I woke up at 3:30 am and had a shower and felt better – like the fever had broken 👍😉 and my nose had finally stopped running 👍.

After breakfast, I filled in all the required details in the hotel room in order to pick up some Brazilian money from the Western Union which was only two blocks away. We walked to the Western Union and the teller told me that I had to change it to send to Uruguay instead of Brazil as there were no Western Unions in Brazil. That was really confusing and we left because if I change the country to Uruguay, I can’t pick up Brazilian currency – so we walked back to the hotel to check out where the next Western Union was in Brazil and there were very few and none in the direction we were travelling 🤔 but I already had sent myself money that needed picking up in Brazil. We left that issue in the “to deal with later” basket 😂

After we checked out of the hotel, we stopped on our way out of town at a little motorcycle accessory shop to get some more chain lube – mission successful. Then we tried to get a gas cartridge for camping and I tried to find a camping supply store that was in my maps – we ended up on a cobble stone side road up a steep hill and there was no camping store – a guy came up the hill on foot and we tried to tell him what we were looking for and he tried to send us back into town for duty free shopping 😂. We thanked him and continued to ride out of town towards our next stop Santa Maria.

We had 250km to ride and it was a perfectly sunny day, no wind and a bit too warm for my liking – reaching 30 degrees 🥵. It was our first experience riding in Brazil and the roads were in reasonable condition and we rode through mostly farm land. We saw two birds that looked like “road runners” which actually were Red-legged Seriema (Cariama cristata). We also saw two snakes on the road – one of them was very much alive😉 but we did not stop to make a positive identification of the exact type 😉👍

We stopped for petrol in Rosário do Sul and there were – 6 police and military cars and the officers were heavily armed and were surrounding people and searching a car. The locals and petrol station attendants seemed not too worried and went on with their job. We decided not to hang around and continued the second part of our ride to Santa Maria. There were lots of trucks on the road and overtaking was difficult and frustrating on the single lane highway.

We arrived in Santa Maria by 4:00pm and check in was not until 6:00pm. I messaged the hotel and asked if we could check in early by 5:15pm and we went to a shopping mall which had an atm machine and I managed to successfully withdraw a small amount of money so that we had some cash in case we needed to pay toll or possibly for camping. The hotel had replied saying we could check in early and I also had received an earlier message asking whether I want them to remove the sex toys 🤔😂 – we had no idea what type of hotel we had booked and whether the very cheap price was an hourly rate 😂🤔 but it was on booking.com 👍

We drove into the hotel driveway which was a narrow lane much like a fast food drive through lane and we came to a secure entrance where someone talked through an intercom to me which I did not understand – then a hand came out with a phone saying we were in suite 16 and a door opened in front of us. We rode through and saw individual suites with garages – we found our suite and the garage door was open. We parked the bikes and went inside – it was very nice and had a large bed and a hot tub and a couples shower with two shower heads next to each other. On the bed side table was a large choice of condoms and vibrators 😂 and the minibar was filled with alcoholic drinks – so somehow we ended up in a sex hotel with a hot tub 😂👍 we ordered dinner through an app from within the room and when it arrived they had mixed up our order. We were told via WhatsApp to pick up the intercom on the wall and tell reception – that was not easy as nobody there spoke English – we eventually got it sorted and had a nice main course of grilled salmon delivered to our suite only 2 hours after we had ordered 😂😉

We then had a relaxing bubble bath and booked the next few days of accommodation as we wanted to meet Gerry one more time at the Brazilian side of the Iguazu waterfalls. I then worked on the next few blogs.