Erechin, Brasil

As I pushed my bike out of the garage of the Hotel California in Cruz Alta I heard a rubbing sound on my front wheel.  “Ah yes,” I remembered. I had been aware of it the last couple of hours of riding in the rain the day before.  I’d been forced off onto a rough shoulder innumerable times in the rain and there was no telling what damage that rough riding had caused, hopefully nothing more than a little truing of my front wheel.

I meant to tend to it that night, but having to leave my bike in the garage of the hotel it slipped my mind.  When I examined the wheel I discovered a severe rupture in the rim, a flap of metal sticking out, a full-fledged disaster.  I had been fortunate that the protruding metal pointed forward otherwise my brake pad could have caught it and catapulted me.  

I pulled out my GPS and typed in “bicicleta” in hopes that there might be a bike shop in Cruz Alta.  Lo and behold there was, about a mile away.  I was getting a late start, after nine, so I wouldn't have to wait for it to open.  My delay was thanks to a surprise feast of a breakfast that came with my room.  I had been told, or so I thought, that there would be coffee in the morning.  I didn’t know that the Portuguese term for breakfast is “café de manha.”

When I was ready to leave and dropped off my room key at the desk, the clerk pointed to a room with a huge spread of food and repeated “café de manha.”  It was a king’s banquet of cheese and cold cuts and bread and pizza and lasagna and sandwiches, two cakes, a platter of fruit, juice and a pitcher of yogurt drink.  I gorged on  two platefuls, and felt as if I’d gotten enough calories for the day.  If every motel offered such a bounty, staying in motels suddenly became much more tempting than I’d prefer.

As I headed to the bicycle shop with a sunken feeling in my stomach that all that food couldn’t relieve, I hoped it would have a competent mechanic who could build me a new wheel with my generator hub, rather than having to buy a replacement wheel.  It would be a major blow to lose my charging capabilities, though not as much of a disaster if it had happened on my last two trips to Africa, where electricity was hard to come by.  I’d be able to make do here, using outlets in restaurants, at least until I reached the Amazon where restaurants might turn scarce.  And I did have solar charging capabilities as well.

At first glance the bike shop, packed with bikes on the floor and hanging from the ceiling along with wheels and rims and tires, looked as if it would have just what I needed, a rim to build a new wheel.  If a mechanic wasn’t available I might even be able to attempt it myself.  

Three middle-aged men were tending to the shop—the manager, a mechanic and a salesman.  The salesman pulled down a wheel with a disc brake, implying it was the only 700 wheel they had.  I gestured at my generator hub and pointed up at the rims.  He pulled one down and showed that it wasn’t a 700, so wouldn’t work.  Nor would the wheel with the disc brake.  He let me know the nearest bike shop with what I needed was 100 miles away, either back to Santa Maria or up ahead in Passo Fundo.  

I had removed my wheel and the mechanic in the back was examining it to see if he could repair it enough for me to continue on.  He didn’t seem hopeful.  I was willing to continue riding with it, as I had already ridden on it for twenty-five miles or so.  When I took the wheel back and was about to put it back on my bike, both the mechanic and the salesman became alarmed, shaking their heads and waving their arms indicating the wheel could explode at any time. 

They had jabbered away at me in Portuguese from the very beginning, leaving me to only surmise at what they were saying.  They might have been offering from the very beginning to disassemble one of the disc brake wheels for its rim, but I didn’t pick up on that or even consider that as a possibility.  But that is what they now made clear they would do.  That was too good to be true.  I wasn’t one hundred percent sure that their rim would work, as it had a deeper dish which might not accommodate my spokes, but I was willing to trust their expertise.  I started to disassemble the spokes from my wheel, but they wanted to do it themselves, so I went and sat in a corner of the shop and read Theroux’s “Deep South” on my iPad and let my huge breakfast digest

I felt relieved and thought back to a couple of recent similar incidents where a mechanical calamity had been resolved when it had appeared most dire. This was my third tour in a row where I’d broken a part that was hard to come by, initially feeling crestfallen, but then saved.  This past summer in France I had to backtrack twenty-five miles to a shop that could replace my unusual bottom bracket and crank set after a most benevolent mechanic in one shop called all over to find what I needed.

