Macapá

 Breakfast in the hotel in Calçoene was the usual hot strong coffee, fried egg, cheese and ham slices and a piece of cake. Help your self…Rusty was not anxious to get back in the road.

But as much as we love him we have to torture him by going driving. 191 is the emergency number for police if you need them; we didn’t. 

Highway 156 was pretty good mostly with just a couple of stretches of lethal potholes but the further south we went the better the road got and I felt confident cruising at 55-60mph.

I have to tell you I got deja vue driving this highway, on a levee looking out over ranch lands just like central Florida. 

I know it’s northern Brazil 222 miles to the Amazon River south of us but this could have been Arcadia or Clewiston. Am I crazy? 

It felt so good to be heading south. The equator runs through Macapá so when we are on the ferry we will be in the southern hemisphere in Spring. 

Layne has been doing research and says Brasilia the capital is 20 degrees cooler but it is a 1300 mile drive from the Amazon.

Living in a wooden hut in 91 humid degrees. Now don’t you feel privileged? I do. 

One thing I have noticed, even in the cement homes with satellite tv receivers is they are always hanging out laundry to dry. It’s a continuous process. 

Speed bump ahead, and these were brutal, very high and square and not at all good to hit at speed.  I slowed right down in villages especially near schools. 

This is driving through northern Brazil an area not many overlanders visit so I hope you enjoy the tour of a corner of the world very few outsiders see, as flat and boring as it may be.  

Looks like a gas station below, but it’s a National Highway Patrol checkpoint. We drove through two of these checkpoints, and I did like the locals and slowed down respectfully but the cops were all abed. Accelerate and disappear is my motto if they don’t actually flag me down to stop. We have yet to meet a corrupt cop in Latin America, in defiance of all stereotypes.

Little tortoise town. We didn’t stop but I caught the mascot by the side of the highway. Maybe they named the town for the wildlife. 

Speed bump as pedestrian crossing. There weren’t too many and they were well marked so I’m not complaining. 

The flatlands of Northern Brazil. No tourist destination this. 

We drove past a reservoir. iOverlander advised there are wild camps by the water but there have been reports of robberies. It was 9am so we had no plans to stop for the night. 

There actually wasn’t much traffic at all and much of the time we were alone on Highway 156. 

Attention: men working. Portuguese is a bizarre language, but I’ve said that before. It often looks like Latin to me.

We were stopped for ten minutes but I was just grateful they were patching potholes and there was a flagger on a Saturday.

The big city, Macapá on the north bank of the Amazon. 

The first order of business was lunch, a shared fish dish with an order of shrimp risotto to go for dinner. 

Then we checked into a large home with a swimming pool where we will stay until Monday when we get ready to load on the ferry.it’s cavernous and not snug but it works for two days. 

Then I sent a WhatsApp message to a mechanic who looked at our  alternator  but forgot to send me back our spare regulator. I went where he told me to meet him and I found him sitting in a pickup after I poked around a bit looking for him. It felt quite like a drug deal and I was very uncomfortable but I got my part and I fled. 

The whole failed repair  felt bogus and I want a second opinion on our broken alternator which I plan to get in Brasilia. Time to blow northern Brazil land of heat and strange people.

Then we went food shopping and saw the usual parade of weird stuff in what looked like Costco. Peas and beans in a bag here. 

Miles of processed foods none of which were of interest. We aren’t staying long enough I hope in Macapá to need to figure out the shopping. 

I photographed a bunch of fruit pulp packages, if for no other reason than to help me identify them on menus…such are the difficulties of not speaking the language. Graviola is soursop and caju (ka-jew) is cashew for instance.  

Google translate works when it works but phone signals come and go and Brazilians I have discovered are terrible at reading and comprehension. They should just speak Spanish like normal Latin Americans. 

And Layne now wants a purple plastic Honda 125. I love these things designed for the Brazilian market where they stick plastic bodywork on an old fashioned Honda frame  and engine and make a utility scooter with some flare out of old parts 

Time to break out dinner and bed in our vast palatial rather seedy home for two days. The air conditioning is barely adequate in this heat but the pool is great.