On The Road

 Near Carnot Brazil on BR156, lunch stop. 

And so we lose WiFi again! 

Leaving Oiapoque

 We start south today with our broken alternator in a box.  We plan to travel conserving electricity by turning off the fridge and cooking sparingly as we will only have our feeble solar panels to recharge our house batteries.

The original plan was to get the alternator fixed and hit the Atlantic beaches with campgrounds and ocean swims and all that stuff. Instead we are going to drive straight south 3,000 miles to Uruguay where there is a well known workshop where we can redesign our electrical system. 

We had planned to get there in six weeks after a leisurely drive down the coast. GANNET2 is five years old and RV electrical technology has advanced quite a bit even as our batteries slowly lose their charge and our flexible solar panels make only a modest difference. 

And so it goes.  Change of plan and beach time postponed until next year I guess. We will remain flexible and see what we find as we get south and escape the clutches of this lost world of northern Brazil and the Guyanas. It’s been interesting and more of an adventure than I’d have liked but I am desperate to get out of here. There’s a reason overlanders don’t drive here. 

It is 350 miles to Macapá the port city on the bank of the Amazon. We’re allowing two days to get there as it includes those 70 miles of dirt which should have been paved decades ago but Brasilia isn’t too interested in this part of the country.

We are scheduled to ride the Tuesday ferry which should take  around 30 hours across the mouth of the Amazon to Belem (“Bethlehem”) on the south bank. Then we’ll drive the 3,000 miles to Uruguay.  Anyway that’s the plan, but we’re Team Lost so who knows what will happen. 

Unless we find campgrounds with shorepower as we drive south we won’t be able to use Starlink much so we may go dark though I hope phone signals will be stronger in the more developed areas of central Brazil, a country the size of the lower 48. Think of this as New York to Los Angeles but without freeways. And not much electricity in our house.

The chocolate shop:

Oiapoque: we saw too much of you. 

Colorful Hotel Cayenne. 

French Lunch

The news is bad as the alternator is broken beyond repair at least in this corner of Brazil. This means we can only charge our house batteries with the solar panels or by plugging in to the electrical grid. Friday we leave with no fridge and altered travel plans, probably a straight shot to Brasilia the capital where we may find repairs or be able to ship a replacement from Missouri. 

Rusty is a good example to follow when I am feeling impatient.

In town we mooch around for a bit, walk a few streets, shop for groceries and wonder if today’s the day.

I got a really silly photo of the food line and didn’t notice till much later. My photography is suffering from this delay! 

I’m not a huge fan of buffets which produce food that I have to guess if I’ll like it and is produced without the care of a dish prepared to order.

The card is your tab, you weigh your plate, the waitress will add any drinks you order through her and the bar code stores your tab. The menu such as it is, is bi-lingual for the many French visitors. 

Brazil loves its buffets even for pet food, sort of. 

Brazil is a country  of two electrical systems. I have a list of states that shows which are 240 and which are 110 and roughly speaking it’s the northern half that is on the US system albeit with different plugs. We of course carry lots of adapters. 

If you look in the bottom right corner of the box below you’ll see the voltage. The weird thing is the whole country has to adapt to each others voltage. Often I’m told campgrounds have both voltages and sometimes hotels do too. We always ask to make sure before we plug in. I guess you get used to it but I find this twin system chaotic. 

The sole overlanders in Oiapoque. That would be us! 

And here we have a jar of farofa, which is the yellow roasted manioc flour that Brazilians love to sprinkle on their food for extra calories. 

Why they do it I don’t know. The stuff is flavorless and gritty and adds nothing. I’ve tried it repeatedly and it never gets better. 

And on the subject of weird travel things here’s an open drain in a parking lot. So far we’ve avoided it but why they won’t cover it or put a fence in front I don’t know. A sawhorse would do. 

If you don’t speak Portuguese French works in this town but Layne has no interest in visiting the museum. So far at least she’s held off. 

Mural alert:

It’s dinner time at the hotel and he’s ready to go in:

That sign promising the open road is still there at the southern edge of Oiapoque.