Later this fall I spend a day in Iowa hopping from bike shop to bike shop outside of Des Moines and then in the city trying to find a not so common race of sealed bearings for my rear wheel.  And now this.  I’ve gone years and years touring all over the world with nothing more serious than a flat tire or broken spoke or broken cable.  But as with the other two seeming disasters, I found kindly folk who went above and beyond coming to my rescue.   

Not even an hour later, my latest saviors had completed the transplant.  They’d even replaced my brake pads, as they showed me metal was starting to show through.  My bike was in better shape than when it had arrived in Uruguay.  I didn’t care what all this might cost.  As it was, it was the same as my stay at the Hotel California, a mere $22.50. 

The bike rode smoother than ever as I headed back out into the rolling terrain.  Over the next two days I gained another thousand feet as the plateau I’m on has risen to 2,500 feet. I hope it doesn’t dip in the next 1,100 miles to Brasilia at nearly 4,000 feet.   I was able to camp in a pine forest outside of Erechin.  

Up away from the coast, the temperature has stayed below 80, making for ideal cycling, other than all the hills keeping me under seventy miles a day even with seven hours in the saddle. I’m 2,100 miles from the Amazon.  I had been hoping to reach it by Christmas.  The terrain will have to flatten for that to happen. 

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.

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.  

Bagé, Brasil

Beyond Trienta y Tres, a cross-roads town, traffic diminished to a trickle on the route to the isolated border crossing at Aceguá, my choice rather than the busier trucker route at Rio Branco.  I was entering the emptiest part of Uruguay for my final one hundred miles to the border.

I had no complaints about having the road to myself, but it did raise the concern of whether the Brazilian customs officials at this lightly-transited outpost had gotten the news that Americans no longer needed visas, or if they might try to extract some sort of payment from me.

I always approach border crossings with some trepidation knowing that I might be hassled for some technicality and subjected to the ordeal of having to explain all the contents in my panniers—tang in a plastic bag, powdered nuts, my water filter, some of my odd bicycle tools.  My concerns and memories of border hassles kept me from fully enjoying the otherwise glorious miles unfolding around me in cooler temperatures with a cloud cover and my first tailwind.  With the temperature finally in the 70s, as they should be this time of the year, I didn’t need to fret about running low on water for a 45-mile stretch between towns, though I could have asked for some at a police station along the route if it had been as sweltering as it had been the first three days of my ride.

The last book I read before my departure was Paul Theroux’s latest, “On the Plain of Snakes,” about driving the Mexico border from California to Texas and then driving down to Chiapas.  As always, he captures the travel experience and primed my anticipation for my upcoming travels.   In his commentary on his multiple border crossing he claimed, “I treasure border crossings, and the best of them are the ones I’ve had to walk from one country to another, savoring the equality of being a pedestrian.”

It is always exhilarating to complete a border crossing and gain entry to a country and all the new that it promises, but the process is hardly something to “treasure.” Some of that jolt of exhilaration one experiences upon entry can be attributed to the relief of getting in.  It is never a sure thing.  I can still remember all too vividly those times when I've been denied entry, or been subjected to the demands of greedy, corrupt border officials, which fortunately has been a rarity.

Back in 1980 Crissy and I were kept waiting for three hours at the El Salvador border because we didn’t have license plates on our bikes.  We were being treated as if we were motorcyclists as they’d never had to deal with pedal cyclists.  Rather than greasing the process with a bribe we elected to wait until someone else came on duty.   When a van of gringoes were let in with bikes on the back of their van we pointed that out to the official and he relented.  

I’ve been turned away from borders at Syria trying to enter from Turkey and Jordan trying to enter from Israel for not having a visa, despite it being an arbitrary issue.  I didn’t even attempt entering Ivory Coast after two days of a runaround at its consulate just a few miles from the border in Maputo trying to acquire a $160 visa.

At the exit point from Uruguay the customs official had me nervous when he paged through my passport looking for my stamped entry into the country.  There was none as it was all done electronically at the airport, including having my photo taken.  He finally began typing away at his keyboard and found my entry info, earning my exit stamp.

