Peeling Ceiling
Trip Start
Oct 20, 2009
1
16
159
Trip End
Jun 23, 2010
Pelotas Rio Grande Brazil, Rio Grande do Sul, Brazil
Monday, November 2, 2009
The stink of smoke in our room was overpowering. I crushed an orange peel around the place to help cover it and slept with the peel on my pillow. The toilet water was running all night and the ceiling was peeling. It had been painted with some sort of white wash, as had the whole place, and there were white flakes everywhere. There were holes in the sheets and curtains, a sagging mattress and no hot water. Des said it all when he called it a shit hotel.
We couldn’t wait to leave the next day. No problems checking out of Uruguay at the border with Brazil, at Chuy, pronounced 'Chewy’. We had our vehicle Carnae’s stamped out of Uruguay and rode the couple of kilometers into Brazil.
Brazil does not use the Carnae system, so all the details about the four bikes had to be manually entered into a computer at Customs and Immigration. This took over an hour, and we gradually stripped more and more layers of clothing off while we waited, because it was very humid. When all was finalized, we set up our chairs in the customs yard to have lunch because we couldn’t bring our lovely tomatoes into Brazil.
Now we were in a Portuguese speaking country, so Lynn’s Spanish dictionary was no good here.
The riding was good, and the scenery magnificent. There were lots of palm trees growing in the open paddocks, lush greenery all around and beautiful, tall white birds, like Ibis and storks. We passed an area where many, many capybara were lazing around and had to watch our speed as the area was heavily monitored with speed cameras, because unfortunately the capybara stray out onto the road and get run over. They’re quite big, like small pigs and would do a bit of damage to a vehicle. There was no place to pull over and take photos, so I’ll just have to take the memory of this beautiful scenery in my head. We covered a distance of 360kms today.
