Going Swimmingly

130 miles north of Boa Vista (“beautiful view”) the capital of Roraima State lies Venezuela, closed to tourists with US passports. However we have found many Venezuelan refugees earning a living in Boa Vista so more people than we would have imagined speak Spanish here.

We spent some time Monday route planning in the comfort of our air conditioned room and came to a few conclusions. 

I’m flying from the capital of Suriname (formerly Dutch Guyana) to Amsterdam on October 14th to visit my sisters so we need to arrive in Paramaribo in the first week of October. The plan is for Layne and Rusty to spend two weeks at the marina and campground in a suburb of the capital while I am in Italy and Scotland so as we back tracked from that date we saw no reason to hurry away from our rather sumptuous $45 a night swimming pool. 

The fact is life in the Guyanas is quite expensive and we are anticipating some hardship in a land of yes, three dollar gas, but $100 a night basic air conditioned accommodation. So we figured let’s spend time here being decadent so we ordered a steak dinner in our room last night. The dining room where we get the included breakfast is lovely but not refrigerated: 

Anyway we had to justify this life do we left Rusty in the room poor boy and tackled some jobs in town.  First of all how to enter Guyana which is not tourist friendly by all accounts and border protocols are rather old fashioned. Apparently they love photocopies according rather dated overlander accounts so we found a copy shop and prepared a wad of paper copies of passports, vehicle documents, driver licenses and so forth. Including making proper booklets my rather cheesy internet purchased international driving permit said to be a requirement for foreigners driving in Guyana. I told you they are weirdly old fashioned. The copy guy did a brilliant job in his fully equipped shop:

I mean, doesn’t this look irreproachably official? A five year permit off the Internet for $20: 

We used google translate and he was efficient and helpful including printing out a perfect copy of our Guyanese car insurance. 

All we have to do now is get Rusty his health certificate and we will be ready to cross. Apparently he needs an exit permit to leave Guyana so if he doesn’t officially enter that can be a problem to obtain from the Ministry of  Agriculture in Georgetown. Another absurd requirement treating Rusty like he is an export commodity. 

This guy overheard our plans and said he had a tip for us. Buy chocolate he said. Guyanese officials love chocolate bars and he hands them out like wedding favors when he drives to the border town of Lethem. We will take his advice of course as there are many police checkpoints on the roads in Guyana.

Next stop was the supermarket for a few staples but shopping is always a cultural experience. This place was close by the copy shop and it was one of the best supermarkets we’ve seen in northern Brazil, oddly enough.

Most of the supermarket is pretty normal with quite a few familiar processed food brands but the meat department was extensive and pretty impressive. Then there are mysterious packages of I don’t know what:

We stuck to apples pears mandarins and bananas. No idea what this gluten free product might be for two dollars:

A passerby heard us puzzling out loud and introduced himself in fluent English. He had spent thirty months studying in Canada and didn’t get to practice his English much he said. These peppers are odd as we haven’t seen any spicy food in Brazil more’s the pity. 

Then I couldn’t get the cart past the check out. Much laughter because they are designed not to fit. Thats because the bagger loads your bags into a special cart and walks them to your car. Cultural differences you encounter when traveling. 

A van tour, sticker and a two dollar tip made his day:

Brazilians are incredibly patient with us and kind. I wish I could chat properly with them. 

And so back to our swimming pool exhausted by a few hours in town. 

Boa Vista

 If I told you this plate of grilled fish for two cost forty dollars you would I trust recoil in horror; we did but we forgot to check the price when ordering. 

It was good, a river fish so it tasted muddy like catfish but we sat an hour waiting to be served cafe it was out on a patio so it was not fresh and cool. We did have a nice view of the Rio Branco (“white river”) which is only white if you consider it is muddy brown but not tannic black. 

That was our welcome to Boa Vista (“beautiful view”) the capital of Roraima (“hore-I’m-a”) State, the northernmost part of Brazil and as it’s just 130 miles from Venezuela we met numerous refugees and emigrants from the country who have made lives here in impoverished but much more prosperous northern Brazil. And they speak Spanish, an absolute life saver when we come across these emigrants.

