22nd – Flat as a pancake. As one could say.

First up and a warning, no photo’s today. I will make up with a doubly good effort tomorrow night to continue to please my subscribers. The reason is that it is 11pm and the internet at this abode away from home leaves something to be desired. Lets just say that I could probably learn binary code, make a morse code transmitter, learn morse code, and actually send out this update before this internet would sufficiently load WordPress enough to write anything.

We passed into the very southern edge of the Amazon basin today and cross the border from Carumba, Brazil and stopped at Santa Cruz, Bolivia tonight. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amazon_basin) . We are thousands and thousands of kilometers from the sea and still only 800 feet from sea level. I thought Australia was flat in places, but by Odin’s beard this place is flat.

A good word to describe today was, interesting. We packed up and moseyed (moe-zeed, past tense of mosey – to walk slowly) the 7km’s to the Brazilian/Bolivian border by 7:30am ready in line to start at 8am when they open. Well, guess what? They are South American and they do things in South American time, they opened at about 8:20. 2 hours later most of us had managed to exit Brazil and enter no-mans-land and work out what to do on the Bolivian side. The thing was, we needed our passports stamped, then a photo copy of our stamped passports to get stamped with an original, then take them with car rego copies (which had to be stamped) to another bloke to inspect the car. In all we needed to enter our persons in Bolivia as well as our cars.

Though there is a problem. There are 2 employees doing stamps and passport checks, and 80 of us wanting to get through, as well as the regular 2-4 hundred regular migrants coming through. Crux of the story is as follows; long lines meandering alongside the road waiting to enter a shack, and a Spanish siesta lunch break from 12:00 to 2:00pm which no bride could stop. Jorge Lemberg and navigator thought they could do the sneaky sneaky and climb in through a window in passport shack to jump the queue, no deal! they got caught and sent to the back like naughty primary school kiddies.

I got my passport stamped pre-lunch, however dad was not so lucky. Our instructions were, “one the OWNER of the vehicle has passport stamped you must take rego copies to customs clearance, the OWNER has to have matching names on passport and rego copies.” Herein is where the problem lay, it was 1pm, dad was still an hour from lunch ending and an hour in queue, then to only start in another queue, it was silly hot, and still had 650km’s to do for the day. So I pretended to be MAx and take all papers to customs to get clear our car. And it worked, nothing dodgy was noticed. I hear by declare my self a winner.

Dad got his stamped and we pulled out maybe 5th or 6th car at 2:35pm. Arriving in Santa Crux at about 9:45pm, very early in the pack. We can seriously knock over the miles when you sit down and drive, none of this diddle-dallying hootinanny bizzo. Poor fellas that are still driving in the night, avoiding things such as stray grazing cows and people. I have large bouncing ones so I had no problems overtaking trucks and locals on flat sections when I could see a long way in the distance.

There is a bit of me on the internet in this clip from H&H Rallies : http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8Y5uOUGl8mc

No animal attacks today.

I would tell you about some beautiful local Brazilian girls that came up and wanted pictures of me and the car and them (Secretly hoping it was more of me and they didnt care about the car 😉 hahahhahah!), but I will keep that stories for personal chats!

Thanks guys, chat tomorrow
James