Ola Beast Crew

The Beasts have just started roaming around Brazil after some fairly major gearbox failures and the subsequent major overhaul.  The webpage has been updated with piccies from our trip along the coast of Uruguay and photos of the start of our trip through Brazil.  Apologies for no updates of recent but when you have to drive nearly 6000km across a country, wait for your car to be overhauled and be subjected to cup after cup of Cachaca there isn’t much time to sit down and write!

Petrol Station – Parati – Rio de Janiero – Petropolis – Muriae – Timoteo – Belo Horizonte – Divinopolis – Floreal – Campo Grande – Miranda – Bonito – Itaiaipu – Foz d’Iguacu (Brazil) – Ciudad del Este (Paraguay)

23rd January – 10th February 2007

So we are stranded at the side of the motorway. It is black. We have no functioning lights and our gearbox has blown up.  We got out and did the usual uneducated mechanics prodding and poking before we gave up and tried to engage gears.  With some grinding we managed to get some movement, but only at 10kmph.  As luck would have it, we were on a stretch of toll road which is patrolled by rescue trucks.  One of these trucks pulled up besides us and suggested that we splutter our way down to the toll booth where after he had left us at midnight, we sat there in doom with a bottle of wine wondering how much it was going to cost us to overhaul our gearbox or if it was terminal.  The following day we were loaded onto the back of a flatback lorry and carted off to a mechanic.

We nervously pulled up in the motorway service area where we were offloaded the Beast.  The mechanic, Mauricio, was not hyper keen to do the work and so waited for his brother, Alexon, to come back.  Alexon came back 5 hours later and they set to pulling the gearbox apart.  They quickly discovered one of the causes of the problem as a mangled bronze thrust washer fell out on them, a second one was discovered clinging on to the gearbox cogs. 

The cause of the problem was found and seemed to be simple to resolve.  The problem was that now we had to get the thrust washer… not easy when the whole of Sao Paulo closes down for a city holiday, we were 50km away from the spares shops and the spare part cannot be found in Brasil as there are only 4 known Land Rover 101s in the country!  So Mauricio and Alexon set off on a quest to get the part made from scratch for us.  After waiting for four days at the motorway service park for the parts to be found or made, the gearbox was reconstructed and we were free to be let loose to head down to the coast.

We said goodbyes to our Brasilian mechanics and headed down into tropical rainforest to the historic town of Parati with its beautiful cobbled streets. Parati, a laid back fishing village was historically the start of the Estrada Real, the gold run from the coast up into the central part of Minas Gerais state.  According to one local JK Rowling, the author and creator of Harry Potter, owns a house in Parati and she launched her book in South America.  A beautiful town trying for UNESCO accreditation with fantastic restaurants and bars; after one evening sampling Cachacas with a local, Greg ended one evening sleeping on some tree roots and not managing to find his way back to the hotel.

We managed to escape the beauty of Parati for the apparent danger of Rio de Janeiro.  We spent almost 3 hours trying to find a hotel, as nearly all the ones listed in the Lonely Planet didn’t exist and when we did eventually find one there was no parking.  The cost of the parking was just as expensive as the hotel, so Greg on his hyper media-induced paranoia insisted that we stay at hotel with parking; the only ones with guarded parking were located on the beach, overlooking the international beach football pitch and Christ the Redeemer!

We carried on driving north up to Petropolis, the town where Brasil’s emperor lived, driving on a windy road into cloud shrouded Mata Atlantica forest.  The wet season always causes landslides and flooding but the power of so much water became apparent when we were avoiding falling down the crevices that had been caused by the walls beneath the tarmac crumbling and leaving gaping holes along the road.

We headed to Timoteo in the Vale do Aco (Steel Valley) to visit some friends.  We spent a wonderful few days in Timoteo, in Minas Gerais with the Drummond family.  Alexis became friends with the Drummonds 10 years ago when she lived and worked in Brasil.  A very big thank you to the wonderful Drummonds for their usual wonderful hospitality – to Audrey, Andrea, Andresa, Adriana, Barcelar, Juarez, Emilio, Gabriela and of course the wonderful Marie Celeste, Beijao, Beijao, Beijao! 

We also visited Oikos where Alexis worked in Timoteo.  Oikos is an environmental education centre that educates the local community on recycling, nutrition, wildlife preservation and environmental issues.  It is part of the large steel company Acesita who once used the area to grow eucalyptus trees for steel manufacture but now have begun the mammoth task of returning the area back to its natural Mata Atlantica rainforest state.  A big thank you to Mauricio, Joao and Ottacilio for showing us around the expanded Oikos and for giving us media coverage in Brasil.

We left Timoteo and headed west to the largest wetland in the world, the Pantanal.  We headed out to the Fazenda San Fransisco, a well known Pantanal environmental farm hotel.  The Fazenda used to be a hunting farm for Panthers and Pumas but for the past 30 years they have been monitoring and preserving all large and small cats on their property.  We enjoyed a wonderful evening safari where we saw ocelots, capivara, jacare (type of croc), foxes and some panther footprints (but not the panther!).  We also enjoyed a river tour and a day time tour of the farm where we saw more wonderful animals including some deer, rhea and parrots.

We left the Fazenda late in the afternoon to head to the environmental activity town of Bonito, only 70km to the south.  The going was good until we watched the clouds spill their contents on the road in front of us.  When we arrived at the wet road, it was dark and we had to drive through red mud 50 cm thick with no working headlights.  The truck ruts that had been laid down in the mud threatened to turn the Beast over meaning that the 70km stretch of road took over 5 hours to drive.  God were we glad to crawl into bed at 11 that night!

Bonito (meaning beautiful) is reknowned for its diving and gleaming blue rivers.  We drove to a farm which provided us with wetsuits for a 2 hour float down a crystal clear river seeing the most amazing fish watch us warily as we drifted past them.

We headed south to Foz d’Iguacu, one of the 7 natural wonders of the world driving alongside of Lake Itaipu, the water that provides one of the seventh modern wonders of the world, the enormous hydroelectric Itaipu dam with its energy.  The water from the enormous dam which reaches more than 10 storeys high is fed back into the Iguacu river that then feeds the Iguacu Falls.  The falls are enormous and magnificient, spilling down several layers forming a rainbow filled spray.  We left the beautiful but presently expensive (in comparison to the rest of South America) country of Brasil and headed back into Argentina.  We consumed over 16 tanks on petrol on our 6,000km journey through the amazingly diverse country.

Notes on Brasil: