Driving in Brazil

So we reserved a little economy car in Fortaleza and resolved to drive back-and-forth to Natal. How bad could it be? 

Well, our first experiences with driving were as passengers in Rio. It was not too bad.  On arrival we were picked up at the airport and delivered to our hotel. We took the freeway (three lanes) to the surface streets (crowded).  No incidents, nothing unusual.  We could've been in California. Over the next few days we took a bunch of taxis around town. Again no big deal.  Just big-city traffic. Maybe there was nothing to worry about.

On our last day in Rio we had an early (9 AM) departure for our flight to Fortaleza and not knowing how long it would take to hail a cab and get to the airport, we set out at 6:15 AM. As it turned out cabs are plentiful at that hour and so at 6:20 we were in a cab on our way to the Airport. At 6 in the morning the streets were empty and so the cabbie could go as fast as he wanted to.  And he wanted to go fast. we screamed around corners, blasted through signals that seemed kind of red and at one point played chicken with a police officer who was directing traffic at a construction site. It seems like our driver thought if you just barreled forward straight at the cop, the cop would have to waive him through. So that's what he did. The cop thought differently.  He kept blowing his whistle and indicating we should stop. Neither was conceding. Eventually, the cop won. We slammed on our brakes and slid to stop inches from the cop’s leg. He gave us a look: are you crazy? Our driver said something - I’m guessing it was an apology - and all was good. We got the go ahead and begin careening towards the airport once again. It was an adventure.  There may have been some truth to the warnings.

The adventure with the cabbie did not end when we arrived at the airport, however. Now we had to deal with him trying to scam us. Scam us a second time, I mean. I let the first scam go. The first scam was a modest one. Rio’s cabs have two rates, a day rate and the night rate. The night rate is about 15% higher and runs from 9 PM to 6 AM. The meter indicates either rate 1 (day) rate 2 (night). We got in the cab at 6:20. It should have been rate 1 but it was already running on rate 2. Not speaking Portuguese I had no idea how to protest. I decided to let it go. When we got to the airport, the meter said R$50. ($23 US)  Less than I expected. His little scam was not a big deal, but that was just scam one.  He asked for R$80 - R$80? Why R$80?  He took out his card. 

We had encountered the card before.  In Rio, the city sets taxi fare rates and adjust the meter accordingly. The rates change January 1, but there are thousands of cabs and it takes time to bring them all in to adjust the meters.  So between January 1 and their turn to have their meter adjusted, cabbies are allowed to add a surcharge to the metered fare. The amount is on a laminated card which cabbie shows you when you arrive at your destination. How someone who does not speak Portuguese would know if this particular meter had been reset or not, I do not know. It’s possible that every time we were shown the card we were being scammed, but how would we know? We just paid.  And I would have paid the airport cabby too. It was just 7% more, no big deal. Except he showed me the card and there was no correspondence between his number (80) and the meter’s number (50).  He just wanted 80.

Because I had to ask him to use the meter in the first place and because he used the wrong rate when he did turn on the meter, I’d had enough. He kept pointing to the card saying 80. I kept pointing to the meter and saying 50. I gave him 50 and said Bom Dia. I won. We survived our first driving adventure. It would not be our last.

Actually, driving in Brazil was not the worst I have experienced, but it is not like driving on Sunday in downtown Danville either. We did not pick up the rental until the last day of our stay Fortaleza. By that time we had been there five days and had had plenty of time to get to know the city a bit. We rode the bus from the airport to the hotel and then back across town to the stadium for the game. We had taken a hike downtown. We had seen how the traffic flowed and what the major arteries were like. So when we went back to the airport to get the car it was no big deal. I got this.

Our car was a small four-cylinder manual transmission Brazilian Chevy. We hopped in and headed south towards Natal. The airport being on the southside of the city we were out of town before you knew it. The first few miles were piece of cake. Four lane divided Hiway.  Easy-going.  At the outskirts of Fortaleza we lost a lane and for the next 300 miles it was a two lane road. The road is in good condition, straight and flat and for the most part everyone was going about 100 km an hour.  The trick was when he came up on one of the trucks with whom  we naturally shared the road. Time to pass.

Different people have different tolerance for risk and different speeds at which they like to drive. The truck doing 95 km/h might be something I could live with for a few miles. Brazilians, not so much it seems. People would come up behind you and avail themselves of gaps that seemed too small to pass in my eyes. Now they were passing me and the truck.  If it turned out it was too small a gap, they were just squeezing between me and the truck. It was a little unnerving when the bus did this, but after a while I got used to it and would slow down and create a space for them, just in case - since they were coming in anyway, space or not.

Along the way...

I got a little more aggressive as the day wore on, especially if we were headed downhill. Uphill? No chance.  Those hamsters under the hood were spinning as fast as they could. By the end of the day, I was in a groove. There's only one moment when I had my doubts. In retrospect it’s kind of, whatever...  There was a big transport truck that must’ve been sitting behind an agricultural vehicle for quite a while through one of stretches that was a little bit windy. As soon as the road is straight, he just went. No gap. He just went. I’m sure he knew that we would see him and get out-of-the-way, and that is exactly what happened. We all hit the brakes and slid over into the shoulder and when he’d passed we’re back on our way. No harm, no foul. Probably not legal. Not how we do things at home.  But I learned an important lesson. The traffic laws are mostly just suggestions.

That was especially true for city driving in Natal. Turn indicators? Who needs them? Lane striping?  Just general guidelines.  Red lights? It's okay if it's about to turn green. Once you get comfortable with that you just go with the flow. ‘All in One Rhythm’ applies to driving as much as soccer. At the end of the trip, I was completely comfortable driving in Brazil. Next time I just need a car with a bigger engine. And better shock absorbers.   One of the interesting things about driving in the small towns was the prodigious use of speed bumps to get you down to a speed that gives pedestrians a chance.

In the stretches between towns, drive is fast as you want. When you get to town you find the world's biggest speed bumps. For us, a small car with four passengers and luggage, we needed to come to nearly a complete stop to get over them without scraping. Most of them were well marked. Most of them. After a while it became Christopher's job to call them out. Even so we hit a few surprises. I was happy that when they inspected the car at our return they did not look underneath.

Speaking of inspections. Another thing we experienced almost nightly on our drive home from downtown Natal to the secluded beach village where we stayed was the sobriety checkpoint set up in front of the police station that we had to pass. Not sure what the legal limit was in Brazil, I decided to stop drinking while I had the keys. I still don't know what it is, but the police did seem disappointed when I blew a 0.00. The second night he did not even ask me to blow. Our host at the Pousada, Noelle, says he was disappointed.  She's convinced the point of the checkpoint is to generate a little pocket money. R$50 can make a lot of problems go away it seems. I am glad I never found out for sure. Maybe we were just lucky, but at the end of the day we drove as much as we wanted, and lived to tell the story.