Firstly I most confess that I lied yesterday. There will again be no photos today. Todays reason/excuse is that it’s almost midnight and we have been driving for just under 14 hours of some grueling, physically exhausting roads. Actually, I did say “doubly good on the photo front” yesterday, and technically, double zero photos still equals zero photos. phew, got out of that one!

Santa Cruz (Bolivias biggest city) to Sucre (Bolivia’s capital city) today an an easy 490k’s. The problems lay within the details. After yesterdays border crossing hootinanny conundrum and late night arrival, the organisation decided to push timing from 7am to 9:30 this morning to allow more sleep ins (lie ins for the brits). There was 180k’s of dirt road that the Clerk of the Course stated “this road is a car killer, please take your time, this road is beyond anything you have ever seen and it goes for 170k’s.” Well, not as bad as what we have seen in Africa. But it took a serious amount of time to do it, we were the 5th car in to the hotel and we monstered along, as well as help Dan and Rabia change a tire on their Merc the instant they thought it was good t overtake me. No one overtakes me! 😛 I have never been so dusty before in my life! I have dust in every conceivable crack and hole in my entire body. My hair has turned form mildy dirty to a tropical beach.

The snakes and Ladders bit does make sense, sooner or later.

There was a bit of tarmac this morning which was good fun, our first taste of climbing hills in Bolivia and weaving our way through a river valley with roads either side. Very nice indeed. Not sure how I did on times yet overall but I know I placed 1st in class as the Bentley left 4 minutes before us and we met them at the checkered flag 83k’s down the road.

A few people then stopped for lunch at local establishments because it was only 11 o’clock and we have 240k’s to go. Beuaty! No Problems, only need to average 85kph to not be lost in the dark.

In our 170 k’s of gruelling dirt, unformed roads we climbed 7 mountain ranges. Up, down….. along the valley floor…. up, down…… rinse and repeat. going from 5 thousand feet up to 8 thousand feet. Then once it got dark it seemed like all the trucks came out to play. The worst bit was the dust, in the nighttime. I’m not sure how to truly describe how hard the drive was. You cannot grasp the difficulty unless experiencing it.

Tomorrow we race our way (bitumen all the way thank god) to the salt flats at Uyuni.

Catchya then!
James

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

MEDIC!! We need a medic over here!

Today I got maliciously attacked by a wild Brazilian animal. This wild animal came right up out of no where and attacked me, in doing so killing itself.

I got stung by a bee in the palm of my hand! 🙁 It is a mighty inconvenience for a short while.

On to something less dramatic, today was full of interesting stories. Starting off with Penny Vs Stanley, James Vs Scott, Vauxhall Vs Buick, Australians Vs British, 1923 vs 1937, 4cylinders vs 8 cyclinders. To explain more thoroughly: We pulled out the hotel at the same time as Scott and Paddy in Stanely the buick and came to the first set of red lights on a long empty stretch of road. What else was there to do other than drag race? It would have been remiss of us both to NOT drag race even. Both of us smoking up the rear’s as we slammed through and into second gear, third gear, then blasting past the next intersection at quarter mile in under 10 seconds. lol just kidding, no burnouts. Vauxhall Vs Buick was fairly evenly matched until the speed limit of 80 where we backed off. Nothing outrageous to report, just some good ol’ fashion skylarking.

Timed section number 1. was amazing. 60 odd k’s on smooth, wet, hard packed clay gravel roads, with 2 inches of mud on top. The difference between the level of traction the front wheels had compared to the back wheels was staggering. Not a single car overtook us in the 34 minutes it took, as we were going like stink! It was the best day’s driving thus far! I live for those kind of roads. Still first in class and pending results tonight, probably tied equal first overall based on points.

