Brazil is a whole new thing for us so I thought I’d try and set out the some of the reasons why we have been so busy with van maintenance and all that upgrading to flex fuel capability to burn Brazilian ethanol spiked gasoline. I should also point out our route will be quite challenging. As you can see the road can be quite difficult in the rainy season.
Our idea has been to wait for dry season, obviously if you look at the photo above and accept it’s not faked. Dry season, when the road will be usable even by a heavily laden delivery van, starts in early August and continues till roughly November. The only big town in Brazil near Peru is Porto Velho and the distance from there to Manaus, the city in the middle of Amazonia on the banks of the Amazon River is about 500 miles. 260 of that is dirt, not gravel, or maintained roadway, just dirt like the red clay so famous of Georgia. The longest stretch without gas stations is 300 miles. There are some farms, some roadside restaurants, occasional cell phone towers whose maintenance has kept the road open over the decades, and lots of bridges. We face 260 miles of this mud track and I hope we will find it this dry:
So why do this? I have an insatiable curiosity about places I’ve heard of but not seen, and I want to actually see Manaus the legendary rubber capital of Amazonia and after that I want to drive further north to explore the Guyanas, places rarely visited by people in a hurry to “do the PanAmerican.” I want to see the highway before it’s paved, a controversial decision which has been taken finally and will soon be implemented. A paved highway will lead to development and wrecking the jungle alongside the highway as has happened elsewhere in Brazil.
On a more personal note I see this as a challenge for the two of us and this is where you are free to disagree with me but travel on the PanAmerican has become too easy for us. We’ve broken down, we’ve crossed borders, we have driven as high in altitude and as far south in latitude as possible and in these Spanish speaking countries we feel entirely at home. Brazil is something completely different and hugely challenging for us. This below is our hoped for route this next year before we start north back to the US and Alaska:
It’s unlikely we will follow the red line exactly as Paraguay certainly and possibly Bolivia will be on the list but roughly this is how we want to circumnavigate South America one last time. We are used to camping facilities and locals here are used to campers blowing through their countries. Northern Brazil is much less tourist aware, it’s not a desert but facilities for campers are far apart. This is a campground located along the BR319 and very nice it sounds too. I hope it’s open and as good as it sounds:
We aren’t pioneers here and we won’t be alone on the highway but this is not a tourist circuit by any means. The city of Manaus, the hub of the region with two million inhabitants has a terrible reputation for crime and has no listed campgrounds that we could find. Driving north 500 miles to Boa Vista (‘beautiful view’ pronounced “bon vista”) there are two campgrounds along the fully paved highway between the cities, plus lots of truck stop gas stations and even a fruit checkpoint! Really? Check it out on iOverlander:
Distances are vast as Brazil with 200 million people is the size of the lower 48 states. Northern Brazil is the under inhabited part too. And after all this we practice driving on the left in Guyana and Suriname and then we enter the European Union in French Guyana where I plan to get Rusty a pet passport to make travel easier with him. After the northern wilderness as we come south along the Atlantic we have tropical beaches, coconut palms and swimming with beautiful colonial cities all while approaching Uruguay the most expensive country on this continent. Who, with an ounce of curiosity and a van wouldn’t want to spend winter doing this before going back to a frigid summer in Patagonia?
All the possibilities of all the things that could go wrong have run through my head. I don’t speak the language, and a breakdown will be really expensive to deal with, and we have to adapt to whatever places we can find to sleep. It will be hot and buggy, the wilderness will be quite wild, ferries across vast rivers run on their own schedules and if it rains god knows what we do. All this is about us, but to get a broader view let me add here the relevant portion of an article by the BBC on Brazil Rodavia (Highway pronounced “hod-ah-vee-ah”) 319:
If you go on YouTube and enter BR319 or Brazil’s Ghost Road in the search you will get tons of motorcyclists and a few Brazilian motorists giving it a go. I know of two American vans that traveled the road this July, an older Ford F150 and a newer Ford Transit and they did okay. The best video I’ve seen which tells the story of what we anticipate is from a couple of young Canadians currently in Africa. They did this road last year. Check it out. Go Alone On The Ghost Road
And now you know as much as we do and I expect you have the same butterflies I do. Here goes nothing
