After a short vacation in Rio de Janeiro, we are finally headed to Brazil to purchase jewelry.
The destination is the state of Minas Gerais. The name of this state means "big mine.
Although it is a single state, it is larger than France and about twice the size of Japan. We are reminded once again of the vast Brazilian plateau.
Fly to Belo Horizonte (which also means "beautiful horizon" in plain English), the state capital.
From there, it is about 400 km to the destination of the mining town, which is reached by rental car.
It was time to rent a car and go!
Then, the road, which I thought would be a highway, turned out to be a normal one-lane mountain road.
I was astonished to see the road like going from Tokyo to Kanazawa by ordinary road.
I drove hard to get there before nightfall. However, slow-moving trucks were blocking the way.
Whenever there is even a slight uphill, there are a number of trucks that can't run at speeds of about 30 km/h. With only one lane on each side of the road, we managed to overtake them, but the opposite lane was in a similar situation, so the few opportunities to overtake with a good view were followed by a battle of overtaking each other, and after 6 hours of exciting driving that almost resulted in a head-on collision, we finally arrived at our destination city.
A low-speed truck overtakes a very low-speed truck on a mountain road that does not move forward at all unless it sees an opening and overtakes both of them.
We arrived at the town of Gobelnador Valadares, a quiet and beautiful town with a river crossing the town and a tall sword mountain watching over it.
Now, finally, the purchasing. I came all the way from Japan for this.
We have been longing to purchase in Brazil for several years, and now it has finally become a reality!
This time, we contacted several companies we had dealt with previously at a jewelry show in Hong Kong and several completely unknown vendors we had learned about via the Internet or through referrals from people who do business with Brazil, contacted them via e-mail, told them what we wanted, and had them prepare for our visit.
The goal is to find interesting quartz and tourmaline.
It is a quartz gemstone that can only be the work of God, and each one has a very unique charm.
To commemorate the event, I decided to bring back to Japan the chunk of gemstone I now hold in my hand.
My desk is filled with all kinds of stones. Unique tourmalines, amethysts, imperial topaz, stones I had never heard of before, garnets, aquamarines, opals, etc., a parade of gems from a nearby mine. The vendor was originally scheduled to spend half a day with us, but we ended up canceling the rest of our schedule and spent the entire day, including lunch, in the office, immersed in the selection of stones.
Finally, in the evening, we finished selecting the stones. Mr. Clermont, the owner, drove us to the top of the mountain at sunset, where we had been looking up earlier, and we toasted to the satisfaction of having selected all the stones!
It was a full day and well worth the trip all the way from Japan (5 flights and a rental car to get to this city)!
