Tartarugalzinho, Brasil

Rio de Janeiro is experiencing an extreme heat wave with temperatures well over one hundred degrees, but I’m continuing to be blessed by pleasant temperatures in the 80 after crossing the Equator in Macapa and returning to the northern hemisphere where the days are lengthening. 

I can thank the generally overcast skies and regular dousings of rain for keeping the temperatures moderate.  In the rare instances when the sky clears and I’m subjected to the direct rays of the sun it’s like being hitting by a flame-thrower.  There is usually one hard downpour a day and a light drizzle or two.  There are also spells of a light mist such as greenhouses use to spray their plants.  I don't mind the rain at all except at the end of the day if it comes too close to camping time.

Contending with one hundred degree temperatures would not be pleasant in this lightly populated northern corner of Brasil with water and shade few and far between.  There are stretches of sixty and eighty and another of over one hundred miles between towns in this final stretch to French Guyana.  With so little traffic there are no extra service stations between towns and what service stations there are are so barebones they don’t have the tankards of ice water that I have come to take for granted.  

It is most disheartening to no longer have them to look forward to. The restaurants don’t have the dispensers either, though some do have bottles of home-made ice water in their refrigerators they will share, though I can’t be greedy about it and have to be content with filling just one of my bottles.  With so few people to cater to the restaurants do not have the buffets that fueled me up every afternoon.  They at least all have trays of empanadas that provide energy enough.

I was expecting the junglish vegetation I experienced crossing the Amazon to continue, but it’s back to the savanna of thinly sprinkled trees.  My day in the lush jungle aboard the ferry almost seems like a dream now that it is two days behind me.  It was such a deep, unexpected immersion into the “backwoods” of the indigenous people I am still processing the amazing experience. I am almost wishing I had taken the return ferry and had another helping.

Logging trucks have been about the only trucks on this route, but not even one per hour.  I can go five minutes or more without any vehicle.  The terrain is mostly flat.  With my fresh legs I had my first eighty mile day since Uruguay and then had another.  They could have both been centuries if there had been more light and less rain. 

I could cross into French Guyana in two days if the road remains paved the final one hundred and fifty miles.  I’ve heard conflicting reports on whether a sixty-mile stretch before the border has been paved.  If it’s dirt and a heavy rain catches me on it, it could be rendered impassable on the bike.  I’ll have to count on a benevolent trucker to get me through, as happened to me in Bolivia years ago.

The miles are passing so effortlessly for the first time, I am startled at times to discover I’ve gone fifteen or more miles and ought to be thinking of taking a rest. I am growing excited about crossing into French Guyana and being somewhat able to communicate with the locals.  Since it is a French départment, I am hoping for the kilometer markers I’m so familiar with in France and whatever other cultural attachments to the home country it might have along with the euro as it’s currency.  

It would be as exciting as ice cold water to find bottles of mint syrup for sale, so I can have my favorite drink, menthe á l’eau, through the three Guianas.  That has me almost as excited as the Carnegie Library in Georgetown, now less than eight hundred miles away, that was the impetus for this trip.  

Across the Amazon

 I was looking forward to the sunrise over the Atlantic, as the sun still rises in the east in the Southern Hemisphere, when I curled up to sleep beside my bike on the car deck of the ferry from Belém to Macapa.  I may have been the only person aboard not sleeping in a hammock or in one of the ten small suites.  Two of the four decks on the ferry were long, open-aired spaces for passengers to hang their hammocks, wide enough to hang three across. Both decks were packed with a colorful array of hammocks not more than a foot apart. 

It would have been a novel experience to be among them, but I felt obligated to guard my bike, or at least all the gear on it.  Lonely Planet warned that thieves were known to grab packs and toss them overboard to accomplices in boats and then dive into the water.  One had to be more wary of that on the popular week-long trips to Manaus that all the backpackers and tourists are drawn to than the ferry to Macapa.  

So few travelers venture to Macapa that the 700-page Lonely Planet guide to Brasil didn’t mention it, even though it’s a city of half a million people.  Nor did Lonely Planet have anything to say about the sector I was venturing into to the Guianas. Looking around at my fellow passengers, none seemed the seedy, thieving type, but I still felt inclined to keep an eye on my gear even after I learned a crew member was somewhat on guard duty.

I had retired to bed early when the ferry got out into open water a little before dark and started rocking more than to my liking. Prone as I am to motion sickness I feared I could be reduced to the fetal position for the entire passage as we skirted the Atlantic, as this was not a full-sized ocean-going ferry.  

