BRAZIL.. OR HAVE I JUST SEEN THE FUTURE?

I am now a long way from Iguacu Falls. We have really been moving the last 4 days & my head is spinning. This is not what a relaxing holiday is about. What was that about reading the fine print? We started our journey eastwards from Iguacu with a couple of 500 km plus days, made even longer with a couple of navgational &/or logistical stuff ups which had us looking for our hotels after dark, never a good situation to be in. Added to that, it was wet a lot of the time. The traffic is a nightmare, & the roads have potholes & ruts all over the place. On day 3, we had to ride on a long stretch of unsealed road. Not normally too much of a problem, but this was really ugly. It was wet & very slippery, with tricky crossfalls & lots of ruts & corrugations, added to which there was traffic coming in the opposite direction, including trucks & buses. We would have covered about 100 km of this in several stretches, & in places there was 200m or more of nothing but mud. I didnt fall off, so thats gotta be a good thing. As I said, it was ugly, & when we finally got into Blumenau we were pretty well knackered. So since leaving Salta on the first trip, I have covered about 3200 km in 7 riding days. And today I finally saw the Atlantic, the point being that the last ocean I saw was the Pacific when I was in Lima about 5 weeks ago, so I have managed to ride across the South American continent, & I do feel pretty good about that.

I am still grappling with Brazil in general. Its an interesting country, & generally I like the people I have met. It is easily the most progressive & wealthy country in South America, & here are a few random thoughts. A more detailed & critical appraisal may or may not follow later! For a start, it is big & heavily populated. A good look at a map is quite daunting. There are towns all over the place, & many of them are huge. We have only covered a tiny portion in the south west of the country, yet I feel as though I have been riding in the same gigantic city for 4 days! Let me explain. You leave one town & in a few kilometres you enter another. The traffic is intimidating & fast, & cars just carve you up the whole time. Everyone drives as though they are getting the priest for their seriously ill mother. There is no relief, & the pressure is relentless, but one just has to adapt. I cant say that I like it, but I think I can understand it. If you dont drive that way you would never get anywhere. I dont know what people do in this country to get away from it all. There is no escape! Even on crappy goat tracks there are houses & heaps of traffic. The population is a lazy 170 million. Deduct a bit for the Amazon rainforest that hasnt been cut down yet, deduct another 30 million people who live in Rio, Brasilia & Sao Paulo, & you end up with a hell of a lot of people crammed into the bits that are left, and it really shows. I would hate to live here, I really would. I would go stir crazy.

Yet it is a land of contrasts. One the one hand, High rise towers festooned with peoples washing, horses & carts in the streets, the stench of pigs & piggeries permeating just about everywhere, dengue fever & malaria rampant. On the other, modern buildings, nice houses, good cars, shops with everything, the techno revolution. Today we stopped in a huge brand new roadhouse along the coastal freeway. I walked in to buy a coffee, & some pimply faced kid gave me a plastic rectangular thing about 5 x4 with a barcode on it . WTF is this for, I think. Turns out you help yourself to whatever you want, & it gets scanned into their system, & you pay on the way out. Dont really see the point, as there were several bored looking staff standing around scratching their privates. Maybe they just havent been sacked yet. Last night in a bar, I was gived a credit card thing to charge my purchases to. The system has so many flaws in it, it almost amounts to organised crime. Half the stuff I ordered didnt get delivered, I could have got someone elses orders, someone else could book stuff to me, etc, etc. Again, you pay on the way out, to a bored looking cashier, then as soon as you walk outside, some heavy gets a final look at your paperwork. What is all this whizz bang technology all about? Where is the saving? I would have thought with 170 million people, the more of them that have a useful job the better. Like building better roads, for a start.

OK, right now I am in a delightful coastal town called Antonina, in a very comfortable hotel right on the swampfront, freshly showered & sprayed, & about to have a coldie, then a good feed. If only I could hang my laundry out the window. The riding gear is fairly feral at the moment, I dont even want it in the same hotel, let alone have to put it back on tomorrow. Bugger it, I will hang it out. Nobody cares. We will be at a place called Paraty in 2 more days, with a chance to rest a bit, do the laundry, & go on a yacht cruise. And think about what a weird place this is!

PS. I havent seen a fly screen since I arrived in Brazil.