WE SAW A TOUCAN. A wild one! I thought that was pretty cool. Animal count is now at:

-3 toucans, a boat load of caiman (crocs), a few capybara http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capybara, Lizards (one alive, one squashed). And a bee (first alive, then dead)

We drove out of the rural farming area of Brazil and entered an area called the Pantanal (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pantanal) which is the worlds largest tropical wetland. Pretty cool, check out wiki. Very very thick vegetation and pretty flat, but the tree’s and shrubberies etc are not very tall, just thick and low.

We even had enough spare time on our way to the hotel Stanley and Penny went on a bit of a date and deviated into the Pantanal for about 35k’s of dirt to see some more awesome animals and wetlands. Totally worth it.

In trusty goPro fashion, battery ran out half way through second timed section. Classic goPro’s….

Edit: I forgot the crux of todays adventure! Most days, the good sirs of Chris Evans and Mark Seymour get blasted by our exhaust note as we hurtle past their Model A at a swift rate of knots. This is always good banter topics ad spurs some great Aus v Brits humor. This quickly escalades to name calling and cursing, then goes straight to uproarious laughter and me saying “TALLY HO PIP PIP GOV’NA” and They will reply, “C YA LATER MAYYYYTTTEE. DINGO STOLE ME BABEHH.” anyywaaayyy, the story must go on. We pulled over for some lunch or an oil change or something because we had a heap of time. Fast forward down the road and these blokes are on the side of the road all hot and sweaty in a spot of bother. Swearing and saying stuff in their British tongue which makes no sense. We catch a few words of ‘hole in radiator’ and end up helping them push some plastic metal around the crack and give them some water to re-fill. Now they are forever in a debt to a Vauxhall driver. At dinner we swapped crude remarks about each others cricket teams and the world is back to normal =D

James

Yesterday was our first rest day. It was an AWESOME rest day. I got to sleep in a bit, have a lazy slow breakfast. We all then piled onto a coach mid-morning and did our tour of the Iguacu Falls. After a short tour guide information speech we had a short walk through the tropical forests and queued up like an exemplary British man for our town to get on a RIB boat for a boat trip under the falls. I don’t really know how to describe it other than the pictures I took. We actually drove underneath the falls and even the people that spent 8 Reals (4dollars) on a glad-wrap poncho got more wet than if they fell into a pool. The interesting part was on the way back to the mooring from the falls, one of the engines on the twin 250 honda boat had some horrible clunks and then died….. with no desire to work again. So we plodded back, like a broken down vintage rally car…. awwwwkkwwwaaarrddd.

What else can you do at Iguacu Falls which is worth it you ask? Well, you can do the helicopter fly over it! Why yes thankyou, I think I will!
WORTH EVERY CENT. Even though it was 10 dollars a minute and the flight lasted 12 minutes. It was so cool, you seriously got some perspective of the amount of water flowing over it, and the river system that feeds it.

Unfortunately I don’t have any interesting stories from todays drive that could even begin to match the Cow Incident of the other day. It was just a transit day. For some reason the road we were driving on was scheduled to close at 9:30am and that was 300k’s into

our route so we turned Penny’s heart on and drove out at 4:50 this morning to avoid a huge detour. A policeman stopped us just at sunrise on the road and started saying something in Portuguese, we said something like “me no hablo Portuguese” or something butchered from a Spanish/Portuguese mix, but all was well and he merely waved us on. I didn’t think he saw me undertake a truck a few kilometers back on a hard shoulder 🙂

More large scale farming through rural Brazil today. LArge scale as llaaaarrrgggeeee scale, huge acreage for sugar cane, and this other plant thing dad called cassava? A primary source of making ethanol in the 90’s? I don’t know…. Every now and then you would see a huge processing factory or drying sheds for all the crops, or even a meat works for the cattle. If you are lucky the giant doors would be open and you would snap a peak at hundreds of cow hides hanging up on hooks like clothes on a line. Ready to be made into shoes, or bags, or something cool like a wallet. 😛

Until tomorrow

James

P.S. Still placing first in class and three way tied for first overall! Huzzah!!! =D