It was just big enough for fourteen compact cars, seven in the front part of the ferry and seven in the rear where my bike resided.

It had no seating area other than a small cafe of ten tables at the back of the car deck and a two-tabled cafe at the rear of the upper hammock deck.  The top deck had a long bench at its rear, but was otherwise uncovered open space.  

I quickly drifted off to sleep, even though it wasn’t even seven p.m.  My body had been in recuperation-mode all day, having spent it sitting in the air-conditioned ferry terminal as it drizzled outside, as I awaited the three p.m. departure.  With my body in shut-down I felt drowsy and capable of taking a nap at any time, so was happy to be forced to somewhat prematurely begin my night’s sleep. The rocking seemed to dissipate during the night.

When daylight began streaming in I was quite taken aback to notice thick jungle not fifty feet from the boat as I looked towards what I thought was the east and wide open water.

My first thought was I had gotten on the wrong boat and was headed upriver to Manaus, but I knew that couldn’t be the case as my ticket had been checked twice before I boarded and I’d even confirmed I was in the correct line.  I was equally surprised when looking to the other side that jungle was equally close, as if we were passing through a channel.  I quickly turned to my iPad and checked the GPS.  I discovered that we hadn’t headed out to the Atlantic, but were following an intricate network of rivers to the west of the huge island of Marajo, as big as Switzerland, in the mouth of the Amazon.

The blue arrow marks our location, which I regularly checked following our progress, trying to guess which waterway we’d follow.

We remained on narrow waterways much of the way, though crossed main arteries of the Amazon from time to time. It was immense.  One nearly needed binoculars to see across it.  The Mississippi was a mere trickle in comparison.

So there was no sun rising up out of the Atlantic.  We were in the thick of the jungle on waterways that had dwellings with docks every so often.  There was always someone paddling a canoe in sight, all manner of people, from children to grandmothers.  Some approached our boat as passengers were known to toss plastic bags of food.  As I gazed out at this unexpected spectacle, a trickle of passengers passed me to the cafe and returned with a small bag of food.  A breakfast of a cheese sandwich, banana and apple was provided to all.

I gathered mine then went up onto the top deck to watch all the action.  It was incredible.  This was as authentic as it gets. At last, after weeks and weeks of anticipation I was experiencing Amazonia.  I was as swept away by it just as I had been when I first laid eyes on Mount Everest from my bicycle seat as I approached Kathmandu.  I was filled with a sustained sense of “wow” then and now.  This was genuinely authentic and unique.

Unlike the touristy boats to Manaus down the wide Amazon that stay well away from the shoreline, we were right in people’s front yards on the narrow passageways we were following.  

We could see the smiles on people’s faces and the patterns on their clothes hanging to dry.

This was the Amazon River experience that one could hope for.  Friends who have done the Manaus trip complain how boring it is as they chug along out in the middle of the vast river and they see nothing but the distant tree-lined shoreline. There wasn’t anything boring about the ever evolving collage of habitats and people in canoes and the variety of foliage and trying to imagine what their lives must be like.  I sat up on the top deck with its 360 degree views for over two hours until it began to heat up too much to be out in the sun.

I retreated to the upper hammock deck and sat on my ensolite pad with there being no chairs.  I had been expecting to do a fair amount of reading, but the scenery was too mesmerizing to read much, though I was able to finish Sara Philippe’s Wesleyan thesis “Everything Has Become Southern: The Confederado Colony in Santarém, Brasil.”  

Santarém was several hundred miles up river from where I was about halfway to Manaus, so I could relate to their experience.  The couple hundred southerners who ventured to Santarém after the Civil War did not have an easy time of it.  Within ten years most had returned to the US, many transported back by US ships sent to Belém to rescue them.  Unless they were willing to work very hard themselves, they weren’t likely to succeed, as it was difficult to find locals, especially among the Indigenous people, who were prepared to work more than sporadically.  

Few of the Southerners had the funds for slaves or the necessities requisite for success having lost most of their resources during the Civil War.  And the Brasilian government didn’t hold true to promises it had made them to wave import taxes on essential equipment, one of the reasons the US government felt justified to rescue them.  

Though Philippe doesn’t examine other groups of Southerners that ventured to Brasil, those that went where the weather wasn’t so hot had greater success.  The Amazon was simply too steamy and demanding, thwarting them just as it did Henry Ford sixty years later not too far from Santarém where he attempted to set up a rubber manufacturing operation. 

