Maranhão é destaque no The New York Times

          Seth Kugel for The New York Times Lençóis Maranhenses National Park.

O Maranhão foi destaque na página online do jornal americano The New York Times. Em sua coluna Frugal Traveler – Seeing The World on a Budget, o jornalista Seth Kugel, colaborador do matutino novaiorquino, escreveu quatro matérias sobre as belezas e curiosidades do Estado.

A coluna, uma espécie de roteiro turístico com dicas para uma viagem mais barata a lugares exóticos da América Latina, abordou duas atrações turísticas maranhenses e o refrigerante Guanará Jesus, definido por ele como uma bebida refrescante com um leve sabor picante ao final.

Kugel descreveu sua recente viagem ao Brasil com uma escala no Maranhão e destacou sua viagem de barco ao longo do Rio Preguiças e a visita ao Parque Nacional dos Lençóis Maranhenses.

Nas reportagens, o jornalista dá dicas de como se deslocar até os pontos turísticos, incluindo opções de meios de transporte, hospedagem e preços. Ele apresentou o Parque Nacional dos Lençóis Maranhenses, por exemplo, como um dos lugares mais belos que já viu.

“Uma espécie de deserto na costa atlântica do estado do Maranhão, no Nordeste do Brasil, onde o que parece uma alucinação é realmente real. As areias lisinhas e os intermináveis oásis dos Lençóis formam um visual que, me desculpem o Rio de Janeiro, as Montanhas Rochosas canadenses e minhas ex-namoradas, são as coisas mais bonitas que eu já vi”, relata Seth Kugel.

Sobre o Guaraná Jesus, o colaborador do The New York Times teceu elogios, destacando sua cor rosa choque e seu gosto de chiclete. “Quando o proprietário da pousada onde estou hospedada disse que tinha no meu frigobar (por dois reais, ou pouco mais de um dólar), eu rapidamente abri um gelado”, escreveu o jornalista. Confira as matérias, na íntegra:

Guaraná Jesus: Crisp, With a Slightly Tart Aftertaste

By SETH KUGEL

Seth Kugel for The New York TimesOne of my favorite guilty pleasures in traveling to a distant land for the first time, is that I suspend my no-sugary-soda policy and try whatever regional soft drink the local crowd favors. Sometimes, they’re terrible (I’m looking at you, Peru, with your neon-yellow Inca Kola that tastes like melted circus peanuts) and sometimes they’re fantastic. (Uruguay’s Paso de los Toros grapefruit soda rocks. Fresca, pffft!)

I’m in Maranhão state in northeastern Brazil, home to what has got to be the country’s most legendary local soda: Guaraná Jesus. Guaraná, as you may know, is an Amazonian fruit that flavors Brazil’s popular Antarctica brand sodas, which is available in the United States. But Guaraná Jesus is a local favorite. And only a local favorite. By policy, it is not sold outside the state (even after it was bought by Coca-Cola).

I had heard from everyone back in São Paulo that the stuff is terrible. Gross pink color. Tastes like chewing gum. Way too sweet. So when the owner of the inn I’m staying at said my frigo-bar was stocked with it (for two reais, or just over a dollar) I cracked open a cold one. Gross pink? Check. Tastes like chewing gum? Perhaps. Way too sweet? Actually, I found it crisp, with a slightly tart aftertaste. I’ll give it a B+.

I’m sure Jesus, were he alive today, would be happy to hear it. By the way, I’m referring to the soda’s inventor and namesake. Who did you think it was named after?

http://frugaltraveler.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/06/11/guarana-jesus-crisp-with-a-slightly-tart-aftertaste/

Whitch boat to take?

Going local, on a “barco de linha.”

There are two ways to go down the Preguiças River from Barreirinhas, the perfectly acceptable two-bit town that serves as a base for visiting Lençóis Maranhenses National Park, and Atins, a coastal speck of a village on the edge of the park that sounds like it’s more my style.

One is to take the standard tour boat, which speeds along the river, stopping at a few picturesque spots along the way, to play with monkeys, visit a lighthouse, that sort of thing. You get to Atins in about two hours, and it costs between 50 and 60 reais – about $30.

