The treacherous road, Br-163

By the time most of you read this we will be traveling on a bus along the famed Br-163, the mostly unpaved highway which starts south from Santarém, through the Amazon rainforest, and ends at the agricultural mecca of Cuiabá. The road is notorious for not being much of a road at all: potholes, mudslicks, quicksand, and felled trees make for awful slow-going for most traffic. The road is almost completely impassable from February through June, during the wettest months in western Pará state.

We'll be heading south to Castelo de Sonhos, a very small gold-mining settlement that was founded along the Br-163 shortly after the army built it in the mid-1970s. Hopefully our bus won't suffer a fate similar to this car, which lost both of its passenger-side tires to a deep pothole 15 km south of Santarém. The irate driver was quick to point out the irony of the locale where he had been stranded (after all, he only had one spare, and had to wait for a tire service to come to his aid). The dangerous potholes are located within a kilometer of the ranch of the most powerful federal politician in the area, and only a handful of kilometers from the barracks of the army division whose sole job it is to care for the road. The kicker is that this fella's car was not the only one that had dropped two shoes on the same pothole (we spotted two other cars on the same day!), but his was the only one that rolled to a stop without any cover from the tropical sun.

We'll post some of the highlights from our trip south along the Br-163 when we get to Castelo de Sonhos. For now, we've got to run around Santarém and get things together for the trip. You know, emergency supplies and tire jacks, that sorta thing.