Fortunately there was no WiFi on the boat to distract me, but it did have ample electrical outlets for charging and that Brasilian essential, ice water dispensers, on three of the decks.   I appeared to be the only non-Portuguese speaker and the only English speaker. Not a soul attempted to speak to me.  One of the 14 cars though had a bike mounted on its back.  Just about everyone was in shorts and flip-flops.  A few wore soccer jerseys, though no one had a ball to kick around.  

We arrived in Macapa, or actually Santana, a few miles down river, at five p.m.,  right on schedule, 26 hours after we departed.  I didn’t have enough daylight to escape the sprawl, so ended up camping at a service station for the second time in these travels, but at least I was in my tent.

Belém, Brasil

From fifty miles out the highway leading to Belém widened to four lanes and became thronged with traffic.  Thus began a near non-stop urban sprawl to this port city of one-and-a-half million inhabitants one hundred miles inland from the Atlantic Ocean on the Pará River, which connects with the Amazon.  At least it was flat and I could hum along at better than twelve miles per hour, a rare event in these travels.

The highway was accompanied by a decent shoulder much of the way.  For the first time I was sharing it with an occasional cyclist, some with a passenger sitting on the rear rack.  In the more thickly populated pockets before the actual metropolis swarms of people stood at wide pull-offs beside the road awaiting buses.  Most were clogged by buses or vans semi-obstructing my way loading and unloading.  For the first time Brasil took on the flavor of a third-world country, complete with an assortment of street vendors.

As I closed in on the city I should have been exalting, finally reaching the gateway to the Amazon after nearly two months of pedaling.  I’d come over 3,000 miles, the equivalent of cycling across the US or in south/north terms, as that was what I was doing, from Costa Rica to Chicago.  I was in a celebratory mood, but I was mostly concerned about an assortment of tasks I had to tend to foremost of which was acquiring a ticket for the twice-a-week, twenty-six hour ferry to Macapa departing the next day, hoping it wasn’t fully booked.  I also needed to find a bike shop to finally replace my front tire and to adjust my front hub.  And there was the matter of finding a place to stay and changing money one last time and stocking up on food.

I had ridden an extra fifteen miles the day before right up to dark to get within forty miles of Belém so I could arrive not much after noon to allow me as much time as posssible to tend to these matters.  I feared I’d end up in a motel, but I was lucky to find a dirt road to an orchard with thick grass not conducive to ants allowing me a fitful sleep.  I only regretted missing out on a free breakfast and also the opportunity for email in case a Warmshowers host I had heard from the day before had gotten back to me.  She said she would be out of town, but that she’d check around to see if any of her cycling friends would care to host me.

I stopped at the first gas station the next morning for its WiFi, but it had no restaurant or WiFi and such was the case at all the rest in this urban environment of smaller-scale service stations restricted to  just gas and cold water and none of the other amenities of the mega-complexes out in rural areas.   I hadn’t really been counting on hearing from her as she had ignored my initial email a week before, only responding to the second when I was within two days of Belém.  

When I closed to within seven miles of the ferry terminal, traffic was reduced to a crawl, going no faster than I was. I was startled to hear someone call out, “Are you George?”  I turned to a guy on a motorcycle who added, “I just emailed you half an hour ago about Warmshowers.”  

This was a miracle of all miracles, such a miracle that it couldn’t be a miracle.  “I live three miles from here.  I’ll lead you over if you still need a place to stay.”  He was on the way to a hardware store and had no idea when I might be arriving.  He was as startled to spot me in this maelstrom of traffic as I was to meet him.  I told him of my plans to get a ticket for the next day’s ferry.  He said the ferry was near the hardware store he was going to.  He’d lead me there from his home.  He also knew of some bike shops he could take me to.  And just like that all my worries were gone.  The cycling gods were looking out for me as well as ever.

When we got to his home that he shares with his mother, a university professor forced into early retirement when her school ran out of funds to pay her, Rafael apologized for not getting back to me sooner.  I had written him a week ago even though his Warmshowers profile said he was presently unavailable, just in case he might be.  He said he was preparing to leave this weekend for a prolonged motorcycle trip around Brasil, and regretted not responding to me, so finally did this morning to tell me he wasn’t available.  But when he saw me he thought otherwise and was happy to help me out.  

