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https://www.sommertravelling.com/post/bolivia-when-the-road-runs-out-of-freedom

We’re David & Charlotte - once ordinary travellers, now full-time overlanders picking routes as we go, changing plans when reality demands it, and writing it all down honestly as we pass through. Expect culture, chaos and beautiful places that don’t feature on glossy lists. This is our roadbook from the real world: what happens when you set off overland with a bit of planning and a lot of curiosity. 

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Blog Link	Country	Points of Interest
https://www.sommertravelling.com/post/bolivia-when-the-road-runs-out-of-freedom	Bolivia  (Santa Cruz, Sucre, Potosí, Uyuni)	mennonite buggies fuel shortages political blockades 13-day captivity water rationing gated village shops jump-starting truck state of emergency rebel escorts black market diesel underground mines 6-hour fuel queue freezing border
https://www.sommertravelling.com/post/brazil-not-for-begginers	Brazil  (Foz do Iguaçu, Paraty, Rio de Janeiro, Copacabana, Ipanema, Chapéu Mangueira/Leme, Pantanal)	border delays speed bumps sweetcorn fields portuguese shift night drive panic damaged mirror sleazy beaches 9-year-old guide favela shooting drug stall queues glock-wearing farmer horseflies & caimans
https://www.sommertravelling.com/post/chile-argentina-the-road-made-itself	Chile & Argentina (Valparaíso, Patagonia, Chile Chico, Mendoza, Chubut Valley, Cafayate, Asunción)	shipping delays lemon muggling wrong ports split rim panic welsh tea roadside shrines steak and empanadasyerba scenic route 40
Thailand Pt2: No Alternative Route – Driving Blind Through Thailand’s Floods	Thailand (Southern)	active flooding, impassable roads waist-deep road crossings submerged vehicles, invisible roads petrol station refuge emergency boats, displaced residents instinct vs judgement, survivor guilt forced flight toward Malaysia
Thailand, Part 1: An Easy Country, Until It Isn’t	Thailand (Chiang Mai, Chiang Rai, Phuket, Khuek Khak)	temples, selfies, sacred queues monk chants White Temple, gold palaces, spectacle staged villages, souvenir traditions Phuket bars, expat bubbles tsunami ruins, beach memorials
https://www.sommertravelling.com/post/india-part-two	India (Varanasi, Ganges River, Delhi, New Delhi Railway Station, Jaipur)	burning ghats, death at arm’s length Diwali smoke, fireworks, and collapsing air tuk-tuks, street logic, and rented survival rats, flies, and drawing personal limits
India Part 1: Ziro to Kolkata – At the Fading Edges of India	India (Hyderabad, Ziro Valley, Kolkata)	tribal tattoos, vanishing traditions Durga Puja chaos vs quiet hills rickshaws, dignity, and biryani regret
A Christmas Thankyou…	Journey recap + what’s next (Europe → Middle East → SE Asia; next leg: Chile / South America)	Maps of our journey so far Map of next leg
Between Borders and Brothels: A Brief Drift Through Laos and Thailand	Laos (Boten, rainforest, Vang Vieng, Vientiane) Thailand (Bangkok)	SEZ sleaze and karaoke brothels rainforest nights and red-mud roads paperwork derailing “freedom”
Seventy-Two Bends and a Few Too Many Tyres	China / Tibet (Khunjerab Pass, Tibet, Lhasa, Nujiang “72 Bends”)	oxygen masks and prayer flags riot police outside holy temples tyres exploding, visas expiring
China: Border, Control, and the Long Road to Tibet	Pakistan → China → Tibet (Khunjerab Pass; across China; into Tibet)	map interrogation, deportation threats SIM cards as surveillance a 34-hour mechanical race against visas
Escorted Across Pakistan: Guns, Landslides and a Narrow Escape to China	Pakistan (Gilgit, Hunza, Karakoram Highway, Sost, Khunjerab Pass)	armed convoys and sirens mountain roads that kill sneaking under live power cables
Tea with the Taliban: An Overlander’s Passage Through Afghanistan	Afghanistan (border region, Kunduz, Kabul)	Taliban tea and “customer feedback” razor-wire hotels and AK-47 dinners secret schools and banned books
Tajikistan – On the Roof of the World	Tajikistan (Pamir Highway, high-mountain villages, Panj River)	diesel alarms at 4,500 metres villages burning cow dung for heat Afghanistan across the river
