September 30, 2010
Rio Grande: In which I find an ATM which gives me cash and buy a map..
Mon 27th Sep.
I've been out to dinner in a cheap cafeteria. The food was nothing special and the weird thing was they closed at eight. Every eating place I passed on the way back to the hotel had the shutters down and the city streets looked more like the early hours of the morning instead of 8.30 in the evening. Though it being a Monday evening it's perhaps not a surprise.
I did try a bank ATM on the way but got a message on the scream, This machine doesn't except cirrus. The machines here use the card slot where the magnetic stripe goes in a groove and the card remains visible, but unlike such machines that I've encountered in Argentina and Chile, while the card is in the groove a lock activates and you most decipher Portuguese in order to release your card. My heart was suddenly in my mouth with anxiety when I couldn't pull my card out because of the lock but however I worked out that the word _Dim_ on the scream most mean finish so I pressed it and felt relief when the lock clicked open. So I'll wait till bank hours when I can get assistants before trying again.
Tue 28th Sep.
You cannot find much falt with a hotel costing the equivalent of 10 Euro which is clean and tidy. However, when I opened the door this morning out to the open courtyard a smell like that of raw sewage hung in the air. I'm not sure whether it was the hotel sewage system or just a general smell that hung in the damp grey morning coming in from the port, the hotel being located only a block from the quayside. It was probably the later as I walked along the old cobbled street by the quay with old warehouses on one side and rusty hulks in the water on the other.
I walked towards the centre of town looking for a cafe with wifi. I walked through the normal pedestrian shopping street round the main plaza along a business thoroughfare not one cafe bar did I encountered. Most savvy looking people I asked didn't or at lease it seemed they didn't know what wifi was or perhaps they use a different term here. Though the letter W is little used in Latin languages and I'm not always sure is it pronounced like a V or what, so the most plausable reason is I's misunderstood.
I eventually walked into a nice looking cafe better than any of the others I'd seen motivated by seeing an espresso machine behind the counter through the window, at lease I'd have a good coffee if nothing else. But better still there was wifi. This was a good place, the coffee excellent, food fine and the staff cool. Different from the places I've been with wifi where they don't like you sitting three hours with one coffee where often the waiter comes over and asks you to order something else in order to cover wifi usage. Here nobody bothered me and were actually quite nice to me as I spent three hours up-dating my journal. I order lunch of a sandwich a second espresso and a chocolate cake when I'd finished before returning to the hotel in the now drizzling rain.
On the way I tried the HBSC bank because its an international bank so the likelihood of there being bilingual staff is greater. Initially the machine didn't pay-out cash when I tried but availing of a member of staff a lady who said she only spoke a very little Spanish, so much for thinking this bank above all others would've bilingual staff. It didn't pay-out for her either until the third try. The card most be put in the groove a second time after the amount and all has been pressed in. I'm still not a hundred per cent sure how it works. On the way from the bank to the hotel the drizzle changed to a heavy down pour with water flowing from the street into the storm drains. It seems a luck coincidence me reaching here when I did and having a couple of days off, the bike remaining dry in the hotel room. I can put up with getting wet myself. I can easily dry myself off. The thing I hate most about rain apart from not being able to stop for a pick-nick lunch having instead to huddle in a bus shelter is when the bike is wet covered in gritty crap picked up from the road and everything feels spongy and in effective. It's often the case that wet weather lasts many days and you're stuck with a bike which feels horrible to ride until the fine weather comes and you dry clean and oil the chain.
When the rain eased off I still had to find a bookshop to buy a map preferable of the region and not the whole of Brazil. I asked the very approachable and friendly caretaker at the hotel who gave me instruction and even walked along with me part of the way as he was finish work for the day. He talked away to me in Portuguese about from what I understood the language in the South is very different than in San Paulo and different still from Bahia. It's all different to me as when he left me some of the words I needed to ask for a map of the region are very different to their Spanish equivalent. I'd a shop assistant wanting to sell me a wall-chart map of the world. 'No no only Rio Grande do Sul' I tryed trying to say it as cleanly as I could manage. Eventually the shop assistant produce a nice laminated map of Rio Grande and neighbouring state Santa Catalina. So I payed and left happy to at last be able to plan a route ahead.
Today's ride: 85 km (53 miles)
Total: 2,957 km (1,836 miles)
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