Campostre do Maranhão, Brasil

Before I embarked on this outing, I presumed the biggest challenge would be coping with the ovenish Equatorial heat.  I feared I’d be forcing myself to endure increments of ten miles at a time on the bike before melting away.  I’ve had several such days, but far fewer than I could have imagined since I encountered that first blast of one hundred degree heat over two weeks ago.   

The last five days the temperature hasn’t even reached ninety and a predominant cloud cover has taken all the sting out of the sun.  The riding has been near idyllic other than knowing it could turn ovenish at any time. The occasional rain has helped considerably too.  It brings an instant cool without contributing to the humidity, which hasn’t been an issue yet.  The forecast calls for thunderstorms every day, but they are widely scattered, so don’t always effect me.


I still have over five hundred miles before I reach the actual Equator in Macapa and re-enter the northern hemisphere for the final leg of this journey to the Guianas.  Maybe by mid-January it will become unrelentingly hot.  I feared the temperature would increase by one degree for every hundred miles I gained on the Equator, but it’s almost been the reverse.

Rather than the heat my greatest adversaries have been the ants and the tiny wire threads from splintered tires giving me flat tires.  I have been averaging nearly one a day since just before Christmas, all on my front tire.  I should have replaced it in Palmas, but the flats weren’t so pervasive until just after I left.  I’m fifty miles from a city of 250,000 where there ought to be a bike shop with what I need.  Besides a tire I’m going to need some new patches as well.  I don’t have many left.  I have taken to cutting what few I have left in half, as the wire punctures are mere pinpricks.

At least I haven’t had a flat in 2020.  There was so little traffic on New Year’s Day, much less than even on Christmas, that I was able to ride on the road most of the day and avoid the shoulder where all the debris and microscopic wire threads lay in wait.  The service stations were all packed with trucks lingering until the next day when they could make their deliveries.  

It could be a hellish day with the road clogged with all the over-sized trucks, confining me to the shoulder and praying those devious wire fragments will leave me alone.  It will be Russian Roulette with more chambers loaded than empty.  I did tie a piece of cord to my fork so it could dangle on the tire, hopefully brushing off any wire the tire might pick up before it has a chance to imbed itself.  

Despite the bane of flats and ants, my hotel room was even overrun with them crawling the walls the other night, I can bask in the glow of all the generosity bestowed on me.  With it not so hot no motorist has pulled over to offer me a cold drink, though someone did share his cold soda with me at a restaurant.  Rather than offering me fluid, a motorist stopped to bequeath me a package of cookies.

At one hotel the proprietor asked if I’d like some dinner.  I asked for an egg and beans and rice to supplement the ramen I’d already prepared.  She included a banana and would take no payment.

January 1 is the first anniversary of Jair Bolsonaro’s presidency.  The Rio Times website had several articles evaluating his first year in office.  He has not tempered his outrageous, right-wing Trumpian outbursts, but the economy is buzzing along.  The Brasilian stock market is up 33 per cent since he took office and the seven government-owned companies that he allowed to go public are up even more.  

Edmilson, my Warmshowers host in Brasilia, was concerned that the National Bank of Brasil he retired from after thirty-two years of service might go public, endangering his pension.  The government presently owns just over half of its shares, but Bolsonaro could change that.  He is relieved that at least Bolsonaro has not undermined the economy.  The real is even gaining strength against the dollar.

Hardly a day goes by that the Rio Times website doesn’t have a story about some Bolsonaro outburst.  He recently lambasted Brasilian college students for “doing everything but studying,” and what a shame it was that there was not a Brasilian university among the top 200 in the world.

Bolsonaro has three sons all in their thirties who are politicians and are as outspoken and ideological and disruptive as their father.  One suggested Brasilian students would do better if schools were segregated by sex. Two of the sons are under investigation for corruption.  There are no stories about the deforestation going on in the Amazon, other than quoting Bolsonaro that meat costs too much and the country needs more cattle.

The vantage from my insulated bubble is that all is well and thriving.  I see no feral youth or unsavory characters or destitution or the homelessness that was so pervasive in California in my travels around the state a year ago.  There may not be a high degree of affluence, but most people seem content.  I have no concerns about items disappearing off my bike when it is out of my eyesight, but I have been largely in rural, rather than urban, Brasil. Rarely have I benefitted from such generosity as I have here.  I am doing something that people certainly respond to favorably.  It has been a genuine pleasure to gain an intimacy of this powerhouse of a country.