My travel to Amazon Forests (2)

Rio de Janeiro .. a tropical flower

Statue of Jesus Christ on Corcovado Mountain overlooking Rio de Janeiro

If Brazilians seem to be looking for an answer to their traditional question: Which Brazilian beaches are the most beautiful? Which mountains are nobler: Corcovado or Bodhi Achocar? Which women are fresher: white, brown, black, mulatto, or those with skins that bear shades of all these colours? Everything is beautiful, strange, surprising, curious .. and awe in Rio de Janeiro.

From the airport to the coast of Cuba Cabana, where the main hotels are, you see that everything you have heard and read about this city is nonsense, not reality, because this city is what you see, touch and smell. As I stared out the bus window, I wondered: What city has all the landforms like this one? From the dark green mountains whose tops cover the clouds to the blue sky reflected by the ocean mirror. From the jungles of the Amazon growing on the shoulders of the city and embroidered with colourful birds and butterflies and bold wildflowers, red and yellow, to the heart of the old city and the “Rua El Fendico” market, which witnessed the glory of the Arab merchants who immigrated from the Levant at the beginning of the last century, those who left their children and grandchildren at the top of the ruling apparatus and in the leadership of Economic movement now. From the opulent neighbourhood of Leblon on Ipanema Bay and the furnished flamingo gardens on Guanabara Bay to the miserable neighbourhood of Rosina, Latin America's most miserable neighbourhood. What city on earth has this lavish beauty and extreme poverty?

Tropical Paradise

Rio de Janiro.. a tropical flower

From the airport to the coast of Cuba Cabana, where the main hotels are, you see that everything you have heard and read about this city is nonsense, not reality, because this city is what you see, touch and smell. As I stared out the bus window, I wondered: What city has all the landforms like this one? From the dark green mountains whose tops cover the clouds to the blue sky reflected by the ocean mirror. From the jungles of the Amazon growing on the shoulders of the city and embroidered with colourful birds and butterflies and bold wildflowers, red and yellow, to the heart of the old city and the “Rua El Fendico” market, which witnessed the glory of the Arab merchants who immigrated from the Levant at the beginning of the last century, those who left their children and grandchildren at the top of the ruling apparatus and in the leadership of Economic movement now. From the opulent neighbourhood of Leblon on Ipanema Bay and the furnished flamingo gardens on Guanabara Bay to the miserable neighbourhood of Rosina, Latin America's most miserable neighbourhood. What city on earth has this lavish beauty and extreme poverty?

Cubacabana beach

The only thing I longed for when the bus from the city airport dropped me off in front of the Grand Canada Hotel on the Copa Cabana beach was to take a cold shower and sleep for hours. I was exhausted after fifteen hours of continuous flying from London to Rio de Janeiro, in which I had not slept at all. During this I read several excerpts from various newspapers on the environment and the conference. I also read a little book about the flora and fauna of the Amazon.

In the hotel, I slept a few hours, but two tasks were waiting for completion today. The first is to obtain an identity card to enter the Earth Symposium for Civil Environmental Organizations, and the second is to complete the procedures for obtaining the identity of the official United Nations Environment Conference. I finished the first and didn't have time to complete the second. So, I made my way to the coast and sat outside a small beautiful café by the ocean. The chairs were crisp white, and the umbrellas over the tables were bright. A roving band of boys and girls was playing and singing rhythmic melodies with their African drums and other musical instruments, I ordered a cold drink and started to enjoy the pretty faces.

Make it stand out

make all the difference.

Mr Georgie and Mrs Lurda Clachei

My family in Rio

At 1 pm the next day the hotel receptionist called me saying that a lady was waiting for me downstairs. I was in my room writing the first Earth Summit report for my newspaper. I went down. She was Mrs LourdaClache mother of my friend Alex who came to take me to lunch. I called them yesterday and told them I had arrived. We agreed that the parents would pass by the hotel to take me with them. I guessed that Mrs Lourda, in her late sixties, was too elegant. Her apperians reveal extravagant wealth. She greeted me in English and said that Alex called them yesterday as well and asked about you and we told him that we are going to lunch together at the Club de Caesar today. She said that his son liked me very much. I told her that I like him too, as he has been a close friend of mine for years. Her husband Georgi was waiting for us in the car in front of the hotel. And he was the one who drove the car despite his obvious old age. Sorry, he said, I don't speak English, and even started to lose his Arabic because no one in the family speaks it. They said that they have a daughter, younger than Alex, called Elizabeth, and they call her Betty. She is an architect, and she wants to meet with me to know the news about her brother. I said I would be glad to meet her. They said they had an older son who is a successful lawyer.

**Georgie holding a honorary certificate**

Georgie: Brazil gave me everything

I asked Georgie why he chose Brazil as his home. I knew the story from Alex, but I loved hearing it from him, too. He said that his uncle had left Antioch and had settled in Rio de Janeiro since 1920, and he was the owner of a shop. As for him, he arrived six years later, when he was fifteen years old. He first worked with his uncle and then opened his own shop five years later. He brought his parents and brothers from Antioch. I asked him if he still felt that he was Syrian and Arab. He replied: No. He respects his origin, but now he is Brazilian, and he loves this country. He is the one who opened the doors of success to him and gave him everything. Then he turned to his wife, laughing, and patting her shoulder, saying: He gave me this woman too. I told him: Your wife is beautiful and wonderful. He laughed and said something to her in Portuguese, and she turned to me and said, "Thank you, you're very polite." I asked her if she was from Rio, and she replied she was from another city. Her father is Brazilian and her mother is Portuguese, she met Georgie while the family was on vacation and they bonded together. She said that his mother did not like her because she is not Arab, meaning a foreigner in her eyes. But she added, saying that she was a good woman, she convinced me as a wife to her son after I bore him three children, and she laughed

Georgi said that the club "Club de Caesar", in which we are going to have lunch, is a special club for a certain social group. And he made me understand in a tactful way that its members are wealthy and men of the ruling elite. The membership fee is twenty thousand US dollars to be paid once, and then the member pays monthly subscriptions for the services provided by the club.

