Ready For The Ferry

 

It’s all very well for you, sitting at home drinking coffee where, if you step outside no one will start rattling off rapid fire Portuguese at you. For us Monday is organizing day in Macapá.

We asked some Canadian overlanders who crossed a month ago what the process is and they filled us in a bit. This afternoon I take GANNET2 to the loading area in the port of Santana called the north dock. We went out yesterday to check it out and it’s ugly.

But it’s a commercial port so what should one expect. 

Freight and vehicles load here. Then pedestrians, which at that point will include us,  gather Tuesday morning and walk aboard at the main docks a mile away. Our plan is to have our landlord take us the half hour to Santana to drop us off to then walk aboard and claim our cabin. The cheap tickets are US$15 for a hammock but we’re paying $175 for a cabin for us including Rusty of course for the overnight ride to Belem. I think these are the port fees for cargo at 5.5 reals to the dollar. I think we are in the $15 range but we’ll see. Our ticket for GANNET2 will be around $310 though we could possibly have negotiated but when he said we could take Rusty in the cabin we weren’t going back to ask for a discount. 

Supposedly the journey starts at eleven Wednesday and last 28 hours but apparently it usually takes 32 with a not rapid unloading process. We have a room reserved an hour out of the port in Belem. 

Our Canadian friends told us they serve meals and have a snack bar and there is apparently some access to WiFi possibly. If there is you will know.  

We spent the rest of Sunday by the pool, the best part of our rather spartan house rental.

We’ve had a lot more experience renting rooms than I’d like but equatorial Amazonia is too hot to mess with. The fact that we can only travel through here in dry season  means it’s hotter than ever, so air conditioning makes it bearable and GANNET2 becomes an oven under this sun. After dark it’s cooler outside the van than inside as the steel box continues to radiate heat.

I miss the pleasure of traveling self contained, like a ship, choosing where to anchor (because unlike a ship we don’t have self steering) finding a place to sleep sometimes on a whim, or sometimes planned.

Renting air conditioned rooms especially traveling with a dog requires planning.

For instance we have that room ready for us in Belém after we get off the ferry. Funnily enough iOverlander shows an actual campground in the city but we settled on the room on the southern edge of town to set us up for the drive south Thursday morning.

Macapá is an industrial town serving the port and the traffic generated through the port in Santana which we have been warned is a den of iniquity and robbery. Nice prospect  but our own neighborhood is not that great.

The landlord pointed out the federal police headquarters is next door but I doubt they are looking out for our welfare from their big blue building up the street. 

We are alone in the house which the owner rents out but gives it no love. There are air conditioners in the bedrooms so we turned one into our dining room leaving the kitchen toilet and living room to bake. The piece de résistance  is the 26 foot fiberglass pool. 

The hassle for me is unloading the stuff we use and sometimes need in the apartment. Thinking Rusty’s bed, our rugs so he doesn’t slip on the tiles, our stools to use add nightstands, our cables to charge our phones, iPads, kindles, earbuds, cameras, power packs and Layne’s watch. I can’t wait for the EU mandate to unify all charging systems to enter my muddled up life:

At least here the power outlets are on 110 volts even though we need adapters as the plugs aren’t the same. In southern Brazil we switch back to 220 volts like Peru Chile and Argentina except each country uses its own plugs. Sigh.  That’s when I pull out our 2000 watt converter box to get the voltage down to 110. If it was easy everyone would be in a van down here. And that below our folding electric kettle on a plug adapter: 

Some apartments we bring in our camping table, others our pots and pans in addition to the usual stuff. We travel with our homecoming we need it we can retrieve it from GANNET2.

Some places we get better internet using our own Starlink. Using an adapter plug of course: 

It can get pretty involved and as you read this we are disassembling it all, packing it away and getting ready to drive to the port of Santana.

We also bring in (I bring in and get wet doing it) our Berkey water filter.  Life is in the details and it’s amazing how much crap we pack into the van.  

Rusty’s bowls and his food and his treats and his leash and on and on.

Much better to live aboard GANNET2 of course. Step by step we will get there and better than ever if we get our way, not just a refreshed alternator but improved electrical systems for our home for the next five years. We’ve been living a long time aboard our van and are not planning to settle down for the foreseeable future.

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.