From Paperwork to Pastures: A Hard Lesson in the Road Ahead	Kazakhstan → Kyrgyzstan → Mongolia → Turkmenistan → Uzbekistan (Bishkek, Ulaanbaatar, Silk Road cities)	lost at the Kyrgyz border visa chaos and forced separation archers, deserts, and broken air-con
All change – people, places and weather	Türkiye (Pontic Mountains) → Georgia (Batumi, Tbilisi, Gori) → Spain detour → back to Georgia → Armenia (Yerevan) → Russia (Astrakhan) → Kazakhstan (Almaty)	snowbound, Stalin Museum, visa limbo, steppe
Back in Saudi and heading for Iraq...	Oman → Saudi Arabia (Al-Ula, Jeddah, Dakar Rally) → Jordan (Aqaba, Wadi Rum, Petra, Dead Sea) → Iraq (Baghdad, Babylon, Samarra) → Türkiye	Petra, Babylon, military escort, desert camps
Leaving Iran and starting on the Arabian Peninsula	Iran (Bandar Abbas) → UAE (Dubai/Sharjah) → Saudi Arabia (NE) → Bahrain → Qatar → Oman (Muscat, Nizwa, Wadi Bani Awf)	oil wealth, malls vs. bazaars, desert shock
Iran	Türkiye → Iran (Tabriz, Tehran, Isfahan, Shiraz)	hospitality, mosques, headscarves, paradox
We are off… To an uninspired start	United Kingdom, Europe	Europe dull after Africa, long transit
We are ready to go!	The Scarborough Arms pub, Sunderland Street, Tickhill, Doncaster (UK)	restart, pub car park, community
400 + days and counting	UK (Doncaster; planning: Turkey, Georgia, Russia, Kazakhstan, Caspian Sea, Mongolia)	truck repairs, twisted chassis, waiting
We didn’t have 1.25 million dollars in cash strangely?	Kenya (blocked) → Zambia → Namibia (Caprivi Strip) → Angola → DRC → Congo → Cameroon → Nigeria → Benin → Togo → Ghana → Côte d’Ivoire → Guinea-Conakry → Morocco → Spain → UK	16,000 km detour, gangs, corruption, despair
It’s been a while since the last one…	Tanzania (Mbeya) → Kenya (Nairobi) → Uganda (Kampala) → Rwanda → back to Tanzania	Rwanda cleanliness, Nairobi extremes, fatigue
What is it with Elephants and Chilli?	Zambia (Livingstone northwards; rural maize fields)	elephant deterrents, chilli, maize fields
Hello, I’m Fabulous, pleased to meet you	Zimbabwe (Victoria Falls)	Victoria Falls, resilience, currency chaos
Gimme hope Jo’anna, give me hope	Botswana (Francistown, Maun, Okavango Delta, Makgadikgadi salt pans, Chobe, Kasane)	elephants, lions, salt pans, wild camping
Red Red Wine	Namibia → South Africa (Cape Town, wine country)	vineyards, comfort, repairs, “a different Africa”
Send a bolt of lightning. Very very frightening me!!	Republic of Congo (Congo-Brazzaville, jungle tracks)	storms, rivers, isolation, raw nature
Life is full of surprises!	DRC (towards Kinshasa)	corruption, mud, bribes, survival
It’s life Jim, but not as we know it!	Senegal (Dakar, coastal towns) Angola (Luanda, rural roads, waterfalls area)	first West Africa, heat, traffic, culture shock, malaria talk, police kindness, washed-out bridge
It’s been a while…	Senegal (Ziguinchor) → Turkey, Bulgaria, Albania, Kosovo, North Macedonia, Serbia, Montenegro, Bosnia, Croatia, Slovenia, Austria, Slovakia → UK	catch-up, road rhythm, settling into Africa, Balkans, war scars, daughter’s wedding
All change!	The Gambia (Banjul) → Guinea-Bissau	border crossing, desert, sense of isolation, yellow fever jabs, visas, constant resets
Cooling down, wind in our hair…	Western Sahara (Atlantic coast) Senegal (east) → The Gambia (Banjul, Atlantic coast)	coastal drive, wind, relief from heat, river country, heat, fantasy cocktails
Hitting the road in Senegal and turning up the heat	Senegal (Dakar, Bassari region, Atlantic coast)	arrival, bureaucracy, intense heat, Bassari initiation, flamingos, village life
Moving on, shipping out	Morocco (Tiznit, Casablanca) → Senegal (Dakar)	shipping the truck, paperwork, waiting game, drone hiding, first separation
Travels through Morocco and Western Sahara	Morocco (Tangier, Tiznit, Agadir, Taroudant) → Western Sahara (Atlantic coast)	long drives, sand, first taste of Africa. Berber wedding, sandstorms, hospitality, visa limbo
Made it to Morocco and 15 minutes of fame	UK (Doncaster, Harwich) → Netherlands (Hook of Holland) → Belgium → Luxembourg → France (Normandy) → Spain → Italy (Genoa) → Morocco (Tangier Med)	arrival, press attention, excitement, media, Channel 5, emotional departure, Covid border dash

