Bagé, Brasil

Beyond Trienta y Tres, a cross-roads town, traffic diminished to a trickle on the route to the isolated border crossing at Aceguá, my choice rather than the busier trucker route at Rio Branco.  I was entering the emptiest part of Uruguay for my final one hundred miles to the border.

I had no complaints about having the road to myself, but it did raise the concern of whether the Brazilian customs officials at this lightly-transited outpost had gotten the news that Americans no longer needed visas, or if they might try to extract some sort of payment from me.

I always approach border crossings with some trepidation knowing that I might be hassled for some technicality and subjected to the ordeal of having to explain all the contents in my panniers—tang in a plastic bag, powdered nuts, my water filter, some of my odd bicycle tools.  My concerns and memories of border hassles kept me from fully enjoying the otherwise glorious miles unfolding around me in cooler temperatures with a cloud cover and my first tailwind.  With the temperature finally in the 70s, as they should be this time of the year, I didn’t need to fret about running low on water for a 45-mile stretch between towns, though I could have asked for some at a police station along the route if it had been as sweltering as it had been the first three days of my ride.

The last book I read before my departure was Paul Theroux’s latest, “On the Plain of Snakes,” about driving the Mexico border from California to Texas and then driving down to Chiapas.  As always, he captures the travel experience and primed my anticipation for my upcoming travels.   In his commentary on his multiple border crossing he claimed, “I treasure border crossings, and the best of them are the ones I’ve had to walk from one country to another, savoring the equality of being a pedestrian.”

It is always exhilarating to complete a border crossing and gain entry to a country and all the new that it promises, but the process is hardly something to “treasure.” Some of that jolt of exhilaration one experiences upon entry can be attributed to the relief of getting in.  It is never a sure thing.  I can still remember all too vividly those times when I've been denied entry, or been subjected to the demands of greedy, corrupt border officials, which fortunately has been a rarity.

Back in 1980 Crissy and I were kept waiting for three hours at the El Salvador border because we didn’t have license plates on our bikes.  We were being treated as if we were motorcyclists as they’d never had to deal with pedal cyclists.  Rather than greasing the process with a bribe we elected to wait until someone else came on duty.   When a van of gringoes were let in with bikes on the back of their van we pointed that out to the official and he relented.  

I’ve been turned away from borders at Syria trying to enter from Turkey and Jordan trying to enter from Israel for not having a visa, despite it being an arbitrary issue.  I didn’t even attempt entering Ivory Coast after two days of a runaround at its consulate just a few miles from the border in Maputo trying to acquire a $160 visa.

At the exit point from Uruguay the customs official had me nervous when he paged through my passport looking for my stamped entry into the country.  There was none as it was all done electronically at the airport, including having my photo taken.  He finally began typing away at his keyboard and found my entry info, earning my exit stamp.

The Brazilian custom official had a hard time finding my exit stamp, as it was in a corner of a page in the middle of many pages of stamps besides several Sengeles stamps from three years ago, as if the Uruguan official were playing a joke on his Brazilian counter part.  After he found it he continued paging back and forth through my passport several times as if in search for a visa to his counter.  That made me very nervous.  I couldn’t understand the Portuguese or Spanish he spoke to me until he asked what I thought to be how many days I wanted.  That gave me some encouragement.

I said forty days and that I was biking to Belem and the Amazon.  He said that didn’t seem enough and thought 90 would be a more realistic number. That was fine by me.  I didn’t start celebrating though until he reached over for his stamp and applied it to my passport and then wrote 90 in it.  It was a further relief when he handed it back through the slot under the window and didn’t ask for $160, as the cost formerly had been, though paid at a consulate when one applied for a visa.  He was an older gent, who proved to be a decent fellow, as border officials are more often than not, especially at minor borders where they aren’t harried all day.

It was shortly before five.  I had three hours of light to penetrate into the country.  This was such a minor border there were no money-changers hanging around.  I was fortunate to have stopped at a gas station just before the border asking if there was WiFi anywhere nearby, which I wanted to check for the present exchange rate.  The gas station actually had WiFi and someone who changed money. I had only spent 890 of the 3,000 pesos I had acquired from an ATM machine at the airport, not even $25 in five days. Getting that taken care of and without being gouged was another great relief.  

Brasil couldn’t have looked rosier as I sped through more cattle country.  The terrain was flatter than it had been in Uruguay, with the horizon a long ways off, not blocked by rolling terrain, giving it the look of Montana Big Sky country.  I knew I was no longer in Uruguay when much newer and bigger pick-up trucks roared past me at 80 or more miles per hour despite a speed limit of 60.  There had been none of that in Uruguay.  

As in Uruguay fences lined the road and I had to be creative finding a place to camp.  My last night in Uruguay I pitched my tent in some brush alongside a barbed-wire fence.  I was awoken at dawn by curious cattle who had come by for breakfast.  My first campsite in Brasil was down a steep embankment just below the road in some bushes.  Neither would rate as optimum, but they sufficed.

The highly-detailed Bradt guidebook I used for Uruguay applied “ubiquitous” to five items one would come across in the country. I hadn't knowingly encountered any of them—the monk parrot, chimichurri sauce, slot machines, the Cerveceria La Posite and Le Cigale restaurant chains and a photo of Carlos Páez Vilaro with Picasso.  I would have had to have gone to the resort town of Punta del Este to have seen the photo, where the artist Vilaro had designed a huge house sculpture that is now a hotel.

I no doubt passed some of the chain restaurants in my meanderings about Montevideo, but they didn’t stand out.  More prominent to my eye were all the McDonald’s.  There were three in a mile stretch on June 18 Street through the downtown and another at the airport and one just a few blocks from the US embassy on the Rambla coastal boulevard. There were none though out of the city, nor any American chain stores.  One just occasionally saw a Coca-Cola sign on a small shop.  Billboards were non-existent.  The only signs along the road were for police stations and a three-digit code one could call if one needed mechanical assistance.

Though I pedaled three hundred miles through the heart of this small country, about the size of Florida, and the smallest of all those in South America other than Suriname and French Guiana, I just barely made its acquaintance.  I would be happy for another opportunity to broaden my knowledge.  Many of the estancias offer work-stay opportunities that would be an incomparable experience.

But Brasil promises to be an equally fine time.  The exuberance of the Brasilian nature was immediately reflected in the amped up motorists roaring past me and was further personified when an early Saturday morning Lycra-clad cyclist sped by in the opposite direction greeting me with a hearty “buenas” rather than the simple upraised finger or two from the handlebar as is common elsewhere.  The several other cyclists who passed likewise greeted me audibly.   And for the first time in these travels a cyclist rode alongside me for a few miles—a young military man wearing a Tinkov jersey, Peter Sagan’s former team. His English was minimal but I learned that he was a triathlete and no Brasialian had ridden in The Tour de France.  His warmth and friendliness were a fine welcome to Brasil.