We sold our motorhome, bought BMW GS, and went on the journey in Latin America on the motorcycle - from Buenos Aires to Texas. Our first stops are Uruguay and Brazil.
Motevideo, Uruguay
January, 2018
They say that the people of Uruguay are nice, but you don’t really see it because they only speak Spanish and those who speak English (very few) are meant to take care of tourists so it doesn’t count. When do you see the true nature of the people? – during a crisis. So here is a story that, although it is a private case, I think it shows something. We arrived at the parking lot on Saturday to pick up the motorcycle and discovered that it was closed until Monday. There is no phone number or sign on the door. While we are standing there looking lost, a man, who spoke fast Spanish, came up to us and tried to explain something. When he saw that we didn’t understand a word, he took us by the hand two blocks away to a warehouse that was open on Saturday, they didn’t speak English in the warehouse but they told us to wait, after a few minutes the owner of the warehouse arrived who speaks English. He doesn’t know the owner of the parking lot, but he went with me to the parking lot (two streets) to check that there was no number there. Then he got an idea that one of his customers knew the owner of the parking lot, called him, he didn’t know the owner either but gave the name of someone else who might know… same result… and so it went on until we felt uncomfortable and gave up. About ten people participated in the event, none of them knew us, just good people. The motorcycle remained locked up until Monday.
It turned out though that right next to the hotel there are rehearsals for the carnival that will start in a few days – hundreds of people, dozens of drums, and everyone is dancing – a great atmosphere. If this is what the rehearsals look like, I wonder what the actual celebrations will look like. We’ll wait and see.
Chuy, Uruguay-Brazil
January, 2018
We are on our motorcycle. The motorcycle is big (in every possible sense) and we get used to it, to the wind blowing, to the experience of being part of the landscape (and not outside of it), to the effect of the weather on us, to the fact that there is almost no room (even though we have 3 large boxes, a huge bag, and a small bag). The weather here is fickle, even though it’s summer now. Although we haven’t ridden in a flood yet, we came very close, we’ll have to get used to that too.
The city of Chuy is a remote city in the middle of nowhere that wasn’t worth wasting a line on until now, but it is special in that the border between Brazil and Uruguay passes right through it, so in the middle of the main street, on one side they speak Spanish on the other side Portuguese, on one side they pay in Pesos, on the other side in Reals and the most interesting thing is – when on one side it’s eight o’clock on the other side it’s seven. Of course there is no fence or wall that separates the two countries, just a street in the middle of nowhere.
Pelotas, Brazil
February, 2018
We arrived at the small hotel in the remote town in the south of Brazil. The receptionist, a smiling older girl, greeted us, as she realized that our language was not Portuguese, not only did her smile disappear, but also she couldn’t understand the little Spanish we spoke. After several unsuccessful attempts, she opened Google Translate and wrote what she wanted to say and let the computer speak for her. Indeed, the sentences were translated beautifully and an intimate and unmediated communication was created between us. Overjoyed, the girl burst into dances along the hotel’s corridors while telling everyone “I speak English!” From that moment on, every time we passed through the reception, key sentences in English greeted us with a smile from ear to ear – she defeated the limitation!
Florianopolis, Brazil
February, 2018
The Carnival – we traveled 2000 km off the beaten track to take part in the carnival in Brazil. Although we were not in the “respected” places like Rio or Sao Paulo, according to a Brazilian ranking, Florianopolis was in the top five. I can only say that the carnival is definitely an event for tourists (that is, for taking good pictures). This is mainly about a party that lasts three days (actually nights), crowds in the streets (so crowded that you can’t walk) but the main thing is to go from place to place and drink. Some of the people are dressed up (many men dress up as women), there are entertainment stages that are basically trucks with speakers the size of a truck that make your ears hurt within a radius of hundreds meters around. Despite the amount of alcohol, we didn’t encounter any violence or blatant drunkenness, most people are happy and there is dancing here and there.
The event of the samba schools is a procession inside a stadium, of fancy costumes that lasts for hours and hours and is quite boring after half an hour but… it photographs well. We, on the other hand, really liked groups that walk down the street with drums and the crowd follows them and dances with them.
