The Amapa jungle

After completing the 1000km of jungle South of Amazon we said to ourselves “How easy. That was it?”. But here, in Brazilian State of Amapa, we found the real problems: from Macapa there are ~500km until the border with France, out of which only 300 are paved. Immediately after entering the unpaved road, a rain began that made riding even more difficult.

At some point the road was blocked because two trucks were caught in mud and other trucks were trying to help. After one hour of efforts some drivers gave up and began cooking the lunch (where we were invited to join). After another hour one truck was back on road but two more vehicles were in trouble: a car and a bus. The fun may have continued for many hours, but we left the scene and we arrived at the Oiapoque river after two days.

For reference, I have included two pictures from 20 years ago (the last ones) made by our friend Eladio. As you can see, not much has changed since then!

1149 jungle1150 jungle1151 jungle1152 jungle1153 jungle1154 jungle1155 jungle1156 jungle1157 jungle1158 jungle

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The third accident

This one happened not even 15 minutes after being almost squashed and I was still reflecting about life and death… Suddenly, a cat decided to cross the street right in front of us. Her action lead to bad endings for everybody:

– Palomina’s front suspension suffered unnecessary shocks
– I lost my thought
– Laura bursted into tears
– the cat died

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The second accident (near miss)

You know what’s the good thing about people who use to run traffic lights? They do have the habit of observing the incoming traffic even when they have a green light, so it’s likely they will be able to avoid a collision with some other driver running a red light when they don’t 🙂 Same with me… I always follow very close to the vehicle ahead of me so I always expect to be followed and I keep checking the mirrors. And that’s what saved our lives yesterday!

We were riding North on Ruta 3 close to Buenos Aires. That day we did some 950km (the average being around 500). Even though it was night and fog, we had to reach La Plata on that day, as we had to be at the Romanian consulate in Buenos Aires (50km away) in the morning to get some papers.

At some point, the two lane road was on top of an embankment and the verge was narrow. That’s were I found a column of vehicles stopped ahead of us. I began slowing down with the intention to stop on the narrow verge (I generally stop between lanes in order to spare myself of injury in case someone can’t break on time). Before stopping I checked the mirrors and I found that the vehicle behind me still had a very high speed, much higher than it was supposed to be.

I decided to continue on the embankment (the gradient was not that high, but still the condition of the surface was unknown). The car I mentioned hit very hard the car ahead of me (which was now immediately to our left) which in turn began rolling inexplicably to it’s right (towards us).

As the second vehicle got closer than 0.5m from us, I continued to descent on the slope while at the same time increasing the speed in order to avoid a collision. The ending was happy for us, as I managed to keep the motorcycle under control on the uneven surface covered with grass, climb back and return to asphalt!

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The first crash

Finally, it happened! It was night, and a road work area came after a very fast section. I reduced the speed but not enough. We had around 75km/h when the rear wheel lost grip. A high-side crash followed, more spectacular than painful. With the help of a tie down we managed to put everything back and continue. Some repairs are needed. Damage report: one turn signal, one mirror, a fog lifht, a cracked/bented rear rack, a cracked pannier and some contusions on both of us. The other drivers were very helpful.CrashCrash

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