Bolivia: When the Road Runs Out of Freedom.

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“Those who deny freedom to others deserve it not for themselves.” - Abraham Lincoln

Now we are talking !

After the relative ease of Brazil, Bolivia felt like the start of something more real. Grittier, poorer, more traditional and somehow more alive. We were back in Spanish-speaking South America, albeit with a different accent. The plan was simple enough. Cross the country, get to Sucre, visit the mines at Potosí, see whether the salt flats at Uyuni were safe to drive on, and then get ourselves to Peru.

Bolivia, as it turned out, had other ideas.

As we got deeper into the country, into its bowels really, the traditional dress became more common and the place felt much more authentic. The people also seemed much friendlier than many we had met since arriving in South America. They were amongst the poorest too. Is there a link there? I do not know, but you notice these things when you are passing through at lorry speed rather than tourist speed.

There is not a massive amount to see when arriving from Brazil, so it was back to long slogs across big distances.

At first, though, Bolivia was fun. We were making good progress, parking in off-road hidey holes and feeling like overlanding was back to being what it should be.

The Bolivian women and some men, wore traditional clothes when you got away from the main cities.

Our journey took us through an area where the Mennonites lived. They came from Europe with the offer of cheap farmland and the promise that they could run their own schools. There are about 150,000 Mennonites in Bolivia now, many around the Santa Cruz region, and they are easy to spot. Simple bib and braces, a strange cap that reminded me of Casey Jones from days gone by, horse-drawn buggies, and no interest in modern technology. They are Christians and they made quite a sight. It is one of those odd overlanding moments where you are in South America, but suddenly feel as if you have driven through a side door into another century.

We bypassed Santa Cruz and carried on. That was when we needed diesel and realised all was not right. The first fuel station did not have any. Nor did the next.

A quick check on Google told us there was political unrest, fuel shortages and road blockades across the country. At first that sounds like one of those vague warnings you read online and hope does not apply to you. It did. This was not a few bored men with branches across a road. Bolivia was in the middle of a national fight over fuel, prices, austerity and President Paz himself. Unions, miners, transport workers, rural groups and supporters of Evo Morales were involved, and some wanted President Paz gone altogether. The blockades were being used to choke the roads until the government listened. Unfortunately, the road west of Santa Cruz was the road we needed. We only had one real route to follow, so after a bit of searching and a two-hour wait, we managed to get diesel and set off.

It did not take long to hit the first blockade.

We were just west of Santa Cruz and were held there for around 36 hours. No information, no idea what was happening and limited Spanish. It was terrifying in a way I had not expected. Bad roads are one thing. Borders are irritating, paperwork is tedious, breakdowns are annoying. But being stopped by other people and simply not being allowed to move is different. Your plans are gone. Your choices are gone. You sit there and wait for someone else to decide what happens next.

Some of the blockades and one of many women drivers, cooking at the roadside.

When we eventually got going, we laughed about it. Strange, we said. What a talking point that would be at dinner. Then, about 30 kilometres further west, we hit the second blockade.

This time we were more relaxed to begin with, which only proves how quickly you can get used to the wrong thing. The problem was water. We had about 80 litres, which sounds like plenty until you realise it is only enough for drinking and cleaning your teeth if you are trying to make it last. It is not enough for cooking, washing dishes, washing ourselves and living properly for an unknown number of days. After day two at the second blockade we had not showered for several days and we were watching every cup we drank.

