Serra do Rio do Rastro
As the cats hadn’t managed to escape us that morning, we set off at a reasonable time and arrived with enough of the afternoon left to try and find a garage. We tried about five different places, none of which could help us. Then we gave up for the day and headed off to find a spot for the night. We ended up on a fairly quiet disused side street, where we left the car and headed into town to visit the brewery. There were so many breweries in Brazil… and so little time!
We had a couple of pints and a few snacks to share. We were enjoying being able to go out and eat again. Chile and Argentina are a bit expensive for doing stuff like this, so it was great to be able to go out and eat again for an affordable price. It was even nicer not having to do the washing up in the van.
Afterwards, we headed back to Ruby and had a pretty quiet night. In the morning, the search for a beam greaser continued. I debated whether to order the relevant tool online and do it myself, but it was quite expensive and then I’d have yet another enormous tool to cart around.
This time we tried some new places. At the first one, the mechanic looked utterly confused. I showed him a translation of what I wanted, and he shook his head. Then I pointed to where, on the floor next to us, he had the tool to do just that. His eyes lit up in understanding — yes, he could do it! He told us that we had to book an appointment in the office, however, so we went inside to do that. Behind the desk sat three women. I told them what we wanted. They shook their heads in unison and told us they didn’t do that. I typed into Google that I had just spoken to the mechanic and that they *could* do it. "No," they told me, "we can’t do it." Lee told me we should leave it because they obviously couldn’t do it. At this point, I was getting pretty pissed off because it seemed like no one was listening to me, and I could literally see the tool sitting on the workshop floor. Apparently, that wasn’t important, though. So we moved on to another garage recommended by them.
The next garage also couldn’t do it; he didn’t have the machine, he told me. He pointed us to another garage just up the road and told us they would do it. This is always the way in South America, an endless list of bouncing between bad suggestions. I would say we have about a 20% success rate based on other people's recommendations. Still, we didn’t have much choice, the majority of business are not on Google, so we went to ask them. Much to our delight, they could do it! And it would cost us about £5. Excellent. We pulled up over the pit, and the guy got his hose out and enthusiastically greased all five points in a matter of minutes.
The problem came with the payment: he only took cash, and we didn’t have any. We tried to use PayPal to transfer to his local account, but that didn’t work. So we told him we’d go to a cash point and come back. He didn’t seem bothered about us both driving off as we headed back into town. We headed for the Bradesco bank marked on Google, as this is the only free ATM in Brazil. To my surprise, it existed, it was open, and it had a cash machine (never believe Google until you see it yourself). Lee loitered around the corner while I grabbed some cash, and then we headed back to the man and paid. He ran inside to grab our change and returned with a handful of small branded bags and a small poster calendar. It seemed he was so happy we’d come back to pay that he wanted to give us a present, even though all he had was a few random bags. Still, we accepted his slightly odd gift with gratitude before we turned and headed for the hills.
On the menu this afternoon was quite an exciting road.
The southern coast here is dramatic. You only have to head inland around 60 km before you hit a mountain range. These foothills rise abruptly from the lowland coastal shores to around 1,000 metres. It’s not incredibly high, but it’s a short, sharp climb. We had already experienced this once back in Morretes, and now we were about to do it again. This time, we were about to climb the Serra do Rio do Rastro — a steep, sharp, zigzagging road that covers the majority of this altitude gain in only 10 km. The views looked stunning, and hopefully the weather was a little cooler now than the last time we’d tried this so it'd be easier on the engine.
We headed inland, climbing a little as we approached the mountain. Then the real climb started. The road narrowed as it cut upwards into the cliff face. There were few cars, and it wasn’t so steep that we had to drop into first gear — so far, so good. As we continued upwards, we saw we were approaching the clouds. They clung to the top of the mountains, and before long, we disappeared into them. This happened just as the road got interesting.
We had seen several signs at the bottom declaring it unsuitable for large trucks, which wasn’t really a surprise. The road features 284 bends and at times a gradient of 11.5%. This is particularly relevant in the last three kilometres, as the bends here get sharper and steeper as the zig zag agressively up the final and steepest kilometres. Not only that, but on this particular day, we were now in the clouds. Visibility was incredibly poor. This makes driving a little more stressful in Ruby, as you can’t see what's coming, so you don’t know if you’ll be able to pull over and stop if the engine overheats — something we have to consider on long, steep hill climbs. According to Google, there was a traffic jam ahead.
