Finally in Brazil

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Although Caracas wasn't at all appealing, after some time travelling you start appreciating different things and the usual turist stuff is not that interesting anymore. I think that's why I enjoyed the five days I stayed there, in spite of the ugly place. Eva was still too weak to take care of herself, so I stayed longer than I had originally planned. She was going to fly back to the Netherlands on July 31. We went back to the doctor several times to take more tests and by the time I left, on the 30th, she was a lot better.
I had two options to get to Brazil from Caracas. There is a convenient and comfortable direct bus, with bed-like seats (buscama), but it would go through the south of Venezuela and north of Brazil, areas that I really wanted to see, at night. The other option was taking a bus to Santa Elena de Uiaren, close to the Brazilian border, spending the night there and taking another bus to Manaus the following day. The problem is that the buses in this case weren´t nearly as nice and the price difference between the options wouldn´t buy me lunch in San Francisco. I still opted for the slower, less comfortable bus, so that I could see the pretty part of the country. I expected to see a lot of green in the south of Venezuela, but everything is either cut down, or the Amazon doesn´t really start until Brazil, because what I was a lot of open plains, not being planted, not being used for cattle, just a lot of open land. The amazing exception were the mountains, so called tepuis. Tepuis are table mountains, some as high as 2800 meters, that drop suddenly to the flat lowlands. They are green all the way to the top, a beautiful view. Salto Angel, the tallest waterfall in the world, almost 979 meters tall, is in this region, but only accessible by plane.

The trip was beautiful, but long and slow. We got stopped by Venezuelan military checkpoints no less than three times to check everyone´s passport. The last time they also wanted to see the luggage, so they asked everyone to get off the bus, get their luggage, take it to a large table they had improvised and open it, one by one. They were so disorganized that they couldn´t keep track of who had already gone through the process and who hadn´t, so several people were asked to open their luggage twice. We must have spent at least 40 minutes there. We didn´t get to Santa Elena until 3pm, after 22 hours on the road. Santa Elena is a tiny little town with less than 20,000 inhabbitants, but the bus station is several kilometers from the center, very inconvenient. The fact that the bus station is so far created the necessity of a means to get to the station and back, since there is no public transportation. As a result the town is now filled with taxi cabs. That´s Latin America.

I took a cab to the hotel indicated on my Lonely Planet. It was incredibly cheap, but equally unprofessional. The shower was a just a pipe dripping water, there was no toilet paper, the owners were a really loud family, the place was infested with mosquitoes, all that crap. I don´t mind those things, I´ve stayed in much worse places before, but they also had a little Chihuahua puppy that was getting on my nerves. The dog was the size of a mouse and loved to bite my shoes. I just tried to ignore it. That night when I was coming back after dinner, the family was eating on the table right outside my room, I turned to greet them and all of a sudden I hear a really loud strident noise: Caaaain... I had steped on the danm dog with my whole weight. For a moment I thought I had killed it, but I hadn´t. It must have hurt, because it kept crying for at least a minute after I took out my foot. The male members of the family found it extremely funny, which made my situation worse, cause the mom got even more pissed off. She made a very impolite comment that I replied equally impolitely (I will skip the details), she felt embarrassed, told me not to worry about it and I went to my room.

The next day I left early to take the bus to Manaus. Going through the border was quick, compared to my other experiences. I felt great about being in Brazil again. The Brazilian border post is a big fancy building with paintings and art on the front, much better and more organized than any of the other nine borders I had crossed during this trip. I felt proud to be Brazilian.

The northern state of Roraima is full of green mountains contrasting with granite hills, somewhat similar to those found in Rio, and lots of waterfalls. Gorgeous place. I felt tired and fell asleep for part of the trip and when I woke up it was extremely hot in the bus, the A/C had broken down. We were really close to the city of Boa Vista, capital of Roraima and when we got there the drivers insisted with the company to get us another bus with A/C. I knew that it was going to get extremely hot in the Amazon during the day, so I was glad that they were going to change the bus. I talked with the driver as we got off and he told me that when the new bus arrived it was going to be announced through the loudspeaker, so we could go in the terminal and relax. Around two hours later I realized that the people from my bus weren´t there anymore. I went to the company and they said that the bus had left five minutes before, nothing had been announced. I was pissed at first, but whatever, it´s not that I was in a hurry for anything. I had nothing to do no matter where I was. They changed my ticket to a latter bus, and I went for a walk around the town. It was so hot outside that I couldn´t walk more than a few blocks. I stopped at a snackbar and ordered my first Brazilian meal with a Brazilian beer. It felt good.

My bus left the station on time at 6pm. I was glad, I was terrified at the mosquitoes that were starting to come out as soon as the sun went down. It´s malaria area and I didn´t bring malaria medice, since I wasn´t planning to go through the Amazon.
I must have crossed the equator - by land for the first time - around midnight, heading south to Manaus.

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Comments

[Eva]

You cracked me up with this story, specially the dog-part! I really wonder what unpolite things a very polite boy says after an event like this...