Tuesday, March 11, 2008

BR-364 The real `Road of Death`

After visiting Iguasu Falls from the Brasilian side, we went and toured the Itaupu Dam. I´ll let you all google it to get the details, but this thing is BIG.

We headed north towards Dourados and Rhondonopolis through more soybean country. The soil here is really red, kinda like Mars.

The rains west of Rhondonopolis had slowed the soy harvest, but not the truck traffic on the BR-364. In a short stretch from Rhondonopolis to Cuiaba we must have passed 80 trucks in an hour. Throw in a drizzling rain and the trucks swerving to dodge 3 foot wide potholes on a two lane road, and you have an adrenaline filled day, or two.

The two lane BR-364 doesn´t do alot of meandering, it´s either uphill or downhill. The trucks might slow to 40 kph at the top of the hill, but they make up time by getting up to 140 kph on the way down the other side. Makes me wish I´d taken more physics classes, all this velocity and mass and oncoming traffic stuff.

2 comments:

Other Brother Daryl said...

Junior Samples asks:

Does BR-364 inersect with BR-459?

{yuk yuk}

Anonymous said...

I see you made it out the other end! hurrah!