The long road to the Atlantic coast

When you ride with BJ the one thing that you can take for certain is that adventure, delay or fun are never far away. In this case it was all three as we sided with the Brazilian map over the GPS and decided that a short cut away from the main roads was achievable. Three hours and a grand total of about 50km later the GPS seemed to know best as the road through a national park that we’d searched high and low for seemed to have disappeared many years ago. As a result we only made it as far as Ampère which was a bit of a grotty little town with the only surprise being that my friend Sean Doyle seems to have a twin named Marcus that owns and runs a Hotel in town(!?)
The following days ride was a little more successful in terms of distance as we made it to São Joaquim which apparently is Brazil’s highest city at an unimpressive 1353 meters. Again, a pretty unremarkable place but the reason for us taking this route in the total opposite direction to where we need to head to is because we’ve simply copied a route from a motorcycle tour company so we’d assumed that there must be something worth seeing right? Well...sort of. The following morning we hit the steep decent away from São Joaquim which proved both fun and picturesque but compared to the many mountain passes that we’ve ridden before it rated only six out of ten. The rest of the ride to Florianopolis rated much lower though.
At this point I guess I should give my early impressions of Brazil. Firstly, I just love seeing all the old VW’s everywhere you look, with plenty of type 1’s and 2’s (Beetles and Campers/Buses/Vans) and the odd type 4’s (erm, just ‘odd’) on and off the road. It always makes me laugh how in one country a car like these has cult status and is so expensive when in others (usually the country of production) they are just a car and so cheap. Well I do until I recall how much money I’ve spent over the years..! Secondly, the roads are very dangerous. The driving is fast and there are lorries everywhere on the busy roads. Not enjoyable at all especially given the lack of protection from the oncoming vehicles, with the aftermaths of vehicle collisions regularly on show at a variety of times in the very recent and not so recent past. What else? Well, a little strange but everybody here is mixed race. I can count on one hand the people that I wouldn’t count as such. Unlike the Spanish in Argentina, the Portuguese brought slaves into Brazil from Africa (Angola I would think) hundreds of years ago and since then the gene pool appears to have been turned into a Jacuzzi. The people seem friendly but again, what a language!! Very difficult to get to grips with and with only a few people that we’ve met speaking English things at times have been hard work.