Cruz Alta, Brasil

Immediately out of Santa Maria I climbed over one thousand feet up onto a tableland of wheat and corn fields that might last all the way to Brasilia, which sits at 3,845 feet. With the heat not so oppressive, I have yet to come upon a service station dispensing ice cold water along with gas, as had been the case at lower elevations, a minor disappointment.  At least they still have drinkable water and I haven’t had to resort to my filter yet.

My first night of camping up on the tableland in a small pocket of forest beside a pasture of cattle, I awoke in the middle of the night with a slight stinging sensation on my hand nestled against my head. I quickly slapped it with my other hand suspecting an ant had slipped into the tent.  A few minutes later when I was stung again, I sat up and put on my headlamp and discovered I had been invaded by hundreds of tiny ants.  They were swarming all over my tent, feasting on tiny crumbs of bread left over from my dinner. If those couple of wayward ants had left me alone they could have gone at it all night, but now their end was nigh.

I quickly checked the zippers on the two entrances to my tent to see if I hadn’t pulled them snug.  They seemed all right, and there was no stream of ants coming from either.  Before searching further for how they may have penetrated the tent I began smashing them with my spoon, dozens at a time.  I attacked them with such vigor that I bent the handle of the spoon.  It was a full fledged massacre. 

Every so often I paused in my smashing to scoop up the piles of the dead with the spoon and deposit them in my spare bowl.  As I shuffled my gear I found ants under each of my panniers.  I finally traced their entry point to a corner of the tent that many were fleeing to.  I doused it with a squirt of mosquito repellent and continued smashing any I saw.  

It may have taken ten minutes before I had wiped them out.  Fortunately, none had entered any of my panniers nor penetrated my bag of nuts and cookies or bag of bread. They did express interest in my jar of peanut butter, as a small battalion ringed the screw-on top, failing in their attempt to get inside.

In all my years of camping the only other ant invasion I have suffered was in Laos. Those were large red ants that also found a crack in the corner of the tent where there was an insert for a pole.  Those ants were voracious, able to eat their way through my plastic bag of nuts.  When they bit, it was much more than a tiny nip.

Some might say this is a lesson in not having food in one’s tent.  I have defied that so-called axiom for years. Only twice, these two ant infestations, has the food attracted a critter.  Even if I were to hang my food outside the tent, as I do in bear country, I would have still suffered the minor inconvenience of ants.  

I did have ants again the next night, but only in my dreams.  That was an indication they had made an impression on me.  Rarely are my dreams within the tent haunted by torments visited upon me during my travels, not even on those several occasions when I’ve been robbed.  

My tent got the night off on Day Nine of these travels compliments of a day-long rain that hadn’t relented as night began to fall.  I had just reached Cruz Alta, a town large enough to have several hotels and motels.  I stopped at the first one I came to, a fairly new, purple-walled Hotel California.  It looked like it might be pricey, but I didn’t know what pricey was in Brasil.  

If it has been more than 100 reals, $25, I would have tried another. At 90 I was happy not to have ride any longer in the rain.  It was nice enough to provide soap and towels and had a strong enough WiFi signal to give Janina an early Thanksgiving call.  She reported she’d bought a turkey and cut it in half to split between Thanksgiving and Christmas.  Her big event of the day though was picking up some manure from a nearby horse farm for her garden, an annual ritual that we failed to accomplish before my departure.

As we talked, I ate leftovers from my bountiful truck-stop lunch—a genuine feast of rice and beans, French fries, a fried egg atop a steak, and several vegetables, all for 20 reals. It was the same hearty meal I ate all across Brasil thirty years ago, the best eating anywhere I’ve toured.  Restaurants on the trucker routes have to provide such banquets to stay in business.  There is always enough for two meals, the leftovers more than filling my Tupperware bowl.

I didn’t come upon the restaurant soon enough, as I sought refuge in the office of a grain operation after two-and-a-half hours of getting soaked not knowing that a service station oasis was just three miles down the road.  No one was on the premises, but the door was unlocked, so I slipped in and sat on a bench in its lobby drying out and warming up while I ate a couple of banana and chocolate-spread sandwiches and read.  

After an hour a crew showed up expressing no objections to my presence.  If we could have communicated I would have asked how far it was to the next gas station/restaurant and learned of the one up the road and been on my way immediately.  Instead I lingered for another hour hoping the rain would desist, but also welcoming a much-needed rest for my legs. 

Even though I’d just had a couple hour break, I stopped at the restaurant for a genuine feed, knowing it was still 25-miles to Cruz Alta.  I was hoping the rain would stop and I could camp, but didn’t mind in the least having to resort to a hotel for its many amenities, including my first shower in South America, having just doused myself my first eight days.  I had lots of gear to dry, too much for all of it thoroughly dry by morning. I had to begin the day with damp shoes, but at least the rained had passed, but not the thick overcast.