The other is to go local, on a “barco de linha,” which seems to be Portuguese for a very slow boat that you share with locals and farm animals. It takes maybe twice as long, makes no stops, and costs eight reais.

What to do? Neither is totally out of budget range, considering that the pousada (inn) I booked there is dirt cheap. There are clear advantages to the quick boat: it sounds like fun and gets me to Atins easily in time to arrange for an afternoon excursion into the national park. The slow boat is a different kind of fun, of course, but I’m on a pretty tight time frame – have to be back in the state capital of São Luis on Saturday – and if something goes wrong, I’m going to miss out on not just the monkeys and lighthouse but some time in Atins as well.

I was pondering this during another standard 50-real tour I took today into the park, when I overheard a conversation between two of my fellow travelers, older women from Rio de Janeiro. As we had just left the stunning dunes and lakes of the Lençois (more on that next week), they started talking about how much they loved Las Vegas. Another man in our group joined the conversation. “I love the Bellagio!” The ladies agreed.

My decision was made. I don’t know what the local commuters talk about on the slow boat to Atins, but I’m sure it’s not the Bellagio.

http://frugaltraveler.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/06/10/which-boat-to-take/

Finding Mirages in Brazil

By SETH KUGEL

Imagine you’re the hero in one of those old movies, desperately lost in a windswept desert, undulating dunes stretching to the horizon. Out of water, tongue parched and skin blistered, you drop to your knees. Vultures circle overhead. (O.K., maybe you’re in a comic strip, not a movie.) Yet there, in the distance, is a crystal blue pool – no, wait, dozens of them – and you push forward, fantasizing about diving in, slaking your thirst, soothing your miserably sunburned skin. It’s a mirage, of course. Dozens of perfect blue pools don’t just magically appear in the desert.

If you followed Seth Kugel’s attempt to outrun the Cavalacanga, these splendid pictures may come as a surprise. They were taken before his unintentional dip into a pool ruined his cellphone and camera. After a short detour to replace both, our Frugal Traveler is back on track.

Except in Lençóis Maranhenses National Park, a sort of inverse-logic desert tucked away by the Atlantic coast of Maranhão state in northeast Brazil where what seems a hallucination is actually real. The barely off-white silky sands and endless cool oases of the Lençóis are such a visual stunner that, with apologies to Rio de Janeiro, the Canadian Rockies and my ex-girlfriends, they may be the most beautiful things I’ve ever seen.

Lençóis Maranhenses National Park.The 570-square-mile park has long been on my must-visit list, but it shot right to the top when I realized my that Frugal voyage from São Paulo to New York would begin in June. That’s the perfect month to visit: the recently ended rainy season has filled the lakes, but the July and August crowds haven’t yet filled the hotels. It’s also the right time to visit the Maranhão’s state capital, São Luís, which has a special way of celebrating Brazil’s annual Festas Juninas, or June Feasts. It’s all about dancing oxen, but more on that later.

The whole thing can be done on the cheap. I found one-way fares to São Luís from Rio or São Paulo as low as 269 reais (about $150, at 1.76 reais to the dollar) on the Brazilian airlines Gol and TAM, and there are regular buses (29 reais) that run the four-hour route from the São Luís bus terminal near the airport to Barreirinhas — the tourism base town for the Lençóis. (Just coordinate your flight with the bus schedule, or you might end up like me, landing at 1:30 a.m., bribing the night clerk of a 0.001 star hotel near the airport to let you crash unofficially for 20 reais, and then staggering off to catch the 6 a.m. bus.)

The breakfast area and bar at Pousada São Luís in BarreirinhasMy first order of business upon reaching Barreirinhas was to find a reasonably priced pousada, Portuguese for a small hotel or inn. The winner was the six-room Pousada São José, a bargain at 55 reais a night for an air-conditioned room and a relaxing restaurant and bar area that backs up to a creek and is surrounded by tropical vegetation. The mother and son who recently took over the place, Roseli Aparecida Farias and Bruno Valentin, were chatty, helpful and dedicated; Ms. Fariasalso contributes her homemadepapaya marmalade to the included breakfast of fruits, breads, eggs and juices that was nicer than the price suggested it should be.

