Rio de Janeiro, Brazil
It’s another sunny day in Rio and Orien and I decide to go to explore the caves, or cavernas (in Portuguese) rumored to be on the hill behind where we’re staying. We’ve heard stories about the bodies of slaves being thrown inside, stories of escaped murderers who headed to the hills and lived inside these caves and also tales about people who ventured inside and disappeared forever. We grab a headlamp and head up the trail with a crude map of their approximate locations.
We bring the neighbors black lab, Nero with us. He bounds ahead of us down the trail and we follow, stopping along the way to marvel at bits of nature that are new to us; Strange seed pods, weird bee funnel hives, long, dangling plants, and unusual insects, Rio is rich with bizarre and exotic life.
The trail
We come upon the first cave and peer inside. The entrance is fairly large, about waist high and a shallow pool of water, filled with shimmering bits of mica, sits just beyond the entrance. Orien brought minimal clothing to Brazil and so happened to be wearing his white linen pants and shiny white boat shoes. Not the best cave spelunking gear, or perhaps the very best. I was wearing sandals, so I dipped in and crossed the pool of water to report that the cave was very shallow and there wasn’t much of a point for him to get his feet wet because the only notable thing about this cave was a broken shovel propped up along the wall in the back. And so we continued on to the next cave. We find it quite close to the first.
It was formerly cemented over by someone and then broken through. Orien enters, white shoes first, into the soft, gravely mud, committing to the soilage of his white linen pants. This one is deeper, splitting off into two parts. I follow him and so does Nero. This cave is more interesting but there are no skeletons in sight. Just some traces of candle wax, an old speaker, and some roots dangling from the ceiling.
We muse over the idea of creating some kind of hidden dwelling on the mountain in one of the caves. Rents have become so crazy in New York that the idea of building a secret underground lair free from the chains of monthly rent is somehow very appealing. I suppose it always has been. I remember my brother and I making plans for underground forts when we were kids. Our favorite idea was to find some old McDonalds playground tubes and repurpose them into a fort by burying them.
Who knows… maybe Orien and I will disappear from civilization to build our grand fortress of McDonalds tubes far under the earth.
But first we have to attend an ayahuasca ceremony. We’ve RSVPed for a session with the grandmother vine in the jungle in Baha, about an hour away from Rio. Word has it there is a cave there too. This is likely to get interesting…
More soon~