I told him I needed a new tire and also an adjustment on my front hub.  The axle that the mechanic in Palmas replaced two weeks ago was grating and had significant play. Among Rafael’s many talents ranging from being an electrical engineer and computer programmer was bike mechanics.   He took great pleasure in working on bikes so was delighted with the opportunity to work on mine.  As eager as he was to be off on his journey, he greatly regretted it would delay his project of building a bamboo bike with bamboo that he had harvested.

A close look at my hub revealed one of the cones didn’t have a seal and so much grit had got in from all the rain that it was deeply pitted.  Rafael replaced it with one of the cones from my original axle that did have a seal.  The mechanic in Palmas hadn’t tried that. With the axle issue resolved I didn’t need to take my bike to a shop, so that meant I could ride on the back of Rafael’s motorcycle on our rounds to the ferry terminal and bike shop and hardware store and bank. 

He had a spare helmet, required by law.  My bike helmet would not suffice.  It was wonderfully relaxing to sit on the back of his motorcycle seemingly without a worry in the world taking in the sights of this city founded in 1616, a mix of old colonial buildings and modern skyscrapers.  As a former race-car driver, Rafael was fast to accelerate and fully at ease wending his way through traffic, causing me no alarm whatsoever.  He was further adapt in the thick traffic having worked as an Uber-driver until a passenger stuck a gun in his face.  Even though the cops tracked him down and shot him dead, as justice is meted out in Brasil, he has no urge to return to such work.  

Flying around on the back of a motorcycle heartened me back to the last time I was on a motorcycle two years ago in Bamako in Mali when Kafune was piloting me around in a quest fo a visa to the Ivory Coast.  We had more success on this mission.  The ferry wasn’t fully booked.  Not only was there no charge for my bike, but my ticket was half-price, the senior rate—less than $25 for crossing the vast mouth of the Amazon.  We had to go to two bike shops to find the tire I needed, but we found what I had gotten in Brasilia to replace my rear tire.  

My legs were getting revitalized, enjoying their first afternoon of leisure in over three weeks since Brasilia, 1,200 miles ago.  They have been looking forward to a full day off aboard the ferry for weeks.  It’s just what they need before the final push, 350 miles through the jungle on roads paved and unpaved to French Guyana and then another 500 miles to the Carnegie Library in British Guiana.  With luck I could be home in time for the Super Bowl on February 2.  It is in Miami.  My flight to Montevideo took me through Miami and my flight back from Georgetown most likely will too. If the Bears are playing, I just might have to stick around for the game.  

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.  

Paragominas, Brasil

I’m less than two hundred miles from Belém and still waiting for the terrain to flatten to a coastal plane.  It has been a roller coaster the past three days with one punishing eight and nine per cent climb of a half mile or more after another.  My legs are stronger than they were in the earlier part of the travels when such was my diet for hundreds of miles, but it still saps the energy and reduces my mileage to less than seventy miles a day.  

If the terrain weren’t so demanding, I’d be in Belem by now, but since the heat hasn’t been a factor, it’s not of too much concern.  I had hoped to be across the Amazon and on my way up the coast to the Guianas by January 1, when I presumed the heat would be escalating.  It may still, but I’m still grateful for every day I’m not roasting and totally preoccupied craving shade and cold water.


I have entered a region where there are vast expanses where the junglish terrain has been eliminated and replaced by agriculture that is struggling to prosper.  The brown, scraggly vegetation gives a look of desolation, especially where it bridges upon the lush original vegetation.

Even though there have only been brief spurts of intense heat, I relish every cold water dispenser I come upon.  They are truly a national treasure.  Some gas stations even provide ice cubes alongside their reservoirs of ice cold water.  Hotels and restaurants and shops often have mini-versions of the large thirty-to-fifty gallon tanks of the service station ice water.  

It’s as if the Brasilian constitution mandates that all are entitled to ice cold water.  Every sip of such water is such a deep pleasure, it could easily appease whatever unrest might be festering in the masses.  It is the ultimate opiate in the hotter climes.  When one can count on ice water when it’s hot, what more could one want?

There haven’t been any of the rest areas on the highway with cold water that came along every thirty miles or so up to Brasilia.  They were an unnecessary luxury with the abundance of service stations, but I did appreciate the easy comfort they provided, being able to sit in an air conditioned shelter charging my iPad and doing a little reading and writing.

I’ve been extending my eating stops a little longer than usual, unable to put down the book I’m reading, “The River of Doubt” from 2005 by Candice Millard, on Teddy Roosevelt’s Amazonian adventure in 1913 a year after he failed to win a third term as President running on the Bull Moose ticket.  He was drawn to South America as his son Kermit was working there.  He’d been to Africa a couple of times on hunting trips, but never to South America.  

