The banana farm was just amazing. The students could really see how bananas are harvested and how careful the farmer is with the bananas. It was interesting to see how the workers cut down the banana bunch. They notch the tree so that it leans, clear the leaves away from the bunch of bananas and then another person cuts the bunch where it carefully lands on another workers shoulder with a pad on it and then the bunch is hooked to a cable which carries it to the packing plant. The cable is throughout the field and the direction can be adjusted by the worker. A banana tree is grown with a grandparent, mother and daughter planted side by side because they only last for two to three years. The students even got a chance to slice a small bunch of bananas (like we would find in the store) from the actual full bunch cut from the tree. The original bunch may weigh up to 60 pounds. The bananas are then put in water to be cleaned and packed. The students also tasted fresh papaya and banana. Hmmmm good!!!! Very impressive farm. The rest of the day was spent traveling to Vitoria and we arrived at 9:00 pm.
Wednesday started with a visit to Vale do Rio Doce’s Port Facilities. We started at their sensory park which is open for the community to enjoy. Then we viewed a movie followed by a bus tour of the full port. This is the largest iron ore port in the world. We also saw one of four new ships that have been ordered by Vale. It is the largest freight ship in the world and called Vale Rio de Janiero. There are very few ports that are large enough to even dock the ship. The crew of a ship like this might be 110 people or so while the crew of the cruise ship that crashed off the shore of Italy was 1100. It had just finished unloading when we saw it. We were able to see the process of a port and movement of iron ore. We saw it moving through the system to the train. Vale is a small city within itself and very environmentally conscious.
Next we visited Garoto, Brazil’s largest chocolate processing factory and when merged with Nestle has 50% of the profit share in chocolate across the world. It was neat to see all the different chocolates made by Garoto and learn about the history of the company. No cameras were allowed but we saw the production of several different lines of chocolates, the wrapping and packaging and we also were able to taste several different kinds of chocolate candy. It was interesting to see how many different kinds some people were able to eat. We were able to visit their store after the tour.
Then we settled in for the trip to a small town outside of Rio. So far our bus travels have been fairly dull. No flooding, no rained out roads, no trees down in the road as in past years. I have been waiting for something to happen. We departed from Garoto about 5:00 pm with a predicted arrival time of midnight. The roads weren’t the best and then about 2:00 am we came to a very narrow overpass. The bus slowly moved through the passageway and crash!! We didn’t hit the sides but we hit the top, the bus could not get under the overpass. The commotion of hitting woke many of the students up (I was already awake). We had to carefully back out and turn around and find another road. We ended up arriving at the hotel in Petropolis at 4:25 am. We are currently on the bus heading towards Rio and we left at 8:00 am this morning.
More to come with the adventures of AZP Class 13.
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