A Final Brazilian Beach Spot at Camacho

As it was late in the day, we didn’t get very far, driving only about half an hour to the nearest available spot. It was supposedly by the beach, but on arrival, we were greeted by a wall of no-parking signs lining a narrow dead end. We relocated to another spot nearby that was nothing special, but it sufficed for the night and allowed us a quiet evening to recharge our social batteries.

We planned to get straight back on the road the following morning, but Lexi had other ideas. She escaped through a window we’d forgotten to shut. I reached out to grab her, but she slipped right through my fingers, darted across a boggy forest, crossed a barbed-wire fence, and vanished. We made several attempts to coax her back, but the ground turned to pure mush as soon as you entered the tree line. It was also a dumping ground for construction waste; after nearly impaling myself on broken floor tiles, getting my feet caked in black swamp goo, and collecting a rather impressive set of mosquito bites, I retreated and admitted defeat.

This delayed our departure significantly, but we eventually got moving and headed towards a beach our friends had recommended as a great surf spot. We were short on time for catching waves, but we could certainly appreciate a proper beach camp, so we went to check it out anyway. We’d originally planned to reach it the day before, until Ruby’s starting troubles interfered.

On top of the starting issue, she’d developed a rather infuriating suspension squeak over the last few weeks. I’d stuck my head underneath in Blumenau and couldn’t spot anything obviously amiss, but then I remembered we’d never regreased the front beam after stripping it down back in Chile. Now, we squeaked loudly over every tiny bump or dip in the road. It was deeply irritating.

As we finally squeaked our way towards the final location for the night, we stopped off for supplies in the nearest town. After sorting out our supermarket run, we pulled into a petrol station about ten minutes from our destination, at which point Ruby promptly refused to start at the pump. The station attendants kindly helped us push her out of the way so I could investigate further.

I gave the cam sensor a hopeful wiggle. Nothing. I inspected both the cam and crank sensors properly and found suspicious corrosion and loose connections on both, so I re-soldered them. It made no difference whatsoever. Then I noticed that with the ignition turned on, the dash light for the immobiliser wasn’t going out. An immobiliser fault is about the worst problem to have because accessing it is a total nightmare; the ECU is buried inside the rear cupboard in the old spare tyre well.

There in the petrol station car park, we unloaded absolutely everything into a massive pile on the tarmac. I pulled the immobiliser out and checked the key sensor connections, which looked a bit naff, so I re-soldered those too (we’d suffered this exact headache once before, way back in Mexico). We tested it again, the ignition light went out, and she finally fired up!

We reloaded all our gear a good hour later, well after the sun had set. Continuing towards the beach in search of the turn-off, it turned out we’d already driven past it. We reached town and checked an alternative spot, which turned out to be an odd dead end on the sand surrounded by a cluster of shacks (definitely no good). We turned around and tried to track down the original road again. This time we found it, but Lee went ahead to inspect it on foot and returned shortly after.

"There’s no way I’m going down there in the dark," he said.

"Sandy?" I asked. He nodded.

That settled it. The last thing we needed was more drama, so we pulled into a large, deserted roadside car park right by the beach. We decided we’d inspect it properly in daylight to see if beach camping was actually an option.

In the morning, we went for a walk down towards the beach access point. Here, a small patch of tarmac leaves the road and ends abruptly at a strip of deep, soft sand, beyond which lies much firmer ground. We reckoned we could make it across the soft patch with enough momentum and get straight onto the firm beach.

It seems camping isn't permitted directly on the beach, but it's tolerated if you're tucked out of sight. Plonking ourselves on the sand in the middle of town didn't fit that brief, so we walked down the coast to see if we could get further away.

It was a long beach and largely driveable, with occasional pockets of soft sand that were easy enough to dodge along existing tyre tracks. The wind was howling, whipping loose sand across the wet surface in a mesmerising pattern that stung our ankles as we walked (and was undoubtedly responsible for the massive sand drift blocking half the main road).

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We reached the end of the beach, but we were still in direct sight of the town. The spot we’d been aiming for lay over a small headland in the next bay, so we walked over to inspect it. It wasn't far (perhaps fifty metres), but it was deep, loose sand with a sharp bend in it. Getting stuck there was highly likely, and there was nobody around to pull us out.

It was a lovely spot, but not worth the gamble for just a single night. We walked back to the van along the narrow track we'd spotted the night before, evaluating the terrain as we went.

"Oh, this bit looks really bad," one of us would say.

"Yeah," the other would agree, "but if you make sure you hit it right here with the front wheel and come up onto the bank here a bit, as long as the back wheel doesn't slide right there, it'll be fine."

The other would nod thoughtfully in agreement before we carried on walking.

As we got closer to the main road, however, we reached sections that made us both shake our heads: sharp bends sloping steeply to the side with deep ruts already carved into the soft ground.

No way.

I'm not sure how our friends made it through in two-wheel drive; either they found a different route, or recent winds had blown a significant amount of sand over the tracks since their visit. We decided to spend one more safe night in our car park, which really wasn't so bad, before pushing further south.

The wisdom of this plan was reinforced later that afternoon while I sat in the van mapping out our remaining visa days. It still amazes me just how vast Brazil is; to leave comfortably without an agonising, last-minute dash to the border, we needed to keep moving.

Sadly, it was time to say goodbye to the coast as we began working our way inland towards Argentina. We decided to head for the town of Orléans that evening to prioritise greasing the front suspension, as it was a decent size and we hoped to find a garage to handle it. It also placed us in a prime position to tackle the coastal mountain climb the following day.