Happy Birthday to me

Feliz Cumpleanos para mi

Happy Birthday dear Shane

Feliz Cumpleanos para mi

It should be in Portuguese not Spanish since I’m in Brazil but hey. Who will know? Actually, the girl in reception picked up it was my birthday when I checked in and there was a nice card and a little bag of hotelmade cookies on my bed when I made it up there. And I just felt like cookies and scoffed them all. Nice.

I had booked into the Ibis Styles Belem do Para which must also be known as the Hotel Soft Inn Belem Batista Campos (according to Google Maps) and not to be confused with the Ibis Styles Hotel Belem Batista Campos which is just around the corner and where I tried to check into when I first arrived. My life isn’t always easy.

Anyway, I wanted to stay somewhere nice and it was just okay.  Not like any of the other Ibis’s I’d stayed in before. Although it probably was 20 years ago when it was built. $72 a night plus an extra $8 a night to park the bike in the underground parking. I think the bike was happy as it was just outside the elevator. In the disabled parking. Not sure if I was put there because of my age. Mmmm. There was also a little laundry thing across from where you check in so people arriving were able to watch me folding my socks and jocks. And an inspiring riverboat pic on the lift.

Belem (which basically means Bethlehem) is the end of the road as you go up the Brazilian coast. To continue further north you get an overnight ferry which takes you north west about 400 kilometres to Macapa. That 400kms in the middle is the Amazon Delta, a series of islands and floodplains caused by rivers coming out of the Amazon basin into The Atlantic Ocean. The Amazon river itself comes out at Macapa. Belem in the Bay of Marajo on the Para River which is part of the greater Amazon system. From Macapa you get back on the highway again and it’s another 580kms up to Oiapoque, which is the border town to leave Brazil and go into French Guiana.

Belem has about 1.3 million people and 2.5 million in the metro area which makes it Brazil’s 12^th largest city. It was started in the early 1600’s and made a city in 1665. The main reason the Portuguese wanted a city here was to stop the French, Dutch, and English from colonising what they considered their land. It has the European feeling about it and still has a lot of old buildings.

Unlike some of the other old cities that I have passed through. Belem has taken advantage of some of the old riverside areas and made them quite trendy. Not a lot. But some. Many of the cities still use their river frontage as working wharves and therefore there is no access and it looks ugly.

I walked a lot of kilometres and lazed around on my bed for a few days which I think I needed to do. And found some interesting little paces to eat. I found this long skinny waterfront bar that you almost needed a beer to have for the walk in and walk out. Through the door in the first picture, Down the corridor, and through a couple of different bar areas until it opened up near the water and then down another level to where I enjoyed my sunset drink.

Also this great little locals lunch spot that had really fresh food. Quick in and quick out. $4.50AUD for a nice lunch and a coke. Serve yourself the beans rice and pasta and then they give you the meat and salad portion. Everyone shares tables. I ate there twice.

I also found a couple of places that did meat skewers and draft beer. In South America they call draft beer Chopp. So one night I had a chopp and sausage for dinner. I did have Gnocchi at a nice Italian restaurant around the corner but I think I like the other places more.

I needed to get a big service done and fortunately there was a Honda place 10 minutes walk away, so I went there on the afternoon that I arrived and made an appointment for Monday morning. I think making the appointment/paperwork, and sorting out what needed to be done took longer than the actual work. No one spoke English. I needed all the bearings checked and greased. A new chain and front and back sprockets, new filters and an oil change, a new sparkplug, a general check of everything else and a new rear tyre. I had really got my money’s worth out of the Pirelli tyre I bought 21,000kms ago in Paraguay. I replaced it with a bit chunkier Metzeler tyre, which the bike originally came with. I got 16,000kms out of the first one and so this new one should see out the rest of the trip. All up I spent just over $500AUD. Happy Birthday Motorbike.

I also did some more research on the next leg of my trip. The other side of South America is done by thousands of motorbikes and overlanders every year but this is the forgotten side. Probably because it harder. Only a handful of people do the circumnavigation like I am doing so its hard to find information. Especially current information. I read about one woman who caught a ferry from Manaus, deep in the Amazon, all the way to Macapa. She stopped half way to change ferries at Santarem. You can drive from Belem to Manaus but you need to head south a lot and it 3600kms. But I could see there was a road to Sanatrem where the lady changed ferries. It was only 1200kms from Belem.

So I hatched a plan to drive to Santarem and then catch a ferry to Macapa from there. That way I get to ride through 1200kms of the Amazon and the bike and I spend a couple of days on a ferry boat sailing down the Amazon River. And I wouldn’t need to catch the boring main Belem-Macapa overnight ferry. The problem with my plan was that I couldn’t find out anything about the road conditions or if a ferry still existed that went from Santarem to Macapa. Or how often it goes.

You can see the Amazon Basin in the map below and the delta section between Belem and Macapa where the Amazon River comes out is in the red circle. The basin is huge. The blue line is where I want to ride. The red one is where I hope there is a ferry of some sort. And the yellow line is the normal Belem to Macapa overnight ferry.

It all became very frustrating and so I thought, this is an adventure and I can always turn back if I have to. And I can always ride back if there’s no ferry. Or I heard that there was a ferry from Santarem to Belem. I could always take that and come back here and then take the overnight boat. Then I read that Santarem was a small Brazilian city on the Amazon River with 330,000 people.

Okay. I leave for Santarem tomorrow. Wish me luck.