Protected Travel Isolation

"What confounds them and turns the trip into a kind of dream so ephemeral and fading that it cannot be discussed is the identical nature of the hotels where they have stayed; the hotel in Manaus is an exact replica of the hotel in Miami, in Belém, Fortaleza, São Luís, and Teresina. My God, where are we now? What's the date? And of course they are protected. They will be protected by the cement hotels with the roof-top restaurants, the wall-to-wall carpeting, the arctic chill of the air conditioning from whatever is real in South America; their reality is the gift shop in the hotel lobby that sells postcards of sunsets never seen, The Identical airports, and that almost identical ride by taxi between airport and hotel. In almost every city in the world this strip of Highway will be the best in the country and fringed and divided with statues, fountains, trees, and historical plaques - the whole project design to detour away from the most authentic element of the worlds malaise, the stench, the menace, the overwhelming symbol of a collapsing economic system - the urban slums. If these old folks have read someplace that 50% of Brazil's Workforce earns less than $50 a month, they will find it impossible to believe in there fifty-dollar-a-day hotel room to which, isolated from the squalor, they have been carefully steered."

- Moritz Thomsen. The Saddest Pleasure: A Journey On Two Rivers.