This was serious. We could always leave the truck and walk through the blockade to try to reach a town, but we did not want to. The truck is our home, but it is also big and shiny and full of valuables. Walking away from it felt like inviting trouble. It was shelter and liability all in one.

Eventually it dawned on us that the other lorry drivers must be getting water from somewhere. By then we were on nodding terms with a few of them and the odd “buenos días” was being exchanged. With a little chat, some pointing and Google Translate, a family in the village gave us water. Pure relief. It lifted our spirits immediately and even made a shower possible, albeit a very brief one.

The village was extremely basic. A few small shops, most with steel gates rather than glass fronts. You pointed at what you wanted and they passed it through the bars. After a while they usually opened the gates for us, as we were considered top customers. The houses were mostly mud with corrugated steel sheets on the roofs. It reminded us of parts of Africa: not because the places are the same, but because the poverty had that same stripped-back feel. Had we gone back to Africa? Not literally, obviously, but the comparison came into my head. Life measured in animals, food, family and weather rather than screens, gadgets and things you do not really need.

The relief at getting water and the gated shops.

The local children came to look at the truck, so we gave them chocolate and pencils and paper to draw with. One girl told us she had just killed a cow with her dad. Another said her family had four pigs. A boy told us his family had eight cats in Santa Cruz. That was their world. Very little food, no TV, no computers, a few basic toys and a lot of dust.

For the kids, the blockade made an interesting diversion from their normal lives and having paper and pencils to draw was something they seemed to enjoy.

Many of the truck drivers had small trucks with no beds. I have no idea how they coped for days on end. We at least had a bed, a kitchen, water when we could get it, and somewhere to hide from the sun and the boredom. They were trying to make a living and the rebels were stopping them. From what we could gather, the drivers were very much against the blockades. They just wanted to work.

As the blockade dragged on, we all developed a kind of camaraderie. Charlotte and I would go for walks past the lines of trucks to pass the time. Going outside was not really an issue because drivers were constantly walking around anyway. We walked a lot, read a lot and tried to sleep as much as possible. The days were long and the nights were longer.

One day we caused ourselves another problem. We had left a camera running in the cab and drained the truck batteries. A stupid mistake, but stupid mistakes are easier when you are tired, bored and half stressed for days on end. The lorry drivers rallied round, found jump leads, brought another truck in and got us going. That was the best of the situation: men who had every reason to be angry and fed up still helping two foreigners in their well-provisioned truck.

At one point, out of sheer boredom, some of the drivers went to a local school and used the playground to play football. By this stage everyone knew us and we were definitely part of the team, even if we were not much use to anyone.

Then the government announced a state of emergency.

Part of the team blocking the road in one location

That changed the mood. Until then, part of you still thinks the roadblock will clear at any moment. Someone will make a deal, someone will get bored, someone will decide enough is enough. But when a government declares a state of emergency, you realise you are not stuck in a local argument. You are sitting in the middle of a national crisis. Roads were blocked across the country, supplies were being cut off, and the government was preparing to use the police and military to clear them. That may sound reassuring from a safe distance. When you are on the road, trapped between groups of angry men and a government trying to reassert control, it does not feel reassuring at all.

We were blocked, released, blocked again and allowed to move only a few kilometres at a time. The frustration was intense. It messes with your head because you keep thinking the next bit will be the end of it, then another group of men with stones, sticks or vehicles proves that it is not.

Charlotte was calm, as always. No emotion and no obvious sign of stress. That is her way. I used to think she was simply less worried than me in these situations. Now I am not so sure.

I ran through all the worst-case scenarios in my head. Would the rebels attack us? Would they decide the truck was valuable collateral? Would they get more desperate the longer the blockade went on? We were a very obvious target: foreign, visible, carrying fuel, money, equipment and probably more comfort than most of them had. That is not paranoia when you are sat at a roadblock with no idea who is in charge.

We were held captive until day ten. Then the breakthrough came.

A lorry driver came to our truck and told us to drive to the front of the queue because we would be allowed to pass. We did as instructed. One of the rebels said he would seek permission and let us know. Several hours later he came back and told us to follow him and his mob along the blocked road.

