went to the Minas Passegem mine.  The mine was pretty incredible, opened in the early 1700s, closed in the 1980s.  An estimated 30 tons of gold were extracted from the mine, primarily by slaves.  We took a sketchy little cable car, very much like in Indiana Jones, about 300 meters under the surface of the Earth for our tour.  The tunnels were very large, much bigger than any mine Chris has visited in Colorado.  We saw many minerals in the walls, huge 3 meter thick injections of quartz and, incredibly enough, gold that was too difficult to extract.  There was also an underground lake that the LP reported as swimmable (we brought our suits!) but the guide said it was full or arsenic.  We made the choice to not swim. 

 

We returned to Ouro Preto for the last time, went to our favorite pizza place and were fortunate enough to have Dierk sit next to us as we were about to leave.  Dierk is a medical salesman from Holland on a 12 day vacay in Brazil.  We had a nice time for the next few hours talking shop (travel) and other things.  It was great to talk with someone on our travels.  Its not that we´ve been anti-social, but our apartment living for the previous 15 days had limited our opportunities to talk with people. Also, in a lot of places we´ve stayed, we´ve been the only English speaking people around.  For example, our lovely pousada in Ouro Preto was full of a large group of French travelers when we arrived.  They were quite friendly and we would spend our breakfasts together watching the hummingbirds, but speaking with them beyond "Comme dit on ___?" and "Ou est La Tour Eiffel" was, unfortunately (especially for Chris who took 7 years of French) beyond our abilities.

 

We then took the bus to Belo Horizonte.  LP describes Belo as "modern".  In LP-ese, modern means ugly.  Not much to say about Belo except that we stumbled upon a per-kilo sushi place.  Per-kilo restaruants are the rage in Brazil, but have not partaken, until we saw "Sushi Beer".  We gorged oursevles on sushi and decided to change our itinenerary.  We decided to fly to deplane in Salvador where our layover was on the way to Porto Seguro. We could still hit beaches closer to Salvador, plus this buys us more time for our journey west for the Parque. NOTE: The lovely airport attendants at TAM changed our tickets free of charge, and threw in a bonus better time for our departure in 2 weeks! Try that in the USA (or Holland, as Dierk commented after getting a full refund for a bus ticket he was no longer going to use!)

 

Our flight to Salvador was uneventful (no pukies from O).  Again, hour long bus trips surrounded our flights.  We talked with a nice professor from University of Indiana on the bus trip to Salvador who is studying water usage in South American ports (what we learned was a little disturbing).  Salvador is an incredible city, we´ve only just started exploring.

 

Tomorrow we take an overnight bus to Lencois for a few days of hiking in what is supposed to be an incredible National Park.