Inhotim to Ouro Preto, Day 6

We organized two starting times -- after another magnificent breakfast and very affectionate farewells to Maria and Willem, Dave, Holly and I headed to Inhotim at 10 with Bryan while Mary, Glenn and Andy spent extra time at Maria Carolina’s exploring the gardens and walking paths before departing for Inhotim with Fabricio later in the morning. After a few minutes saying hi and getting advice from Tiago (who was manning the tour desk), we split up for the day. Holly was looking for a bit of solitude among the trees so Dave and I struck out on the biggest loop path with the idea of ending up back at Galeria Galpau before meeting everyone for the long drive to Ouro Preto that afternoon.

We had the park largely to ourselves -- it wasn’t empty, but not once we were held up or rushed along by a tour group or press of other visitors. We would have considered this a great stroke of travel kharma had we not known the reason for the low attendance was the Brumadinho disaster. Inhotim is intended for Brazil -- most of the art is Brazilian or Latin American (and at least half of it is by women). There’s not much marketing to attract international visitors (no big signs at the airport). It gets little attention from the guide books (Mary’s had one paragraph, mine had nothing). So the majority of its visitors are Brazilian and they had clearly decided to wait a while before coming to the area.

Because we were walking, we spent a lot more time enjoying the botanical and architectural amazements. The galleries range from modest, homey little buildings to spectacular modernist structures with jarring features like a wing that juts out over a large pond with no seeming support. You get to some galleries on the beautiful stone walkways, and to others by scrambling up a narrow dirt path in the thick woods.

The landscape shifts from dense, rainforest-y jungle to open fields with scattered trees, to meticulously crafted gardens with fountains and spectacular flowering plants (and LOTS of immense, glamorous spiders in elaborate webs). Tiago had talked about the gardens -- his feeling was that anyone can make a pretty garden with colorful flowers. The real genius of Inhotim is the gorgeousness of its “gardens in shades of green.” And all through the park are benches crafted from immense logs that had been deemed “forest waste” before Hugo Franca got hold of them and turned them into art? Furniture? Whatever you call then, they’re mind bogglingly great.

And of course even in the gardens and open meadows, works of art create surprises. A bus stop in the middle of a field of wildflowers. Headless bronze statues doing somersaults across a bit of perfect lawn. An uncannily realistic bronze tree trunk suspended among half a dozen saplings -- in 20 years the sculpture will be entirely supported by the real trees.

Of course not all the art is good. Dave was thoroughly unimpressed by Christina Iglesias’ Vegetation Room -- a small open topped building tucked in the woods that’s a little maze through walls carved to look like thick vegetation. (I loved it, by the way.) And the Galeria Psicoativa Tunga (the Psycho Gallery, by Tunga) was an architectural wonder of high, open rooms and sloping floors that housed the worst excesses of modern art we saw at Inhotim -- all weird bladder-y objects, gold skulls, skeins of black rope and hose, random things in hung in big nets. It felt like bad first drafts of the awesome Menstrual Room (also Tunga).

We had better luck with food on our second visit -- my frantic search for a ladies’ room also turned up a perfectly acceptable hamburger stand which Mary, Glenn and Andy found shortly after we did. Dave waited until we were in another part of Brazil before telling me that I’d cheerfully gulped down my burger and fries while a colony of Inhotim’s Spiderman-logo style arachnids hung just behind my head. We finished our second day with a return visit to Galeria Galpao, which came close to convincing me, at least, that I should return to Catholicism. Then we met up with the rest of the crew and Bryan and Fabricio and hit the road for Ouro Preto, a long and slightly tedious two-hour drive through the endless outskirts of Belo Horizonte and then into the real mountains.

The guys dropped us at our hotel (and kindly took Andy to her Airbnb) and with many hugs and handshakes, we were handed over the to breeches-clad staff of the Hotel Pousada do Arcanjo, a 300-year-old villa that can’t quite decide how historic it wants to be. But the manager, Ariadne, spoke perfect English and was exceedingly warm and helpful (and reassuringly not wearing period clothing). We organized laundry, discussed finding a guide for a tour of the city, determined where to have dinner, and then repaired to our (very comfy) rooms for a freshen up. We regrouped a bit later on the beautiful patio for the most artfully prepared caipirinhas of the trip -- they were garnished with a little flower made by turning a slice of lime inside out and working it around a lime half. (Other unique highlights of Arcanjo included a big glass table housing a fairly impressive mineral collection, a daily tea with LOTS of cookies, a wildly varied basket of small necessities in each room that included an honest-to-God handkerchief, and a looping video of a classical ballet performance that appeared to have an Egyptian theme playing over the bar the ENTIRE TIME WE WERE THERE!)

Arcanjo is a little bit out of the city center but provides a very convenient shuttle van, which we hopped to the old town square, where we met up with Andy. The town square was lovely in the dark -- big, impressive buildings at either end of a wide plaza lined with brightly lit shops and restaurants. But Andy had already learned what the rest of us were about to -- step off the nice, level square and Ouro Preto makes Santa Teresa look like the Bonneville Salt Flats. The only saving grace is that we weren’t in an Uber. (Side note -- after walking around OP for a couple of days, Dave actually used the little level app on his phone to measure the slope of the street we were climbing. It was 22 degrees. The Dupont Circle metro station escalator is 30 degrees. They put up road signs warning trucks about a 7% grade.)

We teetered our way down to O Passo, a big, friendly restaurant and erstwhile music venue in an 18th Century house. After studying the huge menu (both the number of choices and the literal size of the menu, which was comically immense), we ordered salads with lots of hearts of palm, pizzas, pasta, steak -- pretty much everything. Jeremy -- who’d arrived in Brazil about a week ahead of the rest of us -- joined us after making his way by bus from Belo. He immediately demonstrated the adventurous spirit that had defined his travels thus far by ordering beef carpaccio.

We summoned our shuttle and began the climb back to the main square -- splitting up with Jeremy and Andy who wanted to get a drink in town (the shuttle didn’t run after 10:30). While we waited, we watched the police watch the teenagers who were lounging with a certain cheerful insolence around the grand statue in the center of the square (of Tiradentes, patron of the military police, as it happens). A motley group of dogs trotted by on some canine mission that didn’t involve pestering us, the cops or the kids. Then a minute or two later, a little car turned up from one of the side streets into the square being chased with frantic, hysterical rage by the entire troop of dogs. It was first funny and then actively alarming how slaveringly furious these dogs were at that car. But it just motored steadily away and the dogs dissipated back down the side street and our van arrived. We’ll never know…