The Brazilian custom official had a hard time finding my exit stamp, as it was in a corner of a page in the middle of many pages of stamps besides several Sengeles stamps from three years ago, as if the Uruguan official were playing a joke on his Brazilian counter part.  After he found it he continued paging back and forth through my passport several times as if in search for a visa to his counter.  That made me very nervous.  I couldn’t understand the Portuguese or Spanish he spoke to me until he asked what I thought to be how many days I wanted.  That gave me some encouragement.

I said forty days and that I was biking to Belem and the Amazon.  He said that didn’t seem enough and thought 90 would be a more realistic number. That was fine by me.  I didn’t start celebrating though until he reached over for his stamp and applied it to my passport and then wrote 90 in it.  It was a further relief when he handed it back through the slot under the window and didn’t ask for $160, as the cost formerly had been, though paid at a consulate when one applied for a visa.  He was an older gent, who proved to be a decent fellow, as border officials are more often than not, especially at minor borders where they aren’t harried all day.

It was shortly before five.  I had three hours of light to penetrate into the country.  This was such a minor border there were no money-changers hanging around.  I was fortunate to have stopped at a gas station just before the border asking if there was WiFi anywhere nearby, which I wanted to check for the present exchange rate.  The gas station actually had WiFi and someone who changed money. I had only spent 890 of the 3,000 pesos I had acquired from an ATM machine at the airport, not even $25 in five days. Getting that taken care of and without being gouged was another great relief.  

Brasil couldn’t have looked rosier as I sped through more cattle country.  The terrain was flatter than it had been in Uruguay, with the horizon a long ways off, not blocked by rolling terrain, giving it the look of Montana Big Sky country.  I knew I was no longer in Uruguay when much newer and bigger pick-up trucks roared past me at 80 or more miles per hour despite a speed limit of 60.  There had been none of that in Uruguay.  

As in Uruguay fences lined the road and I had to be creative finding a place to camp.  My last night in Uruguay I pitched my tent in some brush alongside a barbed-wire fence.  I was awoken at dawn by curious cattle who had come by for breakfast.  My first campsite in Brasil was down a steep embankment just below the road in some bushes.  Neither would rate as optimum, but they sufficed.

The highly-detailed Bradt guidebook I used for Uruguay applied “ubiquitous” to five items one would come across in the country. I hadn't knowingly encountered any of them—the monk parrot, chimichurri sauce, slot machines, the Cerveceria La Posite and Le Cigale restaurant chains and a photo of Carlos Páez Vilaro with Picasso.  I would have had to have gone to the resort town of Punta del Este to have seen the photo, where the artist Vilaro had designed a huge house sculpture that is now a hotel.

I no doubt passed some of the chain restaurants in my meanderings about Montevideo, but they didn’t stand out.  More prominent to my eye were all the McDonald’s.  There were three in a mile stretch on June 18 Street through the downtown and another at the airport and one just a few blocks from the US embassy on the Rambla coastal boulevard. There were none though out of the city, nor any American chain stores.  One just occasionally saw a Coca-Cola sign on a small shop.  Billboards were non-existent.  The only signs along the road were for police stations and a three-digit code one could call if one needed mechanical assistance.

Though I pedaled three hundred miles through the heart of this small country, about the size of Florida, and the smallest of all those in South America other than Suriname and French Guiana, I just barely made its acquaintance.  I would be happy for another opportunity to broaden my knowledge.  Many of the estancias offer work-stay opportunities that would be an incomparable experience.

But Brasil promises to be an equally fine time.  The exuberance of the Brasilian nature was immediately reflected in the amped up motorists roaring past me and was further personified when an early Saturday morning Lycra-clad cyclist sped by in the opposite direction greeting me with a hearty “buenas” rather than the simple upraised finger or two from the handlebar as is common elsewhere.  The several other cyclists who passed likewise greeted me audibly.   And for the first time in these travels a cyclist rode alongside me for a few miles—a young military man wearing a Tinkov jersey, Peter Sagan’s former team. His English was minimal but I learned that he was a triathlete and no Brasialian had ridden in The Tour de France.  His warmth and friendliness were a fine welcome to Brasil.