He and his son joined up with a Brasilian military officer who had extensively explored the Amazon.  He proposed they make a descent of a major river that was a tributary of the Amazon that had not been mapped, a river known as the River of Doubt.  Roosevelt thought that was a splendid idea.  It took a month simply to reach the river with teams of mules and oxen hauling their gear.  

There were more than twenty people in the group, including a doctor and porters and a naturalist.  Roosevelt dismissed a catholic priest from the US who helped organize the expedition when he demanded that he be carried across the plain on a chair held by four of the porters.  That left just one other American on the trip, the naturalist, along with the two Roosevelts.

From the very start of their way down the river, they had serious doubts if they would survive its many rapids and the indigenous people who’d had little contact with the outside world.  It took as many as three or four days to portage around some of the rapids.  They only managed 68 miles in their first month.  They knew it could be six hundred miles or more before they reached the Amazon.  

There was extreme doubt their food would last, especially since they weren’t very successful finding much along the way.  They has to severely ration it, with Roosevelt losing fifty-five pounds.  They continually had to jettison items they were carrying.  Several of their dugout canoes were destroyed in the rapids, forcing them to take days to carve out new ones.

One of their members died in an early rapid and another was murdered by very unstable porter who had been stealing food.  Roosevelt suffered a severe gash to his leg.  It became infected and he was so incapacitated that he was ready to consume a vial of poison he had brought in the event he became a burden to the mission and endangered the survival of the rest of its members.  His son would not allow it, saying he would carry him out dead or alive, even though he was greatly weakened by malaria.

I knew he survived and the crew got down the river, but the book was so spell-binding with one life-or death challenge after another I couldn’t just read one chapter at a time.   The unrelenting rapids were even worse than the unrelenting hills that have been my lot, with both of us wondering when they would come to an end.  At least I haven’t had to walk up any of the hills, though I have wished at times that I had a lower gear. 

They were feasted upon by all manner of bugs, including ants.  Certain trees had up to forty different ant colonies inhabiting them that they had to be careful not to disturb.  Roosevelt avoided a lethal snake bite when it’s fangs couldn’t penetrate his leather boot. 

Roosevelt received a hero’s welcome when he arrived back in New York.  Mapping the river was such a significant event that the river was renamed for Roosevelt.  The first two missions that attempted to repeat his trip ended in failure.  Both he and his son wrote books about the adventure, as did the Brasilian co-leader and the American naturalist George Cherrie. 

Roosevelt wasn’t the only prominent American environmentalist drawn to the Amazon in his later life.  John Muir made the Amazon his last major journey as well, two years before Roosevelt.  He was drawn to it to see the ancient araucaria trees.  A couple books have been published on his visit by the Sierra Club, one by Laurel Bemis in 1993, “John Muir in the Amazon Basin,” and another by Michael Branchi in 2001, “John Muir’s Last Journey.” They are not available as ebooks so they’ll have to wait until my return.

I only hope this isn’t my last journey.

Itinga do Maranhão, Brasil

With a Specialized road bike on prominent display at the  large Bodim bike shop in Imperatriz and a hearty greeting from the three shop attendants as if they’d been expecting me, I was fully confident they’d have just the tire I needed to replace my front tire.  

Before I could ask if they had a 700 X 28 or 32 tire, one of the guys whipped out his phone and after a quick scroll showed me a photo of a bike.  Lo and behold, it was mine.  A friend of his had seen it parked outside a supermarket and knew he’d appreciate it.  He never expected it to turn up in his shop.  He was delighted to be able to take a photo of the guy who was riding the bike and send to his friend.  

The shop did have a 700 X 32 tire but it was a lightweight Kenda with less tread on it than the tire I had, so I had to be content with simply stocking up on patches.  I hD my choice of a French Zefal pack or a much cheaper local brand.  Every shop I’ve been in has had high-priced inport items for those who’d like a status symbol or comparable versions from China or Brasil.  

There was another shop in town.  They called over to It, but it didn’t have what I needed either.  I’d just have to survive the 350 miles to Belém.  I’d gone 150 miles without a flat, being more attentive to avoiding the many splintered tires on the shoulder of the road and brushing my tire whenever I was forced to ride through a patch.  There was still a good thickness to the tire. The 3,000 miles I’d put on it and just softened its exterior make it more susceptible to those dastardly wire threads, which my new hard rear tire was resisting.

