São Miguel do Guamá, Brasil

I took an afternoon break in a small cluster of trees besides the locked wooden gate to a forest of trees being commercially grown in nice/tidy rows.  Why the need for a fence around such tree farms I know not, but that has generally been the case throughout Brasil, thwarting those of us who would like to pitch our tent in their inviting confines.  It’s hard to imagine the trees must be protected from tree poachers, but maybe that is the case, though if someone is brazen enough to come in with chain saw and make off with wood, a fence isn’t likely to thwart them.

I took advantage of the wooden gate to drape my tent, went from the night before, over it to dry.  Before I had a chance to roll it back up a pickup truck approached the gate from the forest. I quickly removed the tent and fly and ground cloth.  The driver gave me a friendly greeting and uttered “acampar” acknowledging my tent.  After the usual essentials of telling him I had begun my ride in Montevideo and was headed to Belém and that I wasn’t an Argentine, as is generally assumed, but an Americano from Chicago, he opened the back of his truck and pulled out a plastic bag from the cargo space and handed it to me.  

It was full of candy—mostly hard candy, but also some chocolate and taffy and several bags of Haribo, which gave my pulse a jolt, as this German-based candy company is a long-time sponsor of The Tour de France.  It distributes more product from the caravan than any other sponsor, over a million-and-a-half bags.  I can always count on grabbing a couple each time I encounter the caravan, as it sprays them indiscriminately by the handful.

The Haribo candy is gummy-based and chewy, so I opened a bag and added it to my small ziploc bag of nuts and crackers in my handlebar bag that I munch on as I cycle along.  It is a bag that I’m continually replenishing and never allow to empty.  I’ll even take advantage of it during the night.  Rarely does something sweet end up in it though.

That night I camped beside a field under cultivation that I presumed was being treated with chemicals and might keep the ants at bay.  Not so.  It was inhabited by a colony of ants that had a liking for Haribo candy.  For the first time ants swarmed my bag of fuel that was tucked away in my handlebar bag.  I didn’t awake to their invasion until four a.m. when I could feel them crawling on my legs. My eye immediately spotted the ant-saturated bag of food.  I tossed it out of the tent and then proceeded to smash the hundreds of ants who were all concentrated on the side of the tent with the candy.  At least these ants hadn’t eaten any extra holes into the tent to gain entry.  

I’d gone a couple of nights without ants, so I was due.  I have camped forty of the fifty nights since I set out from Montevideo other than three nights in the apartment of my Warmshowers hosts in Brasilia and seven in motels.  I went two weeks before the first of my ant attacks, which is now up to six, so it has been working out to be about a one in four chance of waking to ants in the tent.  I  hope the percentage remains the same when I reach the jungle.  Evidently that isn’t going to happen until I cross the Amazon.  

I’m now within one hundred miles of Belém and still no jungle.  There are dense stretches of forest that almost qualify as junglish and “impenetrable,” but they aren’t as towering or lush or tropical as one would associate with being jungle.  Mostly the countryside has been claimed and subdued, though it is still an on-going process.  There is a sense of this being a frontier, a few generations behind the American west, but well on its way to being fully tamed.

The book I’m reading on Southerners coming to Brasil after the Civil War emphasizes how Brasil has long encouraged people to come with plows and guns and ax’s, the three main implements of civilization, to develop its vast unsettled areas.  There was even a move afoot to send 50,000 freed slaves to Brasil after the Civil War, as the US wasn’t sure it could assimilate them and thought it best to send them away. Brasil would gladly have welcomed them to populate and develop Amazonia.

Besides the offering of candy, my food reserves were supplemented by nearly a dozen bags of dehydrated pork skins that I found scattered along a couple mile stretch of the road that must have broken free from a motorist’s cargo. It’s not something I ordinarily eat, but with 400 calories per bag, I was happy to gather them up.  I redistributed  a couple of the bags to motorcyclists I ended up with at a bus shelter when we were caught by a downpour.  

The rain didn’t deter a ranch hand on his horse under a deluxe poncho.

I’m getting used to getting drenched at least once a day.  That’s fine as long as I don’t have to set up my tent in the rain and have had the time to dry out from the downpour before I camp.  I’m ever conscious of trying to be within range of a town with a hotel in case I am soaked.  I rejoiced when I saw a sign for a 40-real hotel ten kilometers up the road as the sky darkened with storm clouds near day’s end.

My heart sunk though when I learned the hotel had been converted into a dorm for workers and had no spare rooms.  No one felt the need to be benevolent and find a place for me, as there were a couple of other hotels in town, including one for 30 reals.  I wasn’t so sure that was such a good deal when the weak fan in my room couldn’t fend off the no-see-‘em bugs that were chewing me up so relentlessly that at midnight I erected my tent on my bed, as there was no where else to put it, though I did consider the hallway. 

The bugs never found the half-dozen quarter-sized holes from one ant invasion, and I was finally able to sleep.  Those gnats were much worse than ants, enforcing my preference for being off in the bush in my tent, even wet and even under threat of being flooded, as is a concern every night when it starts raining and doesn’t want to seem to stop.  There is hardly a more satisfying experience than erecting the tent in the wilds at day’s end.