Mechanical Break In Brazil

We arrived at Oiapoque, the Brazilian border town on Sunday afternoon and have spent several days here. I should point out the delay was not entirely voluntary though we have found the perfect refuge. 

Layne had reserved a room for the night at this colorful hotel which turned out to have comfortable rooms with a kitchen and all modern conveniences, so it was perfect when reversing into place the engine made a loud cracking noise. Fantastic! Here she is all jacked up at the mechanic’s:

Everything was fine rolling forwards but in reverse there was a ghastly noise and then I noticed we weren’t charging the house batteries, the ones that we live off in the RV part of our GANNET2.  I was pretty sure I knew what had happened…

Lorenzo the hotel owner took care of us right away. We got our room and settled in much to Rusty’s relief before we dealt with the mechanical problem.

Webb in South Carolina and Bruce in Arizona were telling tales of freezing winter weather which I wouldn’t mind some of right now. It’s 95 and humid every day and we’d like to be south to get back to van life with less ducking out of the heat. But for now we have to stay put on the cheap side of the Oiapoque River. 

Lorenzo accompanied me to the mechanic Jonah (like the guy in the whale they laughed). Lorenzo the hotel owner is on the right:

We went back to the hotel and I got on with writing up all the photos and activity we had enjoyed in French Guiana. All of which got us up to date…while we dealt with this hiccough. 

I will say I wasn’t that stressed about the situation. By now we’ve had the gearbox fail in the middle of nowhere Peru, the radiator explode in Chile, the windshield replaced in Ecuador and an oil leak in Colombia. And we spent 10 hours sunk in  the mire of Belize one fine day in 2022.  We’ve stressed our heavily loaded delivery van and the Promaster has been easy to repair relatively speaking.  

The second alternator, not an original RAM installation broke the regulator in Chile and Nation’s in Missouri sent me a package of spare parts  in short order. Plus we dinged our skid plate against it when we hit a deep hole on the Ghost Road in the Brazilian jungle. Indeed that repair had come back to haunt us. 

The skid plate had shifted and cut the belt again but Jonah also discovered the alternator wasn’t charging. I know where the fuse is located but it wasn’t that either so he had the alternator sent by bus to Macapá, the big city 500 miles away where there is a specialist shop. 

They found the wiring problem, fixed it and as I write are shipping it back to be re-installed. Nothing to stress about. 

Jonah’s assistant at work in the heat

Naturally we’d have liked to have been on our way but Lorenzo has been incredibly helpful and I’m grateful this didn’t happen in the Guyanas where services are limited and exceeding expensive. We’re lucky to be in Brazil and we’re lucky we know not to worry at this point in our traveling lives; we have time and money to repair stuff. Our biggest concern is the 70 miles of dirt road south of here with rainy season coming on  but we’re told it’s a well graded section and there’s nothing we can do about the weather. 

Life on the road, always surprises  and not all of them are bad. Sometimes a problem introduces you to good people. 

Lorenzo who is a native of Chile loves his hotel and he loves showing off the features. Fortunately for us he even speaks Spanish! 

He and his wife opened the hotel six months ago and they get a lot of cross border traffic with French visitors spending time in Brazil. 

The French come here for glasses and dentistry just as Americans cross to Mexico for the same services. He says they also come to see doctors if the wait is too annoying in the French insurance-run system. 

Consequently Lorenzo says the police keep a very strict eye on things here. Normally we aren’t too fond of border towns, but Oiapoque, a busy crowded place is as safe downtown as Lorenzo claims. 

Tomorrow I’ll post some pictures from our shopping expedition downtown where we felt entirely at ease. 

Seen on the rear of a French car at the hotel

Dawn on Highway BR156 looking south, our direction 

Lorenzo owns more than 300 acres of land he is reforesting, plus he has plans to build a self cleaning swimming pool building a lagoon to filter ground water to create a chlorine free pool for his guests. 

As he says he loves building things, Lorenzo is an entrepreneur through and through and he has been a godsend to us giving us all the help we could need. 

His apartments have all the comforts so we feel extra lucky to have to sit still here for a few days. 

Luckily he’s pet friendly and Rusty is no trouble at all. 

Hmong Market

Sunday we drove to Brazil and left French Guiana probably never to return.

We spent a more or less sleepless night wild camping in the heat in an inadequate sea breeze next to the Dreyfus Tower at Kourou. 

We had read the Sunday market gets crowded in the village of Cacao so we decided to get up early, and 5am is still dark to make the two hour drive before crowds formed. 

We did that arriving before 7:30 after bypassing Cayenne and taking Highway 2 south through the jungle. 

It was warm and damp with some drizzle thrown in to remind us rainy season is on the way. 

Eight miles up a narrow winding side road from the highway…

…to the village of the Hmong:

This was the goal, a supermarket…

…a covered market with stalls…

…and we got a prime parking spot. Cacao normally has about 1,000 residents so it’s pretty small. 

It’s all very French in the rolling jungle. 

I don’t know how much it resembles their homeland in Laos but there is a potable water plant which you don’t often see in South America:

The insect museum is famous but it wasn’t open and I was okay with that:

We bought a piece of embroidery as a decoration. 

I never thought a corn dog would get five stars from me but then I met this one in the Hmong market, soft and fluffy inside and crunchy outside. Pas mal. 

We had the market not quite to ourselves but close to. 

France rescued 10,000 of their former Hmong allies in Laos and settled them here, an area supposedly similar to their former home. 

5,000 “montagnards” (mountain people) live here around 400 feet above sea level and their weekly market is quite the tourist draw. 

We bought food and embroidery and got on our way in an hour. We met lots of cars coming up as we early birds left. 

We went down the hill back to Highway 2, a lovely winding drive. 

Narrow but perfectly paved. 

Then we turned right on the highway toward Oiapoque, the Brazilian border town called St George’s de l’Oyapock for the village  on the French side of the river. 

It started out sunny. 

And then we got some rain. 

And then there was a mile of dirt of all things, because this is South America land of the unexpected.

Luckily it was only about a mile of hard packed mud. 

And we passed a few (!) wrecks just left by the side of the road. It’s what they do around here apparently. 

And then we stopped for lunch, which involved me discovering we were losing air from a rear tire. I could hear it hissing like a snake but it was the valve that was the source of the leak. We were twenty miles from the border, the jungle was dripping with moisture as was I and I wriggled my brain trying to figure out how to avoid changing the tire in this sauna.

Avoiding panic  I have found is the best first move then I got out our compressor and tried to defeat the flow which it did for a while but around 50psi the air came out faster than it could put it in so I stopped and we drove off. 

The rear tires are supposed to be inflated to 80psi but at 40psi I found I could drive 30mph and the tire seemed to hold at that lower pressure without overheating the tire. 

We crawled the twenty five miles toward the border luckily with not much traffic and what there was just passed us without drama. 

We drove into the village  looking for a trash can to dump out trash and then we drove to a deserted park where I could change the rear wheel in peace away from traffic. However the tire was holding, rather bulbously but we only had four miles to go to the French border. Off we went, fingers crossed.  

Brazil! Again!

A marathon race between friendly nations left some flags flying.