Day 210, (continued). There were hundreds of people lining the bridge pushing carts and carrying bags fully laden with goods, a really weird sight. At the Brazilian border the queue was immense and to make it worse there was a massive group of children who had just got off a coach. This all took a while to the great annoyance of my taxi driver. I eventually managed to fill in the entrance visa card as shown by an example taped to a window, I had to follow the example as the card itself was only written in Portuguese. The example text was clearly filled in using English so I did the same. Sadly, Mr