But then there's the filth....

And on the filth front, I'm sorry to report that the waters of Copacabana and Ipanema beaches are the very most disgusting that I've EVER seen them. The waves at Ipanema are an opaque, muddy yellowish-brown that was absolutely appalling. I couldn't believe it. I went to the water and cupped some in my hands, to see if I was imagining how dirty it was, but no - even just a SINGLE HANDFUL of water is detectably yellowish-brown. Ick. You know it's bad then.

It didn't smell, so I wonder if it is not raw sewage exactly, but possibly the algal bloom that often follows raw sewage. I can't imagine that there can be anything alive in there. Poor fishies.

Everybody was still swimming anyway. So in the spirit of what-the-hell Rio boldness I went swimming myself. I'd just dunked under once when I got an attack of the heebie-jeebies and fled back out of the water instantly. I was in the water for maybe 30 seconds and woke up the next morning with a bright red skin rash all over my legs. Coincidence??

So, sadly, it looks like I won't be swimming at Ipanema this year, or at least not unless the currents change. Well, I'll take that as just a good excuse to go down to Recreio and visit my friend Kat now and then at her Surf-n-Stay hostel.

Even so I didn't really appreciate the scale of the problem till this morning, when my Salvador-bound flight did a huge, slow bank over the entire city of Rio. I looked down and my heart sank. I have seen this before, but somehow it seems much worse now. Guanabara Bay was SOLID FILTH. It was SOLID brown, the ENTIRE Guanabara bay was SOLID brown. And speckled with constellations, galaxies, universes, of millions upon millions upon millions of tiny white dots of floating garbage and plastic.

Well, Guanabara Bay is an enclosed bay - I knew it was badly polluted - but how about the oceanfront beaches, Copacabana and Ipanema? Was my experience at Posto 7 of Ipanema just an isolated one? I was hoping to see a spot along Ipanema that might be a little cleaner. But we banked over that entire stretch of coastline and I was appalled to see a solid band of yellow-brown water that extended offshore for approximately a mile. It was HUGE. You could see clearly where it met cleaner Atlantic water further offshore; there was a clean, undulating line a mile offshore, where brown met blue.

I could see tiny spots around certain points of land where the blue color fought back, fought closer, almost reached the land... almost... but not quite. Even Barra da Tijuca, beach of the rich, was rimmed with brown.

We flew over rivers that were pouring opaque brown paint into the sea.

We flew over Rio's once beautiful Lagoa. Not only solid brown but DARK brown.

We flew over the Cristo. The top of his head was just visible, sticking up through the low cloud that often hovers over the Corcovado. He has a very clear view of the Lagoa, and Copacabana, and Ipanama, and Guanabara Bay. Oh, how he must weep.

How can this horrific environmental catastrophe possibly be salvaged? Is it beyond hope? Is there any realistic hope of turning this around? There must be. Bodies of water can be brought back from the most horrible pollution. We did it in the US, once upon a time, back in another lifetime when the United States was once the environmental leader of the world. Back when we past the world's first endangered species act, the Clean Air Act -and, prodded by the infamous 1969 incident in which the Cuyahoga River of Ohio actually caught fire, we passed the Clean Water Act. That law has produced some near-miraculous turnarounds in water quality. Even New York City Harbor has some oysters again. (And the Cuyahoga is pretty clean now.) The Clean Water Act isn't perfect and the US still has some horrible problems - take one look at a satellite shot of our once magnificent Chesapeake Bay, our largest estuary, now almost entirely a dead zone, to see what I mean. (And see the New York Times' current expose "Toxic Waters" if you're really interested.)

But seeing Rio's waters makes me realize how far the US has come. As bad off as the Chesapeake is, it is nothing like Guanabara.

Well, if the Olympics don't cause some real action on this, then nothing will.