It was coming on dusk by then, and yes, I was scared.

We were being led by a group of rebels into an area with no people, no witnesses and no phone signal. Charlotte sat there calmly. I am not sure whether, after a life in the beauty industry, she saw the danger in the same way I did, or whether she saw it perfectly well and simply chose not to show it. Either way, she gave nothing away.

The foot soldiers looked totally indigenous, carried large sticks and had clearly been living rough for a long time. They smelt bad, which is not an insult so much as a fact after days on a road in heat and dust. In that moment, rightly or wrongly, all I could see was a group of men with little education, no social values that made sense to me there, no obvious regard for our lives, no phone signal, no witnesses and no reason that I could understand to care what happened to us. That made it scarier. Fear does not make you generous in your thinking.

As it happened, for people wielding machetes they were quite polite and said they would let us pass, but we still had two more blocks to get through before the first major town.

We passed the rest of the roadblocks with relative ease. Always held for a few hours, always waiting for someone to make a decision, and then eventually being waved on.

In total, we were held for 13 days.

The traditional dress was fascinating.

I have never been in prison, but I now have a very faint idea of why it must be such a terrible experience. Not the bars, because we had no bars. Not even the discomfort, because we had the truck. It was the loss of control. Your civil rights are denied to you and you feel violated in some way. Overlanding is supposed to be freedom. You carry your own fuel, your own water, your own bed and your own decisions. In Bolivia, for 13 days, we carried all that and still could not move.

Eventually we reached Sucre, the first destination we had wanted to get to, and found a makeshift campsite in someone’s backyard. It was scruffy, but it had electricity, so we did not have to run our generator, and it had water. Perfect. At that stage, perfect did not need to be very perfect.

The owner was a wise guy and told us he could get diesel on the black market. I could have kissed him. This meant we could push on to our furthest destination, Uyuni. We bought 230 litres, filled the tank and stored the surplus for the future. The containers went on the rear lift that holds the motorbike, covered with a tarpaulin. Diesel was scarce and we did not want to attract some passing opportunist thief. After 13 days of being stuck, the thought of losing fuel was almost too much to bear.

From Sucre it was on to Potosí to visit a silver and zinc mine.

We were taken underground and walked the roadways. The miners still fill rail tubs with ore by hand and push them out of the mine by hand. They work in pairs and get paid around £2.50 each per tub. It is terrible work. Many die from roof collapses and gas. Women are employed at the mines, but they are not allowed to work underground because they are thought to bring bad luck.

Just in mines?

I was a coal miner in my formative years, so this really resonated with me. I understood what was happening down there in a way most tourists probably do not. The miners drill the rock using compressed air drills, pack the holes with dynamite and blow the rock face so they have mineral to collect. Hard, dangerous, physical work.

We observed these guys and could understand their frustration at the low pay, but was that justification for holding up thousands of lorry drivers and causing mass food shortgaes throughout the country? I have my opinion.

When I told our guide I had been a coal miner, she took us deeper into the mine than she usually took people. She said she respected me for having done that job. I appreciated that. It is not often you go on a tourist trip and find yourself back in something that feels uncomfortably close to your own past.

She was also very political and spent more time berating President Paz than telling us about the mine. At the end, she asked if we wanted to donate anything to help the miners.

I paused before answering.

“The miners are some of the people manning the blockades around Bolivia,” I said. “I spent 13 days being detained at these roadblocks. I think I have given enough.”

That may not be the answer she wanted, but it was the answer I had.

Our final destination in Bolivia was the salt flats at Uyuni. When we arrived, we felt relieved. We were only about 200 kilometres from the Chilean border and nearly free. There was a fuel station and, miraculously, they had fuel. There was also a huge queue. We probably did not need the diesel, but after Bolivia you do not drive past fuel because you think you are all right. Better to be safe.

We queued for six hours.

Finally we pulled onto the forecourt, only to be told the last truck leaving had taken the last of the diesel.

I wanted to cry.

We drove to the salt flats, but they were wet and did not look safe to drive on, and so we said, no thank you. I know people go there for the photographs and the endless white horizon, but I was in no mood to turn a bad fortnight into a rescue operation.

So we went straight to the border.