On a side note – so far we have met almost no tourists on the trip and no Israelis at all. At the carnival event the stand where we sat had at least 50 Hebrew-speaking parties.
Dois Vizinhos, Brazil
February, 2018
We book hotels through booking.com, usually the night before. This time we found a motel with a good score and excellent reviews. We arrived at the hotel – and it is surrounded by high walls. When you arrive the gate opens, and when you pass, the gate closes, but there is another gate in front of you, so you are locked in the room with the vehicle. The registration is done over the intercom (they don’t understand a word in English or Spanish). The gate opens, you enter the yard where there are entrances to the parking lots, closed by gates. The gate to our room rises and closes behind us. From the parking lot there is a staircase that leads directly to the room. As soon as we entered we realized that we were in a love hotel (usually rented by the hour). Overall the room is really great, everything is clean and polished, modern and new. But there are mirrors on all the walls and ceiling, sex accessories for sale and only sex channels on TV. When we ordered food, it arrived through a hidden opening without human contact, and you don’t meet a person when you leave either, doors open, doors close, intercom and you’re out.
Overall it was a great hotel except for the fact that you feel like you did something wrong. Now that we are aware of this, it turns out that in every city there is such a hotel called a motel. We probably won’t go back to that.
By the way, by chance we were there on Valentine’s Day.
Uruguay, Brazil - Summary
February, 2018
Che Guevara rode a motorcycle from Buenos Aires to Venezuela, in the process he wrote a diary and became a communist. The problem is that the motorcycle broke down quite early on in the journey and he hitchhiked most of the way. For this reason we decided not to follow him and traveled from Buenos Aires to Brazil… also the carnival is coming and if we are around then we must not miss it. We took a ferry from Buenos Aires to Uruguay and went up the coast. Through Montevideo you will come to Brazil. Nothing special except for the fact that we were stuck for a weekend in the city since the parking lot where we parked was closed until Monday, but our loss paid off because we came across rehearsals for the carnival in Montevideo, which were really great (in retrospect rehearsals are better than the real thing).
We started driving along the coast, on the map it looks promising, a stretch of coast surrounded by water on both sides with sleepy towns and promising beaches… in reality, quite shabby, the beaches are rugged and not beautiful and the towns are casual and unattractive to stay. So after a few days we decided to go into the mountains and it’s amazing how 50 km can change the view – the road parallel to the coastal road runs a winding route through well-kept towns with weather reminiscent of the Alps in the summer, as if we were in another country.
We met the carnival in Florianópolis, a city across a pastoral island with towns and beaches as we had dreamed. But the carnival itself was quite disappointing. In general it is a party in the street that lasts for three days, where mostly people drink, despite the amount of drinking we didn’t come across really drunk people but mostly happy people (reminds me a bit of Independence Day in Rabin Square). The procession itself, the costumes and the amount of people are impressive and it seems as if they were intended for tourists even though there were almost no tourists there. From Florianópolis we went towards Argentina (about 1500 km) and the Iguazu Falls.
After almost a month in Brazil (the south of the country) this is what we learned:
We hardly encountered any English or Spanish speaking Brazilians. They are usually startled when they hear English and start speaking Portuguese even faster than usual. Along the way we did not encounter any tourists (except in Florianópolis – mainly tourists from Argentina, one Japanese who photographed the carnival with three cameras simultaneously, and many Israelis after the army).
The Brazilians are nice people with patience, very interested in us even though the amount of words we have in common is less than a handful (in Spanish).
With respect to the food there are two options – a free buffet with unlimited industrial food, at noon these places are bursting with diners, or pizza (as if the Portuguese did not originally occupy the place but Italians), a huge selection of pastries and cakes that look good but taste like English cakes.
The roads are mostly of good quality, the driving of the Brazilians is reasonable, with a scary amount of bumpers that you are not always aware of in advance (several times we found ourselves almost flying in the air). The view is green hills that inspire calmness and you can drive in them for hours.
HE 
