On the way to Brazil

Unfortunately, we didn't have enough time to make it to Colombia, so we decided to drive back to Montevideo through Brazil. From there, we will ship our Egon back home.

On the way to Brazil, we passed by some beautiful spots in Bolivia. However, we have almost used up our visa here, so we didn't have much time. We made a brief stop in San Jose de Chiquitos, where there is a beautiful church and the village is also nice. Not many tourists find their way here, so we, two foreigners, were quite stared at. We completely forgot what that feels like. The next day at a lookout point, the same thing happened. We were again surrounded by a huge crowd of people admiring our car. We missed that!

Continuing towards Brazil, you come across a thermal river. Yes, an entire river with water that is 35°C warm! It was really crazy. Even though it's winter in Bolivia, it's still 30°C here. We don't want to be here in the summer. Well, at 30°C outside temperature, you don't necessarily need 35°C warm thermal water, but we still enjoyed our beauty day. In the water, there are these doctor fish that nibble off the old skin scales. When you were alone in the water, you had hundreds of them on your body. It took some getting used to, but then it was cool.

A day later, we had the most complicated border crossing of our trip. Before entering Brazil, you have to fill out an online form, which we obviously didn't know because of our good trip preparation. They only told us this at the Brazilian border, and we had already left Bolivia but were not yet in Brazil. Unfortunately, there are no computers in no man's land. So we had to go back to Bolivia. Thankfully, the Bolivian border guards are not so strict with the formalities, so we were able to return to Bolivia without much hassle. After filling out and copying everything, we went back to the Brazilian border. They told us to come back at 19:30. It was 15:00, and the border officially closes at 18:00. This seemed strange to us, but we couldn't ask because Portuguese is quite difficult to understand if you only know Spanish. In addition, we were not keen on spending a night in the Bolivian-Brazilian border area, but driving at night was also not an option. So we found a truck stop in Corumbá and slept among Brazilian truckers. Later at the border, it was still open, and the unexpected scenario happened: the border guard spoke English! We didn't expect that. He then explained to us that they have personnel problems and the border is open 24 hours a day. In 10 minutes, he finished our paperwork. The next day, the adventure in Brazil could begin.