Pomerode

More rain yesterday of course and as if that weren’t enough Layne had decided this was the spot to prepare our taxes so it was a quiet morning aside from the droplets hitting the roof of the common area.

Rusty wasn’t interested in facing the elements. I was reading a book at my desk, the story of climbing Cerro Torre in Argentina. 

Once the taxes were on their way to the accountant in the States we exercised, watched most of the vans in the campground leave and planned our day under cover of museum roofs. First up lunch.

Layne had a sausage sandwich while I had a Key West style egg and cheese. 

Mine was quite cheesy. 

After sharing with Rusty who was sitting under the table we went to check out a wood museum, at least that’s what they called it. First we had to bounce some damned cobbles. 

Marceneiro in Portuguese is carpenter in English. 

It started out in 1945 as a furniture factory and the family still runs it and ships wooden items round Brazil. 

They powered the factory with a water wheel which in turn got its power from the river outside. 

The store was full of wooden household gadgets and kitchen tools for sale fresh from the factory but Layne could only shop for souvenir items small enough for van life, a spatula and a knife while I took Rusty for a walk. 

We have had a couple of sunless days but even when overcast we can make ten amps from our solar panels  to cover running our 12 volt fridge and our inverter to charge our devices. The campground has good WiFi so we can turn off our Starlink which sucks up energy when we use it, but we decided we wanted to drive a bit to get the batteries charged.  One day soon we will be able to plug in again on rainy days and use campground electricity…

We drove toward Blumenau a large city which also boasts German roots half an hour from Pomerode on a rather boring road through industrial suburbs. 

Our friends Herbert and Agnes had preceded us and warned us that Blumenau wasn’t worth visiting but the batteries got charged…

…and we indeed saw nothing of note so we turned around and scuttled back to little Pomerode. Not before stopping to pick up some supplies at a small market. I saw a sign advertising daily specials listed by day: 

I cannot get over this Portuguese habit of numbering the useful days of the week.

This town isn’t a Disney style representation of a sanitized or idealized German community. 

To my eyes Pomerode looks very much like a modern German suburb, a contemporary community similar to any how non sentimental ordinary German town might look were you to look  across the ocean.

People here are just living their lives not posing in costumes for tourists with phone cameras. 

Oh and there is one rather odd traffic moment. A street that cuts through a downtown park defies normal traffic patterns. “Drive on the English side”says the yellow sign. 

For some reason madness has infected German orderliness and this cut through the park requires you drive on the left “ in the English manner.” And people do:

It seems the stupidest thing and it confused me when I first tried to turn in to find a parking spot. Drive on the left indeed. For one solitary block. 

Layne went to check out a museum dedicated to a local artist where she met the artist’s son and had a good poke around and sent me her pictures. The sculptor’s son who now manages the museum: 

Ervin Curt Teichmann was born in Germany in the city of Kiel in 1906 and his family emigrated to Pomerode in 1914. He grew up here and got married in 1933. His profession was teaching and art was a hobby. 

In 1939 Brazil passed a law forbidding foreigners from teaching and apparently Teichmann was still viewed as an emigrant so he lost his job. And that prompted him to go full time into sculpting. He died in 1992 in Pomerode, an honored Brazilian artist. 

The sun was making an effort to break out so Rusty and I were out enjoying it together and left the museum to the intrepid and ever curious Layne.  

Layne got it into her head we needed an infusion German beer of all things so we set off to look for a beer garden. 

Much nicer under clear skies but the cobbles are always a pain in the ass. 

We found the oddest place, a pub attached to a gas station. An English speaker who had worked in Atlanta for 15 years helped us out and showed us how to work the self service beer dispenser. All this at a gas station while Rusty watched and kept watch over GANNET2. 

We had used a card system at the Gardens Hotel wine bar in Key West so we soon got the hang of it. $2:50 got you a decent pour of beer from any of several taps and they had snacks inside the convenience store. 

I’ve never done that at a gas station before.  It worked. 

With the sun scheduled to put in an appearance we are now planning to head to a beach campground we’ve found. Sea sun and sand I hope. 

