About Town

6/26/14

We once again went out on a hunt for laundry only to end up back at our hotel, where they charged an arm and a leg for each item. Seriously, we have never had this much trouble trying to get our laundry done abroad. We later learned that there really are no laundry services except on the outskirts of town, so the hotels have corned the market and fixed the prices. Oh well.

We decided to check out the neighboring town of Mariana: another colonial gem in Minas Gerais but slightly more modernized and sprawling than Ouro Preto. Sadly, many of the areas cathedrals are closed for renovations and most of those that are open don’t allow photography. So I can’t show you the ornate chapels inside the churches, only the Baroque architecture on the outside. But I’m sure a quick Google search of Mariana or Ouro Preto would provide you with ample examples. One of the more unique sites was the Praça Minas Gerais with two cathedrals adjacent to each other (San Francisco de Assisi and Our Lady of Mount Carmel) in front of the pillory where slaves and criminals were shackled and put on display, conveniently located right in front of the city’s Counsel Chambers and Prison.

Plaza Minas Gerais

Casa de Camara e Cadeia

Casa de Camara e Cadeia

Igreja Nossa Senhora do Carmo

Igreja Sao Francisco de Assis

Nick in Shackles

View of Igreja Sao Francisco de Assis from Jail

Rua Dom Silverio

Overlooking Mariana

We stopped at a per kilo place in Mariana to watch the U.S. v. Germany game. Sadly, we couldn’t beat the Germans but at least we didn’t get crushed by them. After several attempts to start what we thought was a dead rental car, we were on our way again and headed to the Passagem gold mine. It’s an abandoned, exhausted mine that is now open to the public. Without the mine workers to pump out the water, however, many of the lower tunnels have flooded and are now used for cave diving. We descended in a trolley (à la Indiana Jones) 315m down (only able to see a small fraction of the actual tunnels), where our tour guide did his best to speak slowly so we could understand his “Portugñol” (the Brazilian equivalent of Spanglish). We learned that a slave’s average working life span in the mine was only 19 years, eventually causing the Portuguese to provide them with retirement after 15 years of labor. Countless men died in the mine in order to extract 4g of gold per ton of rock removed. [Nick: In the ‘90s I visited a gold mine in Colorado, there I was told they were profitable if they got 1g per ton; probably less today since gold prices have risen. Thus a concentration of 4x that is really spectacular.] In all, the Passagem mine provided 35 tons of gold during the 18^th century. [Nick: To do the math, if you get 4g per metric ton of material, you need to extract 227,000 tons of rock per ton of gold. For the total of 35 tons of gold, that means almost 8 million tons of rock had to be extracted. That is over 5000 Space Shuttles with Boosters or 22 Empire State Buildings.] We got to see a small example of how they panned for gold and I even got a small piece of black mineral rock to take back with me.     

Passagem Mine Entrance

Mine Trolly Cart

Mine Tunnels

Cat & Nick at Underground Lake

 

Demo of Panning for Gold

A small amount of gold dust at the center of the pan

After an exhausting day of site seeing ;o) we went back to the hotel to veg out and enjoy the jacuzzi, which much to our chagrin was once again cold. Do they just not do hot water in Brazil? We ended up roaming around town at night, taking in the city and, sadly, consuming our worst meal of the trip. We stopped at an outdoor restaurant that appeared to have a large crowd gathered, so we assumed the food would be good. Boy, were we wrong! I didn’t think pasta would be an easy dish to screw up – it’s really not that hard to prepare and you just end up throwing sauce on it anyway – but holy crap! We ordered a pesto dish that was literally UNPALATABLE. We returned to the room where I consumed a dinner of mini bar cashews and some dried apricots. Living the high life!

Plaza Tiradentes at night