So far we hadn't met many cars, but that changed in an instant when we rounded a bend and were met with a line of stopped cars, hazard lights flashing halfway up the hill. This wasn’t ideal, as it was a fairly steep section. I could see no more than about two cars in front in the thick fog, so I had no idea what was causing it. As per usual, we had no handbrake, and our main brakes were also a bit worn out. In order to keep us still, I sat with my foot hard on the pedal. In a matter of minutes, other cars had pulled up behind me, so a good hill start without rolling back became a priority. We sat for a few minutes, waiting. The brakes creaked ominously, so I doubled the pressure on the pedal. Then the cause appeared: a giant lorry creeping down towards us out of the mist. Great.
The line of traffic started moving, and I had to perform the unpleasant trick of a steep hill start in Ruby. The clutch is not strong enough to hold the van on its biting point on a steep hill. As there’s no handbrake, when you want to pull away, you have to hold the clutch on the biting point with your left foot. Then, keeping your right foot hard on the brake, you wiggle it to the right a bit so your heel can keep the brake applied while your toes press on the accelerator. Then, with perfect timing, you must release the clutch, rev the engine, and lift off the brake. If you don’t have enough revs, she’ll just stall, but the amount of revs needed depends on the gradient of the hill. If you rev it really hard, you’ll fry the clutch. If you stall, the brakes are nearly impossible to hold onto without the servo assist from the engine, so you’ll definitely slide back a way before you stop — bad news with another car parked close to the bumper. I braced myself for the moment, set the RPM needle to 3,000, and launched us forward. It wasn’t pretty, but the engine bucked and kept going. I kept as far back as possible in first gear to try and limit how many times we’d need to do that. It is stressful, to say the least.
Soon enough, we stopped again. Luckily, this time it was on a slightly flatter section and therefore not nearly as difficult to pull away from. Now that I wasn't concentrating intently on not sliding down the road, I could see the cause of the problem: large articulated lorries were trying to come down the road while a steady stream of traffic simultaneously wanted to go up. As the lorries needed the entire road to get around the hairpin bends, they got stuck waiting if cars were already there. As you can imagine, throwing a couple of lorries and a few dozen cars into the mix — all in impenetrable fog — was a recipe for disaster. It was stupid enough for them to come down when they had full visibility, but in the fog, it was even worse. It took some time before we managed to clear the last two kilometres of gridlocked hairpins and reach the top.
After all this drama, the view was entirely obscured. It was so hard to see that I ended up pulling into a lay-by instead of the road turn-off I wanted. Driving a few metres further, I found the correct entrance and pulled into the car park. This is a viewpoint with a café and restaurant. It’s supposed to do epic coffee, so we decided to stop and get a snack and a drink. This had to be the most decadent coffee ever — they really did not hold back on the chocolate.
An hour later, the fog remained a grey drizzle of horridness. It was a shame, as the views here are supposed to be spectacular. We debated whether to camp and see if the next day was better, but it was still early, and apparently the weather slightly inland was far better. We decided it wasn’t worth sitting in a car park in the rain for a day, so we headed away from the edge of the mountain range in search of sun. I'll include someone else's photos here, so you can see the view that we should have enjoyed and what we drove up.
When we were at the VW campout, someone had advised us that there was a nice road to take from Bom Jardim da Serra. We had originally planned to drive on the surfaced road to São Joaquim, but we thought we’d much rather take some nice country back roads than visit another town. As we neared the small village where we would turn off, just a short way inland and the fog was mostly gone, and it was sunny. We could still see the thick banks of clouds clinging to the edges of the mountains, but we were now clear of them.
The road was slow going — a rough track. We ambled along in the sunshine, with plenty of hours left in the day and views all around. We decided we’d stop for the night by a waterfall on the side of the road. We drove over a small wooden bridge and pulled off to the side, where we had a small, flat, grassy area to park on. On our right, the stream rushed under the bridge we had just crossed until it leapt over the rocky edge in front of us and fell into a large pool below. Even though we were only a few metres from the road, there were barely any cars passing by. It was a lovely spot.
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