The traffic was thinning, so I wasn’t forced onto the shoulder and it’s dangerous debris as often as I had been.  It was a shame though that I couldn’t just ride on the relatively smooth shoulder and forget about the traffic, having to be attentive to traffic simultaneously passing me from both directions, ever ready to abandon the road.

I had to slam on my brakes when I spotted avocados for sale for the first time at a roadside stand.  Mostly it’s just been mangoes.  I wouldn’t have recognized the avocados had not Edmilson and Jussara served them, as the Brasil version is much larger and darker-skinned than I’m accustomed to. They were bundled six or seven to a tied-up mesh bag, more than I had space for.  I asked the seller if I could have just two.  He went behind his stand and came back with two and in the Brasilian spirit made a gift of them.  It happens at times too when I just want a couple of bananas, even in a supermarket.  The great generosity of Brasil never ceases to be heartwarming.

Having to be so attentive to avoiding wire fragments, I can no longer lose myself in thought or whatever podcast I might be listening to.  I just added another to my playlist.  Michael Moore launched a podcast two weeks ago and has so much to say and has been so encouraged by the response that he’s put out one nearly every day.  I’m not the only one to be won over. 

Of the over 700,000 podcasts out there he vaulted into the top 25 most listened to within four editions and number one in the news category.  He’s had some phenomenal guests—Daniel Ellsberg, Ralph Nader and Robert DiNero making his first ever appearance on a podcast—but it is his passionate and unrelenting anti-Trump and pro-Bernie rhetoric that has earned him such a huge listenership.  

I’m well familiar with his ability to offer entertaining, insightful commentary on all and sundry after hearing him hold forth many times at his Traverse City Film Festival on panels and interviewing guests and at his special program “Michael’s Surprise.”  Janina too finds him irresistible. After listening to a couple of the episodes she aptly summed up his appeal—“He is so good at breaking through the received ideas, cliches and lazy habits of mind that characterize political discourse. So refreshing.”  

He is an insider of a sort and shares meaningful encounters he’s had with many movers-and-shakers—Elizabeth Warren, Joe Biden,  Bernie Sanders, Charlie Rose, Michael Bloomberg, Nancy Pelosi and others.  He even mentioned Brasil in one podcast.  He is in favor of dropping the voting age to 16, which he said Austria and Brasil and a couple of other countries have done.  

I was delighted that on his third podcast he made an allusion to me, or at least the number I was known as during my years as a bike messenger.  He went to the impeachment hearing and feared he’d have to wait in line for “five, six, seven hours” to get in, but people weren’t lined up and his Congressman from Flint was able to get him a pass anyway allowing him a front row seat in the balcony.  When Pelossi spotted him she put her hand on her heart.  Fifteen minutes later her daughter, a documentary filmmaker Moore knows, sat down beside him.

It is uncanny how often 5-6-7 turns up on podcasts, particularly sports podcasts referring to games played or weeks left in a season or number of players complaining about a coach.  Errol Morris even managed to make a mention when he was promoting his latest movie on Steven Bannon.  In a podcast with Adnan Virk he brought up a documentary he’d made on Doctor Death, a man who smoked 5, 6, 7 packs of cigarettes a day. 

Brasil also received a mention in a book I’ve just read about the American South recommended by Paul Theroux—“Confederates in the Attic” by the recently deceased New Yorker writer Tony Horwitz.  He drives all over the South in pursuit of connections to the Civil War.  Nearly half the book is devoted to joining re-enactors at battlefields, including a one-week binge with a fanatic driving around to as many sites as they can dressed in uniforms from the day and sleeping in the fields without tents as the soldiers did at the time and not showering the entire time to be as authentic as possible.  

At the book’s end Horowitz says he has been as thorough as possible searching out Civil War lore except for making a trip to Brasil where several thousand Southerners fled after the war to continue their cotton-growing with slave labor.  They were known as the “Irreconcilables” or “Conferados” in Portuguese.  A Yale professor, Rollin Osterweis, a specialist on the Civil War, wrote an obscure novel about them called “Santerem,” that I’d love to get my hands on.  I’d pitch it to the Mexican Director Carlos Reygadas, who made a film on the Mennonites in Mexico, “Silent Light,” that was a Cannes award-winner. 

As I close in on the Amazon I’ve come upon some off-beat Christmas decorations of Saint Nick made with recycled materials.

Christmas decorations have otherwise been non-existent or very low-key.  

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.