Tchau tchau, Ouro Preto

6/27/14

For our last day in Ouro Preto, we hired an English-speaking guide (holy crap, it was expensive – but worth it) to take us on a driving tour of the city. [Nick: I did the driving, not the tour guide J] Not an easy thing to do since the cobblestone streets are so narrow and steep, especially when you have to contend with oncoming drivers and random pedestrian crossings, zooming motorcycles, giant speed bumps and death defying parking spaces on the sides of cliffs. But by the end of the six hour tour, Nick was a pro at it!

Igreja de Nossa Senhora do Rosario

Igreja Sao Francisco de Paula

Once again, I don’t have too many pictures to share, since photography is not often allowed inside the churches, but trust me when I say we visited some amazingly beautiful Baroque churches! If you are ever in Brazil, you HAVE to visit Ouro Preto. After hiring the tour guide and learning, what I thought, were really cool stories about the different churches (which I had planned to share here), I wanted to know more; so I looked up their histories online. Sadly, it turns out at least two of the stories we were told are total B.S. (according to Google and Wikipedia), which really sucks – not just because we paid so much for the damn tour guide, but because I was really interested in learning about the history of such an amazing town. Oh well. Lesson learned: do your homework before hand and don’t trust your hotel to hire you a reputable guide. That’s what the internet is for, right? That’s now our main source of reliable, factual information – not human beings. Go figure. (If only Rick Steves traveled outside of Europe!)

Chapel of Padre Faria

Chapel of Padre Faria Altar

Chapel of Padre Faria

Igreja de Nossa Senhora do Carmo

Igreja de Santa Efigenia

Igreja Matriz de Nossa Senhora do Pilar

Igreja Sao Francisco de Assis

Santuario da Imaculada Conceicao do Antonio Dias

The town has experienced a huge bump in tourism thanks to the World Cup but wasn’t overrun with tourists like you might see in Cusco or similar tourist destinations. Ouro Preto is still a “working man’s town” as about 80% of the population makes a living in the iron industry. The remaining percentage are students at the local university or work in the service industry, for locals and tourists alike. We saw tons of kids hanging out flying kites. I wouldn’t say Brazil is an overly windy place but it definitely has enough wind that kite flying seems to be a very common past time – not something you normally see in the States except on holidays or especially windy places. [Nick: Actually, the North of Brazil is always windy. The areas around Fortaleza, Natal, Recife and Salvador have constant winds blowing from East to West, that the locals say are the African winds. There it was always windy.]

Kite Flying

Kid playing soccer

Our tour guide took us to another delicious per kilo restaurant for lunch (seriously, we need places like this in the U.S.!) and then as a “bonus” on our tour, took us up through the hills to a local state park. We got fantastic views of the forested valley below (if only we had time to go hiking on this trip!) & while we could hear water running underneath the rocks, it’s so dry at this time of year that the waterfall normally on display was completely out of sight. Dry season is a serious thing here.

City Park

Hills outside Ouro Preto

Small Spring

Dry waterfall

Cat & Nick outside Ouro Preto

Before leaving Ouro Preto, we checked out the local soapstone market. Aside from native tropical woods like jacaranda, which have been completely overharvested (the region has NO tall trees left), soapstone is the main carving medium in this region. And it’s beautiful. We watched a few artisans chipping away at the soft stone (kind of like traditional tattooing) and admired their decorative paintings on all manner of tourist knick-knacks and kitschy souvenirs.

Plaza Tiradentes

We headed out of town, back to Belo Horizonte where we would catch an early flight the next morning back to Recife for Costa Rica’s next game. A portion of our drive was along the Estrada Real – Brazil’s version of the Camino Real in California – which was essentially a 17^th century road built by slaves to move gold and other goods to the ports in Rio and Sao Paulo. [Nick: Prettiest drive in Brazil.] 

Estrada Real

Estrada Real

Congonhas

Along the way, we stopped in Congonhas to view what we had read was Brazil’s most famous work of art: Aleijadinho’s 1805 statues of the 12 Prophets outside of the Basílica do Bom Jesus de Matosinhos. The basilica was accompanied by six outdoor chapels depicting life size models of the life of Christ. It’s rumored that the artist carved Portuguese clothes on his sculptures of the oppressive Romans to draw parallels between them and the Portuguese, who had crushed Brazil’s independence rebellion just a decade earlier. The church yard was like a tiny 19^th century oasis amongst the modernized buildings and crazy winding roads of Congonhas. Even with a dying battery and the future of our Google Maps guidance in question, it was worth the detour. [Nick: Fe lent us a smart phone for our trip; it has been a godsend for driving around. Maybe I should buy and unlocked smart phone for future travel, particularly if I am going to be driving in an area where I cannot speak the local language.]

Basílica do Bom Jesus de Matosinhos

The Prophets

The Prophets

The Prophets

The Prophets

The Prophets

The Prophets

Story of Christ

Or so we thought! With the last remaining juice on our borrowed iPhone, we tried to find our way back to Belo Horizonte. Ugh, why can’t we get a car with a working USB port?! It would make the drive so much less stressful and uncertain. Instead, we are hanging on to every ounce of battery we have trying to only use the GPS when we are completely lost, which unfortunately is most of the time since the roads are not labeled and (as we learned) driving at night on dry, dusty roads is much more death-defying around here than one would expect. We stopped at a local gas station to try and plug the phone in for a while to make it last just a little bit longer. Amazingly, the gas station had an outlet we could use, so we decided to grab a snack at the outdoor restaurant and watch some kids play in the neighboring soccer field. Something I don’t think we would have been able to do at a gas station in the U.S.!

With a dying phone it became much harder to navigate the often unlabeled streets but we finally got on the highway to BH. Nick had a stressful time of it with all the super-fast cars and then the very slow trucks in areas where there were no lane markers. Then we hit rush hour traffic in BH and as we inched along our phone was rapidly dying. Knowing that we would need directions to actually make it to our hotel, we tried to get off at a mall, but that was hard because of all the closed roads due to construction. It then took us three shopping centers before we found one with an outlet that we could use to recharge for a while. Will this night never end?!

We were both stressed from Belo Horizonte’s never ending highway construction, incomplete signage, no u-turns, and zero phone battery. Our two hour drive between Congonhas and BH had turned into a four hour detour. But recharge it we did (thankfully) as well as grab a bite to eat (Nick tried something called a pizza burger!) before finally making it to our hotel. We were so relieved to not be driving anymore, it was hard to be mad that our hotel was charging 3x the usual rate since Brazil would be playing in BH the next day. Fuck it; we needed to get off the road and get some sleep.

A Pizza Burger