Two weeks now in Brasil and I have yet to hear a word of English other than when I have given Janina a call. Those few occasions when I’ve asked someone if they spoke English, more often than not they laugh at the absurdity of such a thing.
If I were in dire need of meeting some English speakers I could have turned east yesterday when I came to Ourinhos and headed to the town of Americana two hundred miles away. It is a colony of several thousand American southerns who fled to Brasil after the Civil War to continue growing cotton with the assistance of slaves. They still speak English amongst themselves and maintain their Southern accent. If I had taken the coastal route from Montevideo and dared São Paulo, Americana wouldn’t have been so far out of my way, as it is sixty miles northwest of that huge metropolis.
I nearly took a rest day two days ago when shortly after I left the hotel I stayed at in Ibaiti it began to rain. I had stopped at a supermarket a half mile from the hotel. It began as an innocuous misty drizzle, but a half mile further it turned into a hard downpour. I knew the forecast for the day called for an off and on rain. I’d already endured a couple of such days, but never had the rain lashed down so hard. I didn’t want to be riding down the steep hills ahead with torrents of water. My legs were in need of a day off or at least a light day, and an ebook I’d checked out of the Chicago Public Library was coming due, so I would welcome a day of putting my legs up and reading.
Ibaiti didn’t have a library, so I opted to turn around and head back to the sanctuary of the cheap hotel I’d just left, though I didn’t relish greeting the proprietor, who had warned me of the rain. Halfway back the rain let up and the sky began to lighten. I knew I would be very chagrined to be sitting in my cell if the rain stopped entirely, as it was most likely to do, so I turned around again and headed back down the road in a light rain.
I was happy I had when the road leveled off for a spell. I couldn’t ride as hard as I would have if the road had been dry, but that was saving my legs. Half an hour later with it still raining I stopped at a sheltered bus stop to put on my vest to ward off the chill. A while later I stopped to retrieve what I thought to be a fifty real bill in a puddle of water, more than what I had paid for my motel.
Not only was it a fifty, but it was wrapped around a hundred real note and two more fifties, a grand total of $62. That was a great award for opting to ride in the rain. If not for the rain and that puddle of water, those dropped bills would have been blown all over and surely spotted by someone else, if not lost in the weeds. I’ve found more money a couple of times in the US, but never such a quantity abroad.
The rain persisted until noon when I stopped for my daily lunch feast. I was able to ride dry for an hour after lunch and then the rain resumed. I took this as a taste of the rainy season I could be encountering later in the month when I reach the Amazon, though it would be much warmer there. I just hope it won’t be day-long showers.
Still soaked around five when I reached Santo Antonio da Platina I was happy to turn into another barebones basic traveler’s motel with a large sign advertising the forty real rate for a single with a fan, fifty-five for air conditioning.
By ten o’clock I had finished the ebook, “Figures in a Landscape: People and Places,” Paul Theroux’s third collection of essays, these from 2001 to 2016. They weren’t so much about travel, but profiles and commentaries on reading. He’s as voracious a reader as he is a traveler.
Similar to me, all his reading as a youth made him want to travel, and then all his time spent traveling encouraged him to read even more. When he was in the Peace Corps in Africa he would ride his bike an hour to a town with a store that stocked paperbacks. He has never traveled by bike, even disparaging it in his book about walking the perimeter of England, saying doing it by bike would be a stunt. But in this book of essays, his profile of Robin Williams, an ardent cyclist, he takes a ride with Williams, struggling to keep up.
After back-to-back nights in hotels I was happy to return to my tent the next night, camping in an orchard. It had a fence around it and in the morning I discovered the gate I had passed through at dusk had been locked. It didn’t take too much of an effort to remove all the gear from my bike and hoist the bike over the gate. It was the second time I’ve had to this on this trip. The other was over a barbed wire fence that I didn’t notice when I left the road to slip into a forest. The thin patch of trees along the road were separated from the thicker forest by a fence.
On my way into Marilia this morning, a city of over 200,000, the largest I have passed through, I noticed the first McDonald’s litter of the trip. Not only was Marilia a big enough city for a McDonald’s, it also had a giant supermarket with peanut butter. I was lucky to identify the handful of small plastic containers alongside the Nutella and the local chocolate spread as peanut butter, as it called itself Amendocrem. A small open peanut on its label caught my eye. It seemed to be marketed for children as there were caricatures of two small kids on the label, one with his tongue out licking his lip and the other with two hands upraised with delight and the slogan “the true taste of childhood.”
The only disappointment in the mega-market was that the one-liter bags of yogurt were just 850 mililiters, a typical corporate ploy.
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