I’m in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil.

A fourteen year old boy tries to sell me a ride in his cab for twice the price. I take another cab.

Most of the federal police are smaller than I, but a group of them size me up with amusement in their eyes. Last year, they killed thirteen hundred people in this city.

Shirtless men wander on the freeway, selling pele porco frita between the cars. Others ride 100cc dirt bikes with furniture stacked on the back.

An unbridled horse eats trash in a field surrounded by favelas with sun-bleached coloured sheets for roofs.

There is a white cathedral on a distant hill, and vultures circling over an open crude oil pit.

That infamous captain of zeppelins, Santos-Dumont, built an enchanted house somehwere in those hills.

The cab breaks down. The driver pulls over and cranks the engine, cursing.

Impossible black crags rise above the visible heat waves from the distant jungle. I feel stupid: twenty hours in a flying sardine can, and now the humidity — I can’t give the species name for any of the plants in sight, and my Portuguese vocabulary is three: sim, não, & obrigarda.

It’s the dead of winter here, but you’d never know it.

Ah wait, that’s a jacaranda.

There appears to be a statue on a distant mountain: a robed white figure raising arms and face to the cloudless azure sky. Fleets of teal, red, and ochre sailboats scatter on the lagoon beneath a cablecar dangling between two cliffs rising out of the sea.

I’ve just arrived for RightsCon and Freebird, and also to meet with two friends to discuss how we’ll spend the the rest of this year working on OONI. I’m going to go explore now.

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