German Rain

The rain in Spain may very well fall mainly in the plain, and it certainly falls everywhere on the just and unjust alike, but in southern Brazil it really puts a crimp in tourism, especially if you live in a van.

I woke up in the gas station in Corupá and looked out upon a scene of mist and rain which left me  hesitant to wake the crew.

Rusty starts the night on our bed with us but often goes to his own bed on the floor but more often he enjoys hard ground or if he can get it he’ll sleep happily on gravel. He knows what he likes and does not like being told to sleep in comfort. If I was going to torture him I’d make him sleep on memory foam.

I went to get coffee as I was reluctant to clatter about making tea in the dormitory and it was there on the sidewalk  I met a truck driver who engaged me in conversation and I actually managed to understand him. I’m getting better at Portuguese if they slow down.

He has a sister in Boston and we talked about the cost of living and how in Brazil you get paid less but the costs are lower.  He makes seven bucks an hour driving trucks but food costs far less and he has no mortgage as he lives with his extended family. And there’s no war here, he noted, as an aside. 

He also mentioned a couple of destinations. Our plan had been to drive three hours to a well reviewed beach. The trouble was sitting on a beach in a rainstorm seemed sub optimal so when he suggested Pomerode, a town an hour away we reconsidered. As Layne put it we have never been so indecisive in five years of retirement on the road. Pomerode it was then.

It was a winding drive for an hour through a valley that was Brazil but occasionally nudged Germany. 

Hills aren’t obvious in photos but there were some steep ones in these towns we drove through.  Really steep like a roller coaster. 

And we met an occasional suicidal Brazilian; why walk on a sidewalk when you can be in the gutter on a blind curve in the land of notoriously distracted driving?

Pomerode is known as the most German city in Brazil not least because 75% of the 34,000 people who live here speak German. The city was founded in 1959 after the region these Germans lived in was awarded to Poland after World War Two.

We left Jaraguà under a typical piece of local architecture. The German community speaks a dialect particular to Pomerania known sometimes as Low German and they brought it with them when they left their homes on the Baltic coast of what is now Poland.

We have discovered a bunch of different German towns around here, immigrants from different eras pushed out of Germany by poverty, politics, revolution and religion. Often one thinks of Nazis taking refuge as if on a whim in South America. A large part of the attraction was not only the politics of dictators governing here but also the presence of established German communities. We saw the same immigrant roots in southern Chile and Argentina. Local politicians wanted settlers to claim empty land coveted by their neighbors and they sought white migrants from Europe where 19th century conditions were terrible for the poor and South America offered opportunity. This lot of Pomeranians were just more recent than most. 

You can see the German stereotypes at work here, the subject of jokes, order cleanliness and tidiness, but in the middle of Brazil it’s refreshing honestly to see neat and tidy roads and towns. 

Layne isn’t fond of fruit and pastry for dessert so I’m going to have to find a moment to get myself a strudel. She can have chocolate and good luck to her. 

We thought we’d found a campground close to downtown and it was a tight uphill fit into a garden in front of a dilapidated but fancy villa.

There was mountain one there but a sign said it was $5 to park until six pm and there were no signs of toilets or showers. So Layne got to studying iOverlander while I walked Rusty.

Nice strange evocative abandoned: what a strange place.  

Turning back to the highway the entrance gate hadn’t got any wider. 

And so we drove through a rainy damp German town. 

A short stretch of miserable bouncing cobbles. 

And so to the next attempt at a campground.  This one worked out and we settled in for some cooking and blog writing and sleeping under GANNET2.

You figure out who did what. But it was me who emptied the toilet in the dump station. Always me just in case you were wondering, Rusty never helps.

Layne preparing our tax returns while Rusty helps. 

Germanic street names. 

We met old friends by pure chance, Germans of course. 

And had a robust German dinner with Agnes and Herbert. Fried polenta and crispy bacon:

We talked for a couple of hours probably on our last meeting as they go south to Montevideo to send their Toyota home to Germany after three years in South America. 

We first met them in Chile crossing to Argentina. 

Life on the road is lots of good byes inevitably.