The club was very luxurious and elegant. A group of one-storey buildings set among spacious gardens surrounded by a large lake for kayaking enthusiasts and sailing boats from its members. In order to get from the street to the club, it is necessary to pass a waterway with an electric shuttle ferry. It was a Sunday, and the main hall was almost full, lunch was offered on large tables, and everyone went to get whatever he wanted. Georgie and his wife introduced me to a number of Brazilian and Levantine families. They also introduced me to a general in the army, who, they said will help me in my project because he is a member of the Committee for the protection of the Amazon Indians. The man asked me about my newspaper and whether it reached Brazil, and then why I was interested in the Amazon. After lunch, we went out to the garden and talked over coffee about Brazil's political and economic problems.

I told them that I follow the news of corruption and bribery in English newspapers and that I read in the English edition of the newspaper "Jornal do Brasil" that the investigation committee of the Brazilian Congress had asked dozens of politicians to provide their testimonies on these accusations, the general said that these accusations are part of an attempt to undermine confidence in the current president. Otherwise, why did they choose this particular time to detonate their ticking bomb, when more than a hundred heads of state and government will attend Brazil for the Earth Summit?

I asked him: Do you not agree that the corruption that pervades Brazil, and indeed all of Latin America, is a relic of the rule of the generals? He answered sharply: No. I don't agree with you at all. These generals served the country a lot. Do you know anything about the era of General Humberto Castello Branco? This man awakened Brazil from its slumber, and brought about radical reforms in the political and economic situation, in education and in health. In his time, the rate of inflation fell sharply, the volume of exports increased, and the country's trade balance adjusted after being below the red line for many years. The problem is that you remember a bad example of the rule of the generals, but you forget dozens of good examples!

We left the club around five in the evening. I asked my hosts to take me to the "Gloria" hotel overlooking the flamingo gardens.

favelas. Of Rio

The origin of the inhabitants of the favelas dates back to the nineteenth century when their ancestors were soldiers of the young republic, they eliminated an uprising of the royalists, and then they found themselves without a cause, without work and shelter, so they built their huts on the slope of a hill they called “favela” in relation to the wildflowers growing there. d. In the two decades between 1920 and 1940, when Brazil was the master of the world markets in coffee, cocoa, rubber and types of fruits, many city dwellers left and joined farms to plough, harvest and share the wealth of their country, but neither the cycle of history nor the wheel of the economy always revolves in one direction. Prices fell and trade broke out after the markets were flooded with goods due to excessive production and exports, so the fields closed and the farmers left out. But to where do they go after they lost their roofs and their jobs in the fever of panting after quick profit, and who embraces them other than the huts of the miserable favelas. And the more they poured into it, the more these neighbourhoods expanded, and became more miserable and poorer.

On the pristine cheek of Rio are the favelas, wretched quarters that look like smallpox. Complete cities without services, occupying the slopes of the mountains overlooking the ocean, nesting in their dirty paths crime and drugs and everything related to the underworld, but they are also the source of cheap labour for wealthy neighbourhoods and markets. You see their lights at night like pearls shining bright and discovers in the day that they are miserable huts that reflect their inhabitants' misery without even seeing them

first migrants

The first person to set foot on this spot was the Portuguese traveller Amerigo Vespucci on January 1, 1502, and when his ship entered this water, he first thought it was the source of a river and called it “January River” or Rio de Janeiro, without realizing that what he had discovered It was not a river, but a vast bay that occupies 245 square kilometres and is called by its ancient Indian name (Guanabara), meaning "the arm of the sea".

The first immigration to Brazil began with the Portuguese during the colonial era, then the Europeans, the Japanese, and finally the Latin Americans from the neighbouring countries. The percentage of Arab immigrants who came at the beginning of the century was small, but they were active in the commercial field. Most of them are concentrated in Sao Paulo and Rio de Janeiro. The great wave of immigration occurred in the years from 1884 to 1914, but the charm of this country lies in the fact that all these races quickly fused in their new homeland, forming one homogeneous nation in dreams and ambitions, despite their differences in origins, colours and ethnicitie

I made my way to the Guanabara coast from which
they discovered Rio de Janeiro
The Tamiya Indians were living around the Gulf at the time, and they did not notice the germ of the annihilation that Vespucci released in the body of their simple life that coalesced with the sea, forests and mountains, and they could not read the future where they would turn into slaves in the sugar plantations that extended along the ocean from their bay to the norh, where Salvador is the capital of the Portuguese colony,
nor did they realize that this Portuguese adventurer is nothing but the tip of the thread that will wrap their necks and exterminate them or push them into the depths of the Amazon forest.
Make it stand out

Whatever it is, the way you tell your story online can make all the difference.

I went back to the hotel, took a cool shower and lay in bed for a while, my head waving with questions: What happened to the glory of Rio? Why did she lose the power of political decisions?The first person to set foot on this spot was the Portuguese traveller Amerigo Vespucci on January 1, 1502, and when his ship entered this water, he first thought it was the source of a river and called it “January River” or Rio de Janeiro, without realizing that what he had discovered It was not a river, but a vast bay that occupies 245 square kilometres and is called by its ancient Indian name (Guanabara), meaning "the arm of the sea".

Ipanema beach..one of the finest areas of Rio de Janeiro