The first afternoon, I took a standard 50-real tour to the nearest big lagoons in the Lençóis, including Lagoa Azul, Lagoa do Peixe and a few others. My group was all Brazilian, which makes this a good time to note that Brazil has many charms, but a multilingual tourism industry is not one of them. But here, gorgeous white sands and dipping in lakes that makes the blazing sun almost irrelevant don’t require narration.

Many visitors stay based in Barreirinhas the whole time, heading out on tours to other lagoons, or on boat trips or to play with monkeys. But organized tours are not my thing, and those that I would have liked to do — a plane over the Lençóis, or an all-terrain quad-bike trip through them, were way beyond my $70 (123-real) daily budget.

Instead, I followed advice from friends in São Paulo and took an eight-real boat trip to a smaller, quieter town between the park and the Atlantic Ocean: Atins. On the boat, which I shared with a local couple, their 2-year-old grandson, the crew and a few sacks of rice and manioc flour, my fellow passengers recommended spending the next night in Canto de Atins, a tiny settlement a 90-minute hike from Atins. It’s known to travelers almost exclusively for the fresh grilled shrimp Luzia Diniz Santos serves to hungry adventurers at tables in her family’s home, but what most people don’t know is that same family also rents out rooms for just 20 reais ($11) a night.

Luzia’s house (and restaurant and pousada) in Canto de Atins.That doesn’t get you much, materially speaking anyway: a small room with bed and hammock, use of an outhouse and outdoor shower, electricity for a few hours a night via generator, and coffee and toast for breakfast. It’s not so much a step up from camping as a step sideways. But Luzia and her family live in a landscape of utter calm, under the palms on a strip of sandy prairie between the ocean and the dunes of the Lençóis.

Also in Canto de Atinsis an excellent tour guide named Cláudio, who for 30 reais the next morning took me out hiking on a solo tour of the lagoons near Luzia’s place. We climbed down and up and across the dunes, the only sign of other living creatures the entire time an unattended herd of goats crossing in front of us. The lagoons by Canto de Atins — like most lagoons in the Lençóis — are so rarely visited they don’t have official names. That’s my kind of tour.

But the best was yet to come. As I lunched on Luzia’s famous shrimp (O.K., but nothing to blog home about) two quad bikes arrived, one carrying a guide and another carrying a Brazilian couple who had paid 320 reais ($181) for the day trip. While the couple dug into some shrimp, Luzia called me over. “You want to go back to Barreirinhas the exciting way?” she asked. And soon I had paid 30 reais($17) to catch a ride on the back of the guide’s bike, and was coasting over the dunes, and luxuriating in nameless, gorgeous lagoons, for 90 percent off the going rate for a quad bike tour.

After a final night in the Pousada São José, it was back to São Luis on Saturday for a taste of the Festas Juninhas. In much of Brazil, they take on a country flavor, often accompanied by the old-timey, accordion-based sound of forró music. But São Luís does it a bit differently. There’s plenty of forró, and other dances both Portuguese and African in origin, but the main attraction is a tradition called “bumba-meu-boi.” It’s a curious musical and theatrical combination revolving around the legend of a ranch hand named Francisco whose wife gets a craving to eat the tongue of their employer’s pet ox, or boi. Dedicated husband that he is, Francisco kills the ox, the ranch owner is furious, and so on and so forth, but Indian shamans are called in, the ox is resurrected, and everyone celebrates.

Dozens of groups put on wildly varied bumba-meu-boi performances, but all feature the same characters, dressed in festive, ornate attire reminiscent of Carnival. The Saturday night I was in town I hit up two of the main venues: the grand stage at Praça Maria Aragão, attended by thousands, and the other in Reviver, the historic district, which had three more intimate stages. (A third spot, the Arraial da Lagoa de Jansen, came highly recommended, but I didn’t make it there.)

A bumba-meu-boi group performs in São Luís.I loved bumba-meu-boi for three reasons. First, the spectacle itself was amazing in that it was unlike anything that I’d ever seen but it was easy enough to recognize the main characters in the drama playing out onstage. Second, I didn’t spot any other foreigners, so I felt that I had stumbled onto something new. Third, it was all free.

