This is an archived article that was published on sltrib.com in 2016, and information in the article may be outdated. It is provided only for personal research purposes and may not be reprinted.

Although I asked to be included in The Tribune team covering the 2016 Summer Olympics in Brazil this year, I'm still here.

Me: "I've been to Rio before. I know my way—"

Editor: "You're not going."

When I inquired as to why, I was given the answer normally reserved for small children, drunks and anyone else unable to grasp sophisticated reasoning.

"Because I said so, that's why."

I'm not a child, so I suspect the real reason has something to do with my last out-of-state assignment: Drive to Colorado with Sonny, investigate the medical marijuana issue there, and file stories to the paper.

I disappeared for a week. When I finally arrived home late one night, I had to wait until morning to realize that I was actually somewhere in Nebraska. I don't recall sending any stories back, but the editor says I did.

Never mind. Our Olympic team — Kurt Kragthorpe, Rick Egan and Chris Kamrani — is already in place in Rio de Janeiro, a city filled with robbers, fecal-flavored water and the Zika virus. If the team sticks to business, we might actually see some of them again.

I haven't been to Rio since 1973, when the plane taking me to my LDS mission had a three-hour layover there. Soon as we landed, I knew we were in the real world. The smell, the humidity, the people — it was all very exotic.

I wanted to sneak off and see the Christ the Redeemer statue on the mountain, but the other missionaries felt the Spirit telling them to stay in the airport. I was going to go by myself anyway, but then somebody pulled church rank on me.

They were scared and I was stupid. Rio is no place to be wandering around at night on your own, probably not even today.

The rest of my life might have gone by with Brazil as just a vague memory of really a boring airport and even more boring company. But then I got to spend some time there.

For a while on my mission, I lived right on the Brazilian border. We crossed over daily to shop, eat and get things that weren't available in the country where we lived just a hundred yards away.

The best thing I remember about Brazil was the postal system. Things mailed to a Brazilian address stood a million times better chance of actually getting there, as opposed to the zero percent chance where we lived.

The second best thing was the opposite sex. Brazilian women — brasileiras — were heart-attack beautiful. I wasn't supposed to notice this as a missionary, but I would have had to have been dead for that rule to work.

I almost was. The worst thing about wandering over to Brazil — especially into the jungle areas — were the monkeys. Packs and packs of them. Monkeys are mean. They screamed and threw their own feces at us from trees, which is hell on white shirts.

Then there were parrots. Green ones. Also rude. If we climbed onto the flat roof of our apartment to take pictures, the parrots would fly over from Brazil and crap on us. No wonder the country has a problem with feces in their water supply.

Here's the really scary part. University of Oxford scientists recently announced that capuchin monkeys are even smarter than previously thought. They have been using stone tools for at least 700 years.

Given that my experience with Brazilian monkeys is nearly half a century old, they've probably learned how to use firearms by now. I'll bet the team we sent down there doesn't know that.

Robert Kirby can be reached at rkirby@sltrib.com or facebook.com/stillnotpatbagley.