It was closed.

Bolivia’s final sting in the tail.

We had to spend the night at the border at 4,000 metres. The temperature was heading towards freezing and the big issue now was whether the truck would start in the morning at that altitude and in that cold. After fuel shortages, blockades, water worries, black-market diesel, wet salt flats and 13 days of being told when we could and could not move, we were now parked at a closed border, staring at Chile and wondering whether the engine would play its part.

Did we make it?

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Brazil, not for begginers

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“The real is not in leaving or arriving; it reveals itself in the middle of the crossing.”— João Guimarães Rosa

A Long Kilometre

Crossing into Brazil was like entering a new world.

It took us four hours to drive the last kilometre to the border, and apparently, that’s normal. I’m not sure who decides what normal is at South American borders, but they have a very different idea of it than I do.

We had come in from Paraguay, which, to be honest, hadn’t exactly detained us. I had bought a small independent guidebook before we set off, and it basically didn’t have anything in it. In Asunción, the old town was described as probably the highlight of Paraguay. In reality, it was one scruffy street with a few semi-interesting old buildings. But they were just scruffy, which took away any charm.

We had one beer in a bar. We had planned on having dinner out, but the place was huge, heavily lit and had zero atmosphere, so we drank up, went back to the truck and made ourselves an omelette.

The capital of Paruguay - Charlottes on the photo, believe it or not

Brazil immediately felt different. Orderly-ish streets, proper signposts and a feeling of more money about the place. The only downside was the constant and enlarged speed bumps everywhere. Brazil does not do subtle speed bumps. It builds small defensive structures across the road and lets your suspension find out for itself.

Waterfalls and Sweetcorn

Our first proper stop was Foz do Iguaçu water falls.

Both Charlotte and I had visited the falls almost 30 years ago, but not together. Funny, I don’t remember seeing her there?

The falls are so big they can be viewed from Argentina or Brazil, with Paraguay just down the road as well. They sit in a corner where 3 borders meet.

They now have an impressive visitor centre, souvenir shops and buses to take you to a nature trail and various vantage points. A far cry from the dirt road I remember, but still spectacular.

The noise is the thing. You can see photographs of Iguaçu and understand that it is big, but you don’t get the weight of it until you hear it. It is less like water falling and more like the planet emptying a reservoir over the edge of itself.

Prepare to get wet.

I have mentioned before, but I can’t state enough how vast South America is. We left the falls and drove country roads for three days, seeing little else other than sweetcorn plantations. They were on both sides of the road and went back as far as we could see.

Truly amazing.

How much sweetcorn do we eat?

Stopping for the night was easy. There were loads of farm tracks where we could pull off the main road and hide. No drama, no campsite, no reception desk. Just a track, a field and the usual calculation of whether anyone was likely to appear with a torch and ask what we were doing there.  Nobody did.

That counts as a successful night.

Paraty and Portuguese

Our destination was Paraty, a beautiful town with whitewashed buildings, cobbled streets and a beach nearby, which is always handy.

We went into town on a Sunday. It had the usual range of coffee shops and souvenir shops, but the street vendors were more interesting to us. They were selling trinkets and appeared to be Indigenous people, quite different in appearance to the people working in the shops and cafés.  We had grown to love the South Americans speaking Spanish. Not because we were any good at it, but because we had reached the point where we could just about get by, which is different from being competent but feels like a major achievement when you are hungry, tired or trying to buy diesel.

Now we were in Brazil, where they speak Portuguese. There are some words in common with Spanish, but that made it worse. I had to stop myself trying to read signs, because it was confusing my already very limited Spanish.

Paratay. Very pretty and well worth a stop.

Rio in the Dark

From Paraty, we slogged on to Rio de Janeiro.

As we drove in through the suburbs, we realised it was time to get the pepper spray out from its hiding place.  We arrived late, which was not clever. Driving the streets of Rio in the dark is not a hobby I would recommend. Charlotte was navigating, I was gripping the wheel, and neither of us was exactly full of joy. There was filth, fires burning at the side of the road, beggars scavenging through piles of rubbish looking for something of value, cars that were decidedly beaten up, gangs of youths hanging on street corners, and a woman flagging down a bus with her child on her breast, for all to see.

