Thursday 5 December 2013

Mini World Adventure Part 6

 To me personally this was the part of the trip I was looking forward to and scared of the most, The Amazon, its wild tribes, snakes, killer frogs, insects, Cayman, Piranha fish, electric eels and that’s just the animals we know about!



The Trans-Amazonian highway was built in 1972 to open up the forest to development and was a major cause of the deforestation. Its 2000 miles of dirt road built as 3 lane but as narrow as single track in places, fine in the dry with corrugations  



and gully's,


but when the rains come it turns into a quagmire. These road conditions caused us a now fairly normal problem on the Mini's, the exhausts, they kept being knocked off.It was happening so often we eventually decided to leave them off and drove very noisy little cars.

Bridges spanned the smaller rivers and streams, some required a walk across before we tried the cars on them!



We set of full of anticipation and to begin with the road was dusty but fine, lots of large trucks towing out enormous logs that took up most of the road so we had to drive with care. When we arrived at the first river we had to wait for the ferry or Balsa as they are called. 

They are all free and each side of the river small villages have sprung up. We bought some milk from a chap with a horse and cart, very pleased with ourselves until we saw the emaciated cows and worried every time one of us coughed.



The Balsa's varied from one or two vehicle versions to large ones similar to the King Harry Ferry rivers also varied from 100 yards to 1/2 mile or more across. On one of the first crossings we were lucky enough to see the rare freshwater pink dolphin. 




The locals were very friendly and often, as we waited for the Balsa to arrive we would try and wash our clothes in the river,seeing how poor a job we made of it the local women would wash them for us whilst we occupied the children (who were more like fish then children) swimming and diving in the murky water. Many children sold food to waiting drivers,boiled eggs,bananas,oranges,bananas,pawpaw and mangoes.




Some of the towns were quite large and gold had been discovered making others very 'wild west'. In one of these gold rush towns we were in a bar and saw the barman bring a double barrelled gun up to the counter to point at a very drunk and rowdy client, it certainly quietened him down and left a lasting impression on us too! Men were using gold as money in the bars and shops,there were several buyers of the gold the prospectors had found,these were heavily guarded.We went into one of these establishments and were shown the raw gold dust and some larger ingots,with hindsight I wish I had bought one. Many men carried guns and it did feel very much like America must have been in the cowboy days.
Many towns had what looked like a bandstand,(in fact it may have been a bandstand, but I never saw a band playing in them) where at night if you didn't want to stay in a hotel  or have the money you could hang your hammock without charge. 


We often slept in these that could sometimes have up to 30 men sleeping at all different angles making quite a sight, and sound I can tell you!!

In Itaituba we were told it was over 1200 kms to the next fuel station, our plastic tanks we had bought had long since gone, so we loaded the cars with 20 litre metal cans, both inside and on the roof rack, it was like driving a mobile bomb. 




Unfortunately the quality of the cans was not good, so we had to juggle leaking cans and topping up as often as possible. The other problem was the quality of the fuel, (there was a joke in Brazil that when the Pope decided what bits of South America where Spanish and Portuguese he must have known where the oil was because at that time most other countries had it, Brazil did not) to save importing too much petrol they had developed a fuel called Alcool developed from Sugar cane, this was to cause major engine problems later in the trip. 




Another way to lower fuel use was to close fuel stations on Sundays, this meant an enforced stop and I usually serviced the cars, on one particular day working on the bank a of a large river, someone from the village bent down close to where I was working and pulled metre long snake from the grass shouting 'viper,viper' The way he was handling it made me think it was not dangerous but it certainly made me more careful when working on the cars. 
It also meant as we spent a bit longer in a village we got to know the locals better and by now are Portuguese was getting better. 
In one small town we were invited by a local to his farm, 



They proudly dressed in their Sunday best for me to take a photo.



He then took us into the forest to cut down a tree, it was incredible to see the difference in light once it was felled. 



 We walked through the virgin forest being shown wild mango & pawpaw, I have never eaten fruit so sweet and strong tasting, it was delicious.


We also visited the local sawmills and did some filming for Nationwide TV



Below is a shot of 'Slash n Burn' the controversial way farmers clear the jungle to enable them to raise cattle and grow crops, problem is the land is poor and after a couple of years it is no longer viable, although given time the jungle does start to take it back.



Many of these river side villages were flooded every year and we were shown houses with paint rubbed off half way up the walls even though they were 50-60 feet above the present water level!



Something that I hadn’t thought of was unless you were on the bank of a river you had no view, on the road the furthest you could see would be the other side of the valley and all that would be was trees. A problem locals has was there were no rocks, the surface was soil or sand and boulders and rocks had to be brought in. 
About half way to Manaus the rains started, this turned the road into mile after mile of sticky glutinous mud. Our usual method of dealing with this problem was to get out of the cars,have a recce, choose the best route, back the cars up and drive as fast as we could to try and make it all the way through. If, or more likely when, we got stuck we either used our hand winch to a tree, or if the other car had got through tried to tow it out. Sometimes it could take several hours and locals on the road would also help.








On one particular day it was so bad the mud jammed in between the rear wheels and wheels arches locking them up, we had to stop, jack up the car, drag out the mud and start again, but it happened so often we had to stop in an old abandoned farm (fazenda) and wait until the road improved. 
The jungle is an incredible place, when we were unable to find villages or ‘service areas’ (along the track are areas for trucks, buses and cars to stop with a place to eat and usually somewhere to hang a hammock) we would sleep next to the road with the hammocks tied between the cars and a tree. The noises from the jungle at night are amazing, from howler monkeys, frogs and thousands and thousands of insects, most of which seem to bite. The mosquito’s will actually bite though the hammock into your skin and then the ‘pinon fly bites between, at one point my back was just red all over.



 There was another insect that seemed to get under your skin and left me with what looked like long white scars. 
We arrived at one small roadside stop late one afternoon, hitched our hammocks in the adjoining barn and went down to the stream to wash and clean our kit. It was about three metres wide and about a metre deep.a with all the rivers in the jungle it was lovely and warm and you could feel little fish coming up to your skin and gently biting.
As throughout the whole of our trip, we found the local people very hospitable,here was no different and we were invited into the house for a evening meal. Obviously fish is the staple food and as guests we were given the best part, the head!!! I had dawn the short straw so started to eat what I could noticing the rather large teeth,so I asked them what sort of fish it was, they said Piranha, I then asked where the fish had come from? They informed us they had caught it in the stream!!


The food in the Amazon apart from the fish was not the best, it usually consisted of rice, black beans and spaghetti all of which had been reheated many times. They also had ‘Farina’ which was made from the husks of corn on the cob and I think meant to be roughage. Occasionally we would treat ourselves to a Churrasco a selection of up to 20 different BBQ’d meats are brought to the table on long skewer, it was usually for a set price so they would always try to fill you up with bread etc before the best meats came at the end of the meal. The coffee always came very strong and very sweet with sugar pre-added.



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