Trienta y Tres, Uruguay

 I had two options to Brazil, riding along the coast or going inland.  The coastal route would be two hundred miles of beaches and resorts.  I could go swimming anywhere as by law everyone has access to any beach. I’d have many campgrounds to avail myself of including one run by the army with 2,500 tent sites.  

The resorts ranged from hippie/surfer hideaways to world-class luxury enclaves that attract hoards of Argentines and Brazilains along with jet-setters and the Uber-rich from all over the world, including the likes of the Prince of Monaco, Naomi Campbell, the Rolling Stones tailor and George Bush Sr.  One of the most notable private mansions is that of a Microsoft honcho.

That route had lots of attractions—a huge sea lion colony, the largest ombúes forest in the country, nudist beaches, a giant sculpture of a hand in the sand, a bottomless wealth of eccentrics and ostentation of many dimensions.  I knew it would be accompanied by lots of traffic and hubbub and the ilk I prefer to avoid, so I opted for the much less traveled interior route.  It has been idyllic cycling through uninterrupted pasturelands of cattle and sheep, riding smooth roads with a wide shoulder as good as I’ve ridden anywhere and hardly any traffic.  Though the country boasts over thirty million head of cattle, the highest percentage per capita in the world, they are widely scattered in the hilly, forested countryside.  I’ve only see two gauchos tending to them, both with heads bowed engrossed in their hand-held devices. 

Uruguay continues to impress, not only with the quality of its roads, but the paucity of litter, as little as I’ve encountered anywhere.  There is just an occasional plastic soda bottle.  It took awhile for me to scavenge three of them to supplement my four water bottles.  I’ve had to endure a late spring heat wave with the temperature in the 90s, getting me conditioned to what lays ahead in Brazil.  I haven’t even reached the tropics yet and I’m getting baked.  With the distances between towns of thirty miles or more, I wanted to expand my water reserves, especially for camping if I didn’t have a chance to refill late in the day.  I don’t mind at all the extra weight.  Running out of water is a concern I don't want to have, and now I don’t.

It can be a challenge at times finding water.  I pulled into one small town three bottles down, not a desperate need other than finding some shade for a spell.  The lone discernible store, a bakery, was closed.  I couldn’t find a water spigot in the town park. I asked two women sitting on a porch where I might get some water.  They pointed to a house down the street with an open door.  It was the unlabeled town shop, selling eggs and popsicles and other essentials.  I bought a popsicle and got my bottles filled.

The town of Minas, a former gold mining town and the furthest inland Darwin penetrated into Uruguay during his ten-week sojourn in the country in 1832, was large enough to have a tourist office. English-speakers come through so seldom, it wasn’t staffed by an English-speaker.  I was hoping to learn the significance of June 18 and October 8, as they are common street names. My guidebook’s list of national holidays didn’t include anything on those dates. It at least did explain the meaning of the town Treinta y Tres. That is the number of fighters who crossed the Rio Uruguay in 1825 to start the struggle for independence from Brazil.  They are further immortalized with streets in the town named after each.   Thirty-three is further appropriate for the name of the town as it rests 33 degrees south of the equator.

The WiFi in the tourist office was out of commission, nor was there any in its main plaza, as many towns provide.  I had to resort to a restaurant, which at least allowed me to use electricity for the first time to charge my iPad.  I had to use my French adapter, which I’ll also need in Brazil and possibly also my English adapter, as it isn’t consistent throughout the country.

Finding electricity isn’t too much of a concern, as I’m traveling with a fold-out solar panel along with my generator hub.  The sun has been intense enough to keep me well-supplied as I ride along with the three panels spread atop my gear over my rear panniers charging two batteries simultaneously with pedal and sun power. It’s too early to pass a verdict which charges faster. I wouldn’t mind some clouds to blunt the ferocity of the sun, but at least I can be happy with the greater charging power.  I can listen to podcasts all day and read ebooks off the bike to my hearts delight without concern of bottoming out.

Uruguay isn’t a cycling nation as is Colombia, nor has it provided any legs to the peloton as have Venezuela and Argentina and Brazil, but it does have a velodrome in Montevideo, in the same sporting complex as its soccer stadium.

