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.