The Daily Telegraph - Saturday - Travel
Essentials
Brazil, a British explorer who smuggled rubber seeds out of Brazil in 1876, launching the Asian rubber market – and laying waste to the Amazonian one.
On the drive back, Paulo suggested a dip in a roadside creek. As I was getting in, a local man pulled over and came down to the water for a drink.
“Hope there are no caimans,” I joked. His brow wrinkled. “I doubt it. Probably sucuri though.”
I looked at Paulo, who translated for me: “Anacondas”.
I have had Eldorado explorations in South America, looking for beauty and riches. I have had mock-conquistador experiences, half-killing myself to reach an airy summit or a remote glacier. The drive to Fordlândia was, as metaphors go, my Heart of Darkness. I could have gone by boat but the tour operator had plumped for a six-hour road trip; he’d hired a Fiat Mobi, ideal for nipping to the supermarket. Hardly anyone goes to Fordlândia – so it was a shot in the dark.
Paulo turned up at 8.30am and we were soon on the BR-163. One of Brazil’s mega-roads, it links the Amazon to the far south; a sign advised that Rio de Janeiro was 4,114km away. No holiday hardtop, it was built for industry, with two lanes rammed with twin-trailer lorries, sometimes in convoys. The asphalt kept breaking up into laterite and chaotic roadworks. I saw near misses, sometimes saw nothing at all – when we were driving blind into a cloud of red dust – and I saw two feet and a blanket: a fatality, involving a soya lorry.
Eventually, we turned right for the final section – all dirt now – to Fordlândia. We checked into the Pousada Americana, where a man called Guilherme fed us on fried fish, rice, beans and fresh mangos from his trees. After a siesta I met Magno, a local history teacher who showed me around.
Above town, the manager’s houses were only just standing, with roofs imploding, paintwork mottled and plaster falling off in chunks. One had been turned into a hotel – the Hotel Zebu – shuttered and mouldering, with a swimming pool cracked by invading vegetation. The large former customs depot and warehouse on the river was a car park. One-ton blocks of rubber had once been stacked here for shipping to the US. The old machine shop was still a workplace, but what remained of the original machinery was rusty and dilapidated. Equipment for vulcanisation had been dumped in fields. The most American-looking building, a spindly water tower, stood tall above the town, but the famous cursive lettering that told passing boats they were close to a Ford establishment was long gone. The only instance of the name I could find was on the blistered cylinder head casing of an ambulance that looked quite old, but definitely post-Fordlândian.
A water pumping station in the river leaned over precipitously, and looked as if it might soon sink. Fire hydrants dotted around the streets were not connected to any pipelines. The old pier had lost half its length. The railroad that had run deep into the rubber plantation was nowhere to be seen. A jail block was still standing though. Magno said people didn’t get locked up for long as any miscreants were ejected. Most of the golf course has been taken over by the forest. Henry Ford approved of golf because players only ever look forward.
It was all a bit dispiriting, but only a bit. For I knew beforehand Fordlândia had failed. I knew there were many reasons: the ignorance of its planners was greater than their idealism; rubber trees that grew healthily in the wild didn’t like to be sown as crops; local workers rebelled against the arduous regime, awful food and disrespect shown by foreign managers. Synthetic rubber was invented. After spending the equivalent of hundreds of millions of dollars, the site was abandoned in 1945; Henry Ford would sell the land to the Brazilian government for pennies.
The locals seemed fond of their heritage. Magno said, “People get emotional when they talk about Fordlândia. To think of a town in the Amazon in 1928 in which there was running water, electricity, salaries for employees and
How to do it Humboldt Travel (01603 340680, humboldt travel.co.uk) has a 14-day holiday to the Amazon featuring a visit to Fordlândia and Belterra, as well as Belém, Alter do Chao and culminating with a four-day cruise up the Rio Negro from Manaus. From £5,970 per person including all accommo dation, transfers, guides and all flights within Brazil
How to get there
Tap Portugal (flytap.com) flies direct to Belém from Lisbon from £795 return; several airlines operate between UK airports and Lisbon. Latam (latamairlines. com) flies to Santarém and Belém via São Paulo houses to live in. Coming here was like winning the lottery. People competed to get one of the five thousand jobs.” Guilherme was more measured: “Henry Ford was a visionary. But he never came here. There was a saying that anything would grow in the Amazon. But he was fooled because he never hired an agronomist who knew how to grow rubber. He could work with cars but not with plants.”
A visit to Fordlândia is more than a nostalgic trip. Fordian utopianism failed. Americans often expect others to live and work as they do. Brazilians refused. The expats wilted in the heat and no amount of quinine could repel snakes, jaguars and dysentery. But where rubber refused to grow, soya is burgeoning. Agro-industrialisation, cattle-ranching and deforestation are turning the Lower Amazon to flames, death and devastation. The backdrop to Fordlândia in 1928 was rainforest. Now charred trees lie all around like a great unknown.
‘Coming to Fordlândia was like winning the lottery; people competed for one of the five thousand jobs’