There were quite a few cyclists in Montevideo, including the ubiquitous food delivery messengers on ebikes and others on rental bikes of the type found in cities all over the world.  In the evening hours out in the country I’ve seen guys in Lycra riding hard.  But the most heart-gladdening cycle-related site was a farmer with a bike-frame fence beside his house.

Uruguay is a country of enough affluence, second only to Chile in South America, that I can’t count on street food.  The closest thing is service stations with empanadas.  My most satisfying meal though has been an ice cold one-liter satchel of yogurt drink that I drank half of and used the other half on Cheerios.  I was craving another the next day, but didn’t pass through a town large enough to have a grocery store.

The lack of litter along the road is a strong emblem of a populace with an elevated sense of concern.  It is reflected in many ways, going all the way back to its origins.  It abolished slavery in 1813, well before Brazil, that waited until 1888.  It banned bullfighting in 1912 and the death penalty at about the same time.  Wind power covers more than a quarter of its energy needs.  It has continually been at the forefront of humanitarian issues.  It provides a greater percentage of its population to UN peacekeeping missions than any other country.  I regret I only have two more days to enjoy it before I cross into Brazil.

Montevideo, Uruguay

A sign over a drinking fountain just after one passes through customs at the Montevideo airport reads, “Uruguay, a country with safe tap water.”  The corners of the sticker were loose from someone who had tried to make a souvenir of it.  Uruguay may be the only country in South America with drinkable water.  That is no doubt a factor in Uruguay ranking as the Latin American country with the highest quality of life, a position it has held since 2005.

My early assessment would not dispute that.  I enjoyed a pleasant eighteen-mile ride from the airport into the city, most of the way on a bike path along the ocean, much of it lined with beaches, with traffic at a minimum on the adjoining road.  With a late spring temperature in the 80s there were plenty of people enjoying the beach, even on a Monday.  The life guard stations every couple of hundred yards were all staffed.  Others were out on bikes, some wearing helmets and some not, meaning the controversial law of 2013 requiring cyclists to wear helmets was not being enforced. That same year Uruguay became the first country to legalize cannabis.  The country also distinguishes itself with the world's highest percentage of wind power and the legalization of same sex marriage.

The drivers are almost as considerate and peaceable as those of Japan, where rare is it that anyone dares to go over the speed limit.  I could sense on my flight full of Uruguayans their relaxed and sophisticated nature. I've already been the beneficiary of the kindly Uruguayan sensibilities.  The first was at the airport when a customs official who had just x-rayed my bags and wanted a closer look, asked if I had any food.  I had food spread around all my panniers and in my handlebar bag too—energy bars, ramen, peanut butter, cherrios, leftover Halloween candy, bread and more.  He said animal-based food wasn’t allowed into the country, so I’d have to turn over my three hard boiled eggs and cheese.  I asked if I could sit there and eat it all. He said that would be okay.  After I’d eaten the first egg and was still working on peeling the others, he relented and said it would be all right to take the rest with me.

Several hours later at the Museo del Futbol I was invited to bring my bike into the lobby.  The museum adjoins the football stadium built for the inaugural World Cup in 1930, the first stadium in the world built specifically for soccer.  That was a nice introduction to this fantastic museum that also gave entry to the stadium.  It was packed with trophies and photos of all sizes and a wide assortment of artifacts and included four monitors showing footage of Uruguay’s greatest triumphs beginning with victories in the 1924 and 1928 Olympics, followed by its twin World Cup victories in 1930 and 1950.  Among the massive wall-sized photos throughout the museum was one of  Montevideo’s Independence Square jam-packed with fans celebrating one of its World  Cup victories with the caption “This nation of two million people celebrated as if it was one person.”   

There was also acclaim given to the 2011 team that won the South American championship besting present-day powerhouses Argentina and Brazil, the Goliaths it is sandwiched between.  Paul McCartney was also included, as he gave two sold out performances in the stadium in 2012 and 2014.  

I dropped in on the museum on my way out of town late in the afternoon, just a couple of hours after I arrived in Montevideo. I had intended to make it a day two visit, but after meandering around the city for a couple of hours I thought I’d seen enough of this somewhat tepid metropolis of 1.8 million people, more than half the country’s population, and gave in to the call of my tent and headed out.  There were a handful of stately old Beaux Arts buildings, but their magnificence was choked by the proliferating bland, weed-like constructions that now dominated.

