Santa Maria, Brasil

I was welcomed to Brasil with relatively flat terrain the first forty miles to Bagé.  I asked the cyclist who accompanied me for a few miles if it would remain flat all the way to Santa Maria, 160 miles further.  He erupted with a spontaneous laugh, almost as foreboding  as his gasp of “its going to be hot” when I told him I was headed to Belém at the headwaters of the Amazon. 

It wasn’t that Santa Maria was in the mountains, just that the terrain would turn hilly.  It was up and down with climb after climb of ten or fifteen minutes often in my lowest gear, followed by a fast descent and then another climb. There was an occasional flat stretch of a few miles, but mostly it was climbing and descending  through vast pasturelands thinly populated by cattle.  It was a battle to keep my average speed for the day above ten miles per hour.  It would fall below on the climbs, then recover on the descent, especially if it included a flat stretch.

The vegetation was green, looking as if it could support much more cattle than were scattered about.  Some of the climbs took me to fir trees, and some of the descents to palms, but it was largely deciduous.  Habitations were a rarity.  It was an unexpected seventy-five miles to the next town after Bagé.  I had been counting on a town or two, or at least a gas station at a crossroads, but there was nothing.  

With my water dwindling I climbed down to a river late in the day to fill a couple of my water bottles that I could pump through my filter if need be.  I hoped to avoid that effort, as the temperature had mercifully remained  below eighty all day.  By dark it had dipped into the 60s forcing me to use my vest for the first time. I didn’t need to drink anywhere near as much as the previous nights when I sat shirtless in my tent.

The traffic was negligible until I came to a junction after about one hundred miles to Porto Alegre, a city of over a million that is Brasil’s southernmost port.  The traffic suddenly thickened with trucks transporting goods heading to the large city of Santa Maria.  It was no worries though with a nice wide shoulder.  

Gas stations became more frequent, always a most welcome site, as they are a genuine oasis with dispensers of free ice cold filtered water, similar to what I came upon from time to time in Oman a few years ago.  My water concerns are gone.  There was no such amenity when I was last in Brasil thirty years ago, so this came as a wonderful surprise.  Some of the larger service stations also have WiFi and showers.  When it turns hot I will be craving the next service station with great vigor.  If I can count on unlimited ice cold water every two or three hours as I approach the equator I may be able to survive the extreme heat and humidity.

Hopefully I’ll pass through a town large enough to have a supermarket at least every other day.  My first supermarket in Bagé was a bonanza of North American proportions, a welcome upgrade from the pint-sized versions of just four or five aisles in Uruguay.  Brasil is a land of plenty.  I haven’t come across peanut butter yet, though there is Nutella to be had in Brasil, something I didn’t see in Uruguay during my peanut butter searchs.   The liter packs of yogurt drink were half the price of Uruguay and ramen too.  There was also a vast array of powdered drink packs, including mango, and several brands, including Tang, twice the price of the cheapest local version.  

I was a bit alarmed when the first ATM I tried in Bagé rejected my debit card.  Fortunately my concern didn’t last long as the next one down the street gave that glorious whirring sound of processing my request and shuffling a wad of bills and I could celebrate.   

Not much later my ears picked up another sound that gave me further cause to celebrate.  It was the sound of traffic.  I had been on a surprise rough and rutted dirt road for over forty minutes out of Bagé to reconnect with the highway, a route I chose rather than doubling back on the road I had come in on.  For good reason no one else was on the road.  There were steep climbs that had me close to dismounting and pushing.  My GPS said it should only last 3.9 miles, but it hadn’t taken into account the steep dips.  When I finally heard traffic ahead, I knew my ordeal was done, at least for now, as I know I have a couple hundred mile stretch of dirt awaiting me after I cross the Amazon.  But since buses and trucks travel it, it ought to be more manageable than this stretch.

I’ve had no jet lag to overcome, as Uruguay and now Brasil, at least the section I crossed into, are only three time zones ahead of Chicago.  I thought I’d remain in the same time zone for the entirety of this trip, but Brasil is actually as wide as it is long necessitating four time zones.  The country is huge, the size of the continental US, and is the world’s  fifth most populous country, though more than a hundred million fewer than the US. With a much lower population density than the US, heightened by twenty million concentrated in São Paulo and seven million in Rio de Janerio, rural Brasil is quite wide open.  I will be staying well inland avoiding those vast urban sprawls.  Brasilia with three million will be the largest city I’ll have to contend with.  Belém is half the size, and may be the only other city of over a million on my route.  None of the three Guianas at the end of my travels even have a million residents total.

None of the cities on my inland route until Brasilia, over a thousand miles away, warrant a mention in my seemingly comprehensive 736-page Lonely Planet guidebook to Brasil.  It largely concentrates on the many beach towns and the large metropolises.  I’m still reading it cover-to-cover to see what all I’m missing.  The country is more than a mix of Portuguese and the largest number of descendants of slaves in the Americas.  Not too far off my route in the far south of Brasil are large concentrations of Germans and some Japanese too.  Octoberfest rivals Carnaval in such parts.  São Paulo has the world’s largest Japanese community outside of Japan.  Nearly half the population is black or mulatto, though largely white so far in my first two hundred miles.