As we squeezed into town, the roads narrowed and the traffic got heavier. Then a bus took my wing mirror.  I initially gave chase, then realised that even if I could stop the bus, how exactly was I going to explain what had happened? And did I really fancy getting out of the cab as it was coming on dusk in Rio de Janeiro?

Nope.

One of the common sites in some areas of Brazil.

At the time, we didn’t know if the mirror was damaged or just displaced. Charlotte couldn’t pull it back into place, and driving became even more of an issue. You use your mirrors a lot more when driving a large vehicle, so not having both of them in a city was not ideal.

What had actually happened was it had been pushed out of place and just needed untightening and putting back.

But again, on a lorry, that means standing on a stepladder to reach it.

Nothing is easy.

Our destination was a secure parking area behind huge steel doors. Not pretty, but safe, and ideal for visiting the city during the day. At that point, pretty was not high on the list.

Beaches and Buckets

We did the usual Copacabana and Ipanema beaches.

The large police presence made us feel safer, though I’m not sure whether needing a large police presence should ever be considered reassuring. The beaches felt a bit sleazy to me, with the usual array of tourist tack on the streets and discounted drinking shacks along the beach edge.

There was plenty of flesh on display, even though the weather wasn’t great.

Some of it was braver than the weather deserved.

We ventured a few streets back from the beach, but soon realised this wasn’t wise. The mood changed quickly, the shops looked run down and the street felt less forgiving. We turned around and went back to the seafront.

Copacabana beach

One observation: there are loads of VW camper vans in Brazil. They seem to be used for everything, but mainly for transporting goods. Not the polished Instagram version with fairy lights and a surfboard on top. Proper working vans. Dented, useful and still going.

The statue of Christ the Redeemer was on my bucket list. I had failed to get up to it on my last visit, so I was determined this time.

As we loitered around the visitor area, we were approached by an unofficial guide offering his services. We were unsure of his credentials, and he didn’t really match up somehow, so we decided to test his knowledge before agreeing to use him.

We asked him when the statue was built.

He looked a little perplexed, stared at the floor and eventually said, “Well, it was before I was born.”

We estimated our potential guide was actually a Rio street kid, aged about nine years old.

We didn’t engage his services, but gave him a tip anyway.

You had to admire the effort.

In the end, we didn’t make it up to Christ the Redeemer. The weather was bad, and we didn’t want to be on top of a mountain when the rains came.

And they did.

So Christ the Redeemer remains on the bucket list.

Again.

Cocacabana.

The Favela We Didn’t Find

We also wanted to go back and do a favela tour.  Favelas are the slum areas, and we were told they are mainly self-policing and therefore safe, or at least safe in their own way. The police don’t normally go near some of them, and the residents are left to manage their own security, although “manage” can mean different things depending on who is holding the gun.

The Favela are grim looking places.

We had both done a favela tour on previous visits, but they now appeared to be extremely tourist-driven, so we decided we would go alone. Unfortunately, or fortunately, we got lost.

Charlotte was navigating our walk, and we missed the first favela as she misread the map. It wasn’t mentioned by me or her, as I didn’t want to cause a scene. Marriage, like overlanding, sometimes works best when you shut up and keep moving.  As it was getting dark, we abandoned our efforts and retreated to the truck.

The next day, we reluctantly contacted a guide and asked if he would take us to the favela we wanted to visit, Chapéu Mangueira in the Leme area of Rio.

His response was no.

There had been a shooting there yesterday, and it was closed. We decided it might be better to take a tour and it was fascinating. We were told the drug barons rule the favelas. They are the judge and jury in disputes, and rapists and paedophiles are simply killed. Their bodies disappear, and the police are not allowed in, so nobody officially knows anything.

The people live almost on top of each other, and they respect each other, or have to. Our guide said the strict local rules keep everyone in check. The buildings were ramshackle but rose up to five stories high, no higher. Many of the inhabitants, he said, were construction workers, and the area was safe because people respected each other and understood how the place worked.

I’m not so sure.

Bread Queue, Drug Queue

Brazil’s history sits heavily underneath all of this.

I had in my notes that more than half the population identify as Black or brown, descendants in part of Africans brought across through the Portuguese slave trade, which brought millions of enslaved people to Brazil. Brazil also still has the largest Catholic community in the world, though religion there, like everything else, is shifting.