I had intended to stay at one of the several downtown hostels, but I had no desire to make my first sleep in the country in doors and possibly in the company of others, though I would have welcomed the opportunity to hobnob with fellow travelers, if there were any in this pre-summer season.  There weren’t any on my flight, fully packed with Uruguayans returning home.

The prospect of camping gave me all the energy I needed, despite not much sleep on the overnight nine-hour flight from Miami after a nine-hour layover.  If I’d had one of those tight lay-overs after my flight from Chicago I would have been in a panic, as Frontier Airlines had a snafu getting my bike to me, which I had to transfer myself to my next flight on American.  Security procedures wouldn’t permit it to be brought through a door beside the small hatch that all the standard luggage, including my duffle, passed through.

A Frontier agent awaiting with me at the luggage carosal was flummoxed.  He was in communication on his phone with several officials that were giving him contradictory instructions. It took over an hour for him to figure out how to get my bike to me.  At least the delay allowed me time to scavenge a discarded cart, renting for $5 at this airport, to transport my 45-pound duffle, and almost as heavy bike box, the long hike to the American check-in.

All was working out, just as it had in Chicago when Janina had to return to the airport when I realized several minutes after she dropped me off, that I was still wearing the down vest I meant to wear just for the sub-freezing seven a.m. drive to the airport.  I didn’t need it for the hot temperatures that awaited me in South America and had no space in my panniers to carry it for the month-and-a-half I’d be away as I ride the 3,000 miles from the bottom of Brazil to its top before crossing into the Guinanas where I’ll visit the lone Carnegie Library on the continent in Georgetown, the ultimate goal of these travels. 

I’m starting in Uruguay as it is one of four countries, along with the Guianas, that I have not biked in South America on my previous four rides about the continent.  I was just across the river from Uruguay on my first trip in 1989 when I spent six months riding 7,000 miles from Colombia to Tierra del Fuego, then another 3,000 from Buenos Aires to Rio de Janiero. Though Uruguay is nestled to the east alongside the northern third of Argentina, Montevideo is actually south of Buenos Aires, making it the southernmost capital in South America.

On my ride around Venezuela fifteen years later I intended to slip into the Guianas, but Venezuela has no diplomatic relations with them, refusing to acknowledge their existence, maintaining they belong to Venezuala.   I could have crossed into Brazil for just a few miles and then crossed into Guyana and then the other two, but that would have required a $160 Brazilian visa, which was absurd for such a short period of time.

I was on the verge of making this trip starting in Uruguay last year and was in the process of acquiring the Brazilian visa, having to send my passport to the embassy in Washington D.C., but the process threatened to take too long, pushing me deep into the brutal heat of the Brazilian summer, so I delayed it til this year allowing me to leave earlier.  During that interim the newly elected Brazilian president paid Trump a visit, during which Trump got him to drop the fee for Americans to visit Brazil, perhaps the most notable accomplishment of his presidency.  If he’d made that one of his campaign promises rather than building a wall along the Mexican border, I might have wanted to vote for him.

Potential hundred degree temperatures await me on the Equator and in the Amazon, so I was happy not to linger in Montevideo, putting me a day ahead of reaching the ovenish region before the temperatures reach their peak in January.  I’d like to be back in Chicago by then, ice-skating with Janina on her suburban outdoor rinks.

Days were shortening when I left Chicago with it getting dark before five.  The days will be on the lengthening cycle for another month where I am now, allowing me to ride until eight p.m. on my first day in Uruguay, all the time I needed to find a forest thirty miles out of the city so thick that a tree plucked a pack off my bike as I pushed through it, giving me a fright when I stopped and noticed it missing, fearing it had been stolen when I stopped at a supermarket a couple hours before.  But I quickly remembered that I had slipped a tin of sardines into the pack, so it hadn’t been swiped there, and had to be nearby, which it was.

I had a blessedly tranquil night eager to resume my riding, just sorry that I’d only have three hundred miles of it in Uruguay before crossing in to Brazil for the bulk of my time away.