US passport holders can’t get visas for overlanding to Venezuela so at this point we either follow the plan and drive on or turn back as we are the bottom of the sack. We have made our plan to visit the three Guyanas over the next couple of months so we will drive 70 miles east on Tuesday morning to see about entering the former British Guyana where they speak English and drive on the left. All change from Brazil.

It was a long day Saturday as we woke at dawn in our truck stop 180 miles south of Boa Vista  and left at 6 am. Our plan was to get an oil change in the city and do a load of laundry before retreating for the weekend to a hotel room with air conditioning and a pool. We are really suffering from the intense equatorial heat and I apologize for being boring about it but it puts summers in the Florida Keys to shame.

The truck stops aren’t fancy but they have free cold showers, clean toilets, and assorted stores like tire shops, restaurants and convenience stores. Traffic stops at night mostly so they are quite quiet  and it’s so hot we sleek with our doors open mosquito free in dry season. Our fiends in southern Brazil traveling in a pick up camper disagree: 

So there you have it, differing points of view! 

We had a choice of two paved highways to Boa Vista from Novo Jerusalem and we took the smaller highway leaving 174 to the truck traffic. The defining limit for this road were the plentiful 25 ton bridges:

The bridges usually have nasty holes at each end where the road doesn’t quite match up with the planks so getting on and off requires a low speed and a little angling to avoid bumping the bottom of our van protected by a skid plate. On the long stretches off decent asphalt we could drive 55 mph but there were sudden descents into potholes and rippled asphalt and of course more bridges. Highway 432 to Boa Vista: 

We also saw our first hills indicating we’ve left the Amazon Basin for now. The hills are covered in those bright yellow trees with those flowers that grow in the Keys whose name I can’t remember as usual: 

The land is covered in greenery growing out of control with fences and some attempt at ranching while the villages are small and impoverished with dogs looking not great mooching outside the grubby little homes, and you know how I feel about dogs so we and dropped  off food for the worst cases.

I see this and read that Tesla wants to pay Musk a trillion dollar salary and I suppose it’s little wonder I find myself pondering what kind of world I live in. But I don’t decline the suggestion of a fifty dollar hotel room with air conditioning and a pool at the end of the day. 

While the highway is paved approaches to the bridges may not be…

It is countryside that reminds me of the Africa I ride through on my motorcycle in the 1970s, when I was young and better equipped to handle what I saw in Niger, Nigeria and Cameroon. I have listened to all desire to take GANNET2 to Africa as I can’t stand the dismal quality of life I find in some parts of South America.

For once I managed to catch a milestone on the dashboard.

And finally we saw the promised land across the river, just before ten in the morning. Not this bridge:

This one over a low, dry season white river- Rio Branco. I figured in Florida the sandbar would be covered with boats, chairs coolers and umbrellas. Ponte do Macuxis apparently named for a local Indian tribe. 

Boa Vista is built as a crescent shaped city in the backs of the river with the streets radiating away from a central industrial looking plaza where main government offices are located. It’s not a beautiful city by any means. 

The first order of business was an oil change. We have oil filters purchased from Jeep dealers along the way and I got six quarts of 5w20 oil which is difficult to find, in Manaus and it was as well I did.  What we discovered was it’s hard to find a place to change the oil in a town where most places want to raise the car in a lift to drain the oil and the Promaster is too big. We knew the solution was out there and we resigned ourselves to looking for the right shop.  Eventually, with the help of a Venezuelan immigrant mechanic who felt sorry for us we found it. I spoke Spanish with him and he introduced me to the man below:

Giuffré and his Dalek oil pump:

Across the street I saw ho hum batteries…

And then it was time to do laundry. 

Automatic built in soap dispensers as usual. 

A refuge from the heat. We met another Venezuelan here who married a Brazilian but still remembered her Spanish. She told us of a fish restaurant so we went there and paid a fortune as explained earlier. We were just too tired and unfocused to do our due diligence and they took advantage. Such is travel. She was very sweet though. 

And finally we drove thirty minutes across town to our hotel for three nights.

The approach to our refuge from the heat. Pretty fancy eh? We know we are privileged in our own small way.