2 December: what an epic day, we had thought we would do less than 100km to a wild camp and instead ending up slogging all day in the the heat and clocking over 400km. Firstly, the wild camp was a bust as it was super windy and we would have spent the better part of the day being sandblasted, then the roads to the next destination which should have only been 170km away didn’t exist and we ended up trying to figure our way between millions of wind farms on dirt roads that weren’t on the GPS until we got to a tar road. We finally pulled into a small village at 4pm to what we hoped was a “surf camp” and it was rather run down and nobody around so eventually bailed from that (as the sun set) and are camped just outside the village on the beach (getting buffeted by the wind). And there is definitely no surfing anywhere here, unless you kite surf and even then it might be too windy for that.
3 December: Last nights free camp on the beach turned out to be very good and peaceful. Just the gentle hum of the wind turbines when we woke at 2am till almost no wind. We think word got out to the village that some strangers with a wierd car were camped on the beach as many come past this morning to wave and greet. A short ferry ride today (on which there was an American who lives in Brazil so we got to have English conversation) and then a brief hop up the coast to a new campsite. Where the gas strut failed on opening the roof so first order of business was putting one of the “old spare ones” back on so that we don’t get squashed by a collapsing roof when the winds blow.
5 December: Overall, it’s been quite a good stay at Vida Nova with a real sense of community amongst the campers. Even got to enjoy an asado evening and have some conversation via google, our broken Spanguese and the one husband who could speak a bit of English.
6 December: An easy day of driving, with at least half of it on a dual carriage way. We haven’t driven on a two-lane wide road for ages, where we could just flow along at a constant speed without having to slow down/come to a stop for speed bumps. What an absolut pleasure! Campsite is pretty decent too, on a small river- feels like we could be camped on the Vaal. Sadly, haven’t been able to escape the constant strong wind though
7 December: We debated commuting into Fortaleza today or leaving it until tomorrow and ultimately procrastinated that task. Spent the better part of the day trying to book a ferry for the Amazon in a month time, ideally we would have preferred to do it on the spot but have been told that January is peak season and there are limited boats (one every two weeks) that can take Mr Jones. It was a little nerve wracking and difficult as everything has been done via WhatsApp with an unknown agent and he kept sending voice notes which google struggles to translate but in the end, we have succeeded and even managed to make payment despite not having PIX.
8 December: from celebrating success yesterday to feeling depressed today – Mr Jones has had had intermittent knocking sound coming from what sounded like the exhaust and Stuart has not been able to find it. He did find that the air filter housing has broken off its rubber suspension mounts but that is not the cause of this noise so today we stopped at a Bosch garage to see if they could identify the issue and fix the air filter housing. The latter was easily fixed but they say there is an issue with the fuel injector pump. This is the same item that cost a fortune last year and only one year later we have another issue with it and most likely another massive bill coming. We have returned to the river campground outside town to lick our wounds for the weekend and on Monday we will drop Mr Jones off and head for a hostel.
12 December: Total despair and frustration today as we get the final quotation for work on Mr J with them now claiming both the injector pump and injectors need repair so the estimate has almost doubled to USD2,5k! We immediately caught an Uber to the garage and Stuart spent the afternoon attempting to argue via google translate. Ultimately, we are stuck between a rock and a hard place, these repairs require specialists and they have already dismantled the items in order to test and diagnose so even telling them to just put it all back together will incur costs and with no benefit.
13 December: Another stressful day, Stuart was determined to supervise the reassembly as we don’t trust the garage and ended up fighting with them just to get them to refill the coolant system properly (we are very sensitive to this after the same job last year where they did it wrong and Mr J overheated most likely leading to our cracked head gasket then). When everything was finally done, Stuart took it for a test drive and lo and behold the coolant was leaking. By this point it was about to get dark and so we left Mr J at the garage and scrambled for an Uber and hotel room in order to avoid a rush fix and potentially breaking down in the dark as Fortaleza is a seriously scummy town.
14 December: Got Mr J back and he does seem to be running better but we still seem to have the knocking sound (just more subdued) so while the money spent may have avoided a future issue not sure we have resolved of the issue that concerned us originally but we are too exhausted to fight anymore and anyway wouldn’t want these mechanics anywhere near Mr J again. After driving away from the mechanic spent the better part of 5 hours hunting for gas in and around Fortaleza.
16 December 2023: Another day of hunting for gas, this time in the little village of Lagoinha. stopped at a small hardware shop that was an iOverlander saying they did refills of 5kg bottles – clearly via a gravity feed from a large donor bottle. They said they could do it and to come back at 1 so we parked by the beach for 3 hours only to find when we returned that they said our bottle had a faulty valve (it had been working fine to this point so hope they didn’t damage it as the bottle still has 1/2kg in it). Then we had the bright idea that if they were doing gravity feed perhaps Stuart could convince them to fill our ZA bottle with the adapters we have – they were willing to try but didn’t succeed so after another hour we actually hit the road for a 90minute hop up the coast. Ended at a nice campsite on beach, looks like there may be some small waves so just hoping the wind doesn’t blow too much
22 December: It has been a fantastic 6 days at Praia do Baleia, the vibe has been super chilled in the camp, we enjoyed a fantastic asado last night which despite the language barriers was good fun and then today we managed to manually refill our Cadac as cylinder. The gas thing turned out so easy after a fellow camper gifted us a special refill adapter. Stuarts bag of gas adapters come in handy as he had one that could thread onto the Brazilian one and thus connect to our ZA cylinder. Crazy to think that we spent nearly 10 hours looking for a place to swop our specially purchased Brazilian bottle over the last couple of weeks and today within 30minutes we had refilled our Cadac bottle. As thanks we gifted the Brazilian bottle and regulator back to our fellow campers.
23 December: Eish, not a well thought out shopping excursion today! When passing through town on our way to the new campsite, we forgot to stop and buy some charcoal and fresh veg so today we thought we would just walk back, only it turned out to be an 8km round trip – in slip slops and 33DegC heat carrying a 4kg charcoal bag.
24 December: We come to Jijoca do Jericoacoara hoping that as it is more famous from a tourist perspective we may meet some other overlanders for Christmas but the campsite is practically empty. On the plus side it at least has some really big trees, much less wind and is right on a very pretty lagoon.
25 December: We feared it was going to be a really lonely Christmas, especially as lately we have been really missing home but in fact we have had a great day. Started with a little sneaky amethyst necklace present for Tania that Stuart managed to buy from a camper who was selling them, followed by a scrambled egg and bacon breakfast. Then a morning and afternoon of whatapp video calls (from Sydney, Switzerland, Johannesburg, Durban and London). And now we are sitting down for a pork shoulder roast and bottle wine.
27 December: Yesterday and today we got to see the Brazilian equivalent of South Africa 16 Dec mad dash to the coast as the campsite went from practically empty to bursting at the seams, with many arriving late into the night. Going to be an interesting few days considering that there are only 4 bathrooms.
30 December: Considering how busy it is, it has been a quite pleasant few days but we have decided to bounce for New Years Eve and see if we can’t wildcamp on a remote beach.