Palmas, Brasil

 The cycling gods made it a very Merry Christmas bequeathing me a tailwind and a cloudy sky and a relatively flat final forty miles along the wide, lake-like Rio Tocantins to Palmas, allowing me to complete my 62-mile Christmas Day ride several hours before dark.  

I had a host of hotels to choose from in this city of 250,000, but I had the recommendation of bargain-priced one from a couple that had stopped along the road the day before to offer me a cold bottle of water and some sweets.  The wife was an English-speaker.   They invited me to put my bike in their pick-up and take me to their vacation get-away home one hundred kilometers up the road, but I’m too committed to the bike for such temptations.  They’d be back in Palmas, their home, the day after Christmas and gave me their phone number in case I was still there or had need of help.  As the wife and I chatted for ten minutes or so, her husband videoed it all on his phone.  

They were the second couple to stop that day to give me a cold drink, just after I had commented in my blog that I was surprised no one had on my present stretch of long, hot distances between towns and service stations.  The first pulled a Heineken out of their cooler for me, then replaced it with a Schweppes.  It was hard not to guzzle it down in one gulp.  Wow, did it taste good, as did also the bottle of water from the other couple even though I had just filled my water bottles thirty minutes before with ice cold water from a service station.

The guy was the first person in these travels to ask my age, a question I often get now when on I’m tour.  But he was far from the first to give me a thumbs up.  That is a common occurrence from people who don’t even speak to me as they walk past or acknowledge me from a distance at my service station pit-stops.

My Christmas was further highlighted by an open supermarket in Porto National when I joined up with the river and turned north to Palmas.  I wasn’t even sure if the restaurants and mini-convenience stores at the service stations would be open on Christmas, so an actual open supermarket was reason to celebrate.  It was busy with people stopping in for six-packs and ice and snack items.

I went straight to its refrigerated cabinet and grabbed three 200 ml cartons of chocolate milk, my treat of the day whenever I find it.  They have replaced the liter-bags of yogurt drink that highlighted my first month on the road, as they disappeared just before I reached Brasilia.  I can stock up on the chocolate milk as it doesn’t need to be refrigerated, so I try to keep one in reserve to start my day as I break camp.

My biggest Christmas treat will be to be sleeping in air-conditioned comfort, not in a pool of sweat.  My sweat might be repelling the ants, as I’ve had a couple of nice ant-free campsites in high patches of grass that provided the ultimate of seclusion, but not a wisp of air circulation, especially with the need to put up the rain fly the last couple of nights.

When I made my Christmas call to Janina, she asked if there were Christmas lights to be seen.  The decorations are minimal.  The most prominent acknowledgement of Christmas is the red stocking hats that some service station attendants and restaurant workers are wearing even in the blistering heat.  Edmilson and Jussara had a two-foot high artificial tree in the corner of their apartment even though they would be visiting their children near São Paulo for the holiday.

I was hit by my first tropical thunderstorm late in the afternoon yesterday.  It came out of nowhere.  All was sunny and bright, then the sky quickly darkened and the wind started swirling, dropping the temperature, and then a torrent of water hit.  My legs and shorts were getting a car-wash of a cleaning.  It lasted about fifteen minutes and felt great.  Ten minutes after it passed I came to dry road and was soon dry myself other than my shoes and socks.  I would welcome one of those every afternoon.

Now that I’ve completed the 525-mile leg from Brasilia to Palmas, the next is 769 miles to Belém and my much-anticipated crossing of the Amazon, a 24-hour proposition around an island the size of Switzerland.  With the terrain relenting and the miles coming much easier, I finally can feel as if I’m closing in on my ultimate destination—the Carnegie Library in Georgetown, Guiana.  Every day now is a big step closer.