Brazil - a country of contrast

Another thing that is alive and well are bookshops. They were really interesting to walk round and there were plenty of books in English.

This bookshops had a very nice, and popular, bistro style restaurant upstairs. We ate there a couple of times.




The buses in Rio were of very good standard and unlike those in some of the other S. American countries.


One interesting thing that is quite traditional in the big towns in Brazil is what they do with houseplants. The plants that are in smaller pots are tied to trees on the pavement outside the houses (and some shops) and are quite well looked after.
I was very remiss in not taking any photos in daylight but I've found this out of focus one taken at night. On some trees they were tied all the way up the trunk.

 

Jenny, although there's quite a lot of poverty in Brazil it's not abject poverty as seen in a lot of Asian countries. As a country, it's quite affluent. A good way of measuring that is by the amount, and price, of restaurants.

 

You can't go to Rio without having a look at the Botanical Gardens. They're not really the way we think of botanical gardens, with lots of flowers. Most of the garden are more like a tropical arboretum with little in the way of flowers, apart from flowering trees. A lot of the flowers on the trees had already finished.

The Gardens are 200 years old and very cheap to visit - about £1.70. They are mainly trees, water features, and statues but they have a well renowned research department. They are quite obviously spending money on renovating parts of the garden that had been rather neglected. I guess this is because of the World Cup and the Olympics. The orchid house is, currently non-existent and the bromeliads are being worked on.

Even the way the place is at the moment it's worth half a day's visit. There's an impressive view when you enter them. It's Avenue of Royal Palms. This is almost half a mile long!


The gardens have a very impressive collection of bamboo with dozens of giant clumps setting of the views.

This clump (technical term ) doesn't seem to have changed since I took a photo of Mrs Shiney beside it 30 years ago.




There was still quite a bit of colour in the gardens. This is the flower of the Sausage Tree (Kigelia Africana) and it has giant fruit the size of a whole salami.

 

This is a rather unusual tree. It's known as the Monkey's Apricot Tree or the Cannonball Tree (Couroupita guianensis).

The flowers are large




It's very pretty in bunches


They grow straight out from the trunk of the tree on little stems - a bit peculiar for such a large flower. They then develop into the Cannonball fruit. The tree can develop a whole string of the flowers on one stem and the stem needs to be very strong to support the fruit.

Some trees can be completely covered in the flowers and produce lots of fruit.


In many countries the fruit is fed to livestock but many parts of the tree, flowers and fruit are used for human medicinal purposes. It's also used for mange on dogs. To Hindus it's a sacred tree and grown around the temples.

The flowers growing on the trunk

 

Just a few more shots in the Botanic Garden

A lot of plants didn't have nameplates so we're racking our brains. Actually, I'm sitting back and leaving it to Mrs Shiney


Tibouchina






Plumeria



Jackfruit

 

Some more without names.

At first glance I thought this was a pleached line of trees. On closer inspection it, very much, gave that effect but the trees were growing from long shoots and not standard trunks.


There was more than one variety of tree and this was a fruit growing from one of them




This bird was marching along and ignoring us. It was definitely a bird with a mission!


These are roots (shoots) of the Swamp Cypress (Taxodium distichum) a deciduous conifer that likes swamps and damp places. The tree was about 40ft high.

 

Moving on through the town to the industrial suburbs where they have a commercial fruit and veg market. We had to be careful not to be run over by giant artics and men running with hand carts. They were all very polite but in a rush all the time. I found it exhausting just watching them run around in the oppressive heat of the day, dragging enormous loads on hand carts!

Although everything was sold in bulk they would sell individual items - at a price! It was still a lot cheaper than the retail markets.

 

There were dozens of the covered warehouses, with open sides, and each one was a minimum of an acre.

 

Thanks strongy For a moment I thought you were doing an impression of W.C. Fields