And thank goodness, because I had decided to blow 110 reais ($62) of my daily budget at the pousada Portas da Amazônia, in a gorgeously (if only partly) restored 1839 building in Reviver. The utterly huge rooms had the cool original, creaky window shutters, and beds and towels of such luxury that any low-end traveler instantly realizes will not be his for long.

I chose Portas over the much cheaper option: a hostel just 25 reais a bed, in part beacuse Roseli and Bruno in Barreirinhas had suggested it, and in part because I had bargained them down via phone to 110 reais from 139, which would at least leave about 15 reais to spend the rest of the day.

And that turned out to be easy. I had a big free breakfast my last morning at Pousada São José, and held off for an early dinner at one of the food stands selling heaping plates of local cuisine to those attending the bumba-meu-boi performances.

For 8 reais ($4.50!) I got a pile of arroz de cuxá, a rice with herbs that is perhaps the most famous local dish, and a choice of three entrees. I went all shellfish: a crab pie of sorts, a shrimp stew called camaroada, and mussel-like sururu in the shell. Conclusion: filling and full of soul, but no chance Maranhense cuisine becomes the next big thing. The highlight of this state has nothing to do with food – or the tongues of pet oxen, for that matter. It’s the mirages come true.

http://frugaltraveler.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/06/15/finding-mirages-in-lencois-maranhenses-and-oxen-in-sao-luis/

 
The Cavalacanga Ate My Cellphone
 

Eleon heads off-road to save time before sunset.

At around 2 p.m. on Thursday, I arrived in Atins via slow boat from Barreirinhas. But my destination was still about 90 minutes away: the home and restaurant of Luzia Diniz Santos and family in Canto de Atins, a little settlement of 30-odd people on a strip of sandy prairie between the ocean and the dunes of Lençóis Maranhenses National Park in northeastern Brazil. Luzia’s grilled shrimp is famous, at least locally, and her place receives a steady stream of lunchtime guests. Her four simple guest rooms (for 20 reais, about $11, a night) are far less known. I found out only from a fellow boat passenger heading home to Atins, and changed my lodging plans accordingly.

The route to Luzia’s is a straightforward hike down a sandy road, something I was clearly capable of doing myself. But a sweet 11-year-old boy named Eleon stopped me as I got off the boat offered to serve as a guide for just 5 reais. He was smiley and gentle, but with a bit of spark: our trip would be extended to two hours, he said: one hour walking, and “one hour of adventure.” Sounded like good company.

When I insisted on stopping for lunch first in Atins, though, he got politely nervous, mentioning repeatedly that he had to be back home by sundown. At first I assumed it was a curfew set in place by his grandfather, who (he had told me right off the bat) had been raising him since his mother died in 2008. But Eleon, it turned out, was petrified of a mythical nighttime creature known as the Cavalacanga.

The Cavalacanga, he explained, is a fleet-footed, headless she-mule who gallops at such lightning speed that she can make it from Atins to Barreirinhas “in one minute.” If you cross her path, she simply leaps over your head, turning you into the Cavalacanga while she reverts to a human state. In turn, one assumes, you do the same to the next innocent tour guide who stays out past sundown.

To me, a stint as the Cavalacanga didn’t seem like such a bad deal. Who wouldn’t want to spend a few days as a headless horse, especially if it meant gallivanting through a place as gorgeous as the Lençóis? To answer my own question: Eleon, that’s who. So as the sun edged toward the horizon, he led me off the winding road, blazing a shortcut through a swampy, scrubby stretch of land, occupied only by the occasional cow or goat nibbling on brush.

The more direct route had its advantages – we stopped to pick some puçá, an oblong blue fruit a bit bigger than a blueberry, for example. And its disadvantage: it forced us to wade through a few shallow pools. And one that was not as shallow as it looked.

I should have followed right in Eleon’s footsteps, but instead, I veered a few feet to the right, hit a drop-off, and sank to my waist. My camera dipped briefly into the water, conking out, at least temporarily. My cellphone was ruined.

Ah, the irony. Eleon lived in mortal fear of the Cavalacanga. Yet it was I, the nonbeliever, who had been done in by her mythical powers.

http://frugaltraveler.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/06/14/the-cavalacanga-ate-my-cellphone/