There is wealth in Brazil, plenty of it, but there is poverty on a scale that is hard to ignore once you leave the postcard streets.  40% of the population (213,000,000 is the population) live on €250 a month.  Recent figures put around 23% of Brazilians below the poverty line, with millions still living in extreme poverty and Rio makes sure you see both.

A shop and various other buildings in the Favela

Food smells that were amazing, but often followed by the occasional waft of shit. I’ve had that smell on numerous occasions now, and I’m getting tired of it. The whole area was unkempt and filthy, but also alive in a way the polished beach streets were not.

Brazil is complicated like that. It gives you beauty and then makes you step over something.

But it is a party town, and so there was music everywhere.

As were drugs.

In the Favela, we went to see a project to teach streets kids dance and music.

Brazil is a major domestic market and a strategic transit hub for cocaine because of its borders, ports, airports and links to Andean producer countries. And drugs are not hidden away in some dark corner. They are woven into the place.  On one occasion we saw what appeared to be a drug stall, and the queue was almost funny. People were lining up like they were buying a packet of bread.

Taxi drivers, guides and any friendly soul who bothered to speak with us all said the same thing: be careful and don’t have your phone on display. To be fair, I’d be careful with my phone in London, so maybe it’s just the same, only with better scenery and worse driving. I wear a plastic watch, but Charlotte has a reasonable one, about £300, and she took it off and left it in the truck.

Into the Pantanal

Leaving Rio, we headed towards the Pantanal.

The Pantanal is vast, somewhere between 150,000 and 190,000 square kilometres, depending on where people draw the edges. Roughly two-thirds the size of the UK, which is a ridiculous amount of swamp by anyone’s standards.

Our aim was a boat trip to see wildlife, and maybe even spot a jaguar.

Having looked for tours, we found the usual selection of tourist crap. A traditional Brazilian breakfast, followed by a walk, then a boat trip with others, probably all wearing clean shirts and looking pleased with themselves.

We wanted something more authentic.

After asking around, we got the phone number for a farmer who had a boat. He agreed we could stay on his land, and he would take us out.

We arrived at a remote farm late in the afternoon and quickly arranged that we would set off for the boat trip at 06.00 hrs.

That was that. He wished us goodnight.

I wasnt so sure about several of the bridges. At 12.5 tonnes, we have to be careful.

The next morning, he appeared bright and early with a gun in a holder on his waist.

I asked what it was, meaning was it real.

He casually said, “Glock 9mm.”

I asked why he wore it. He said it was for protection against the jaguars, as they sometimes came through his farm. I didn’t dare tell him I had been barbecuing the night before and had grilled two steaks. Lucky escape. I could have been dinner.

No Jaguar, Plenty of Insects

The Pantanal visit was roaring and real.

It was the dry season, which should have meant the animals gathered near the river as the swamps dried out. Except Brazil had other ideas. There had been unusually heavy rain, the rivers were swollen, the swamps were full of water, and the jaguars clearly had better things to do than entertain us.

The mosquitoes early in the morning were horrendous, and as the sun came out, so did the flies. They were like horseflies, and we used long linen scarves to protect ourselves.

Very stylish. Very Lawrence of Arabia, if Lawrence of Arabia had been sweating in a swamp and quietly losing the will to live.

It was 30+ degrees and I had to wear long sleeves and trousers to protect from the insects.

We didn’t see a jaguar, but we saw plenty of caiman, birds of all flavours, and had a great trip alone on a boat with an interesting farmer.

We had avoided the packaged tour, found a man through a phone number, slept on his land, gone out at first light and been eaten alive by insects.

That will do for me.

He was an understated guy, and I asked him what he farmed.

Cows.

He told me he had 2,000 of them.

I Googled the cost of a cow in Brazil.

It’s a big number.

Are you going to Google it?

The Middle of the Crossing

We came looking for waterfalls, Rio, Christ the Redeemer and jaguars. We got some of that. We also got a broken mirror, bad weather, a closed favela, swollen rivers, insects, warning looks from strangers and a farmer carrying a Glock.

What can I say? Brazil is not for beginners. But then, beginners probably shouldn’t be driving trucks through Rio in the dark anyway.

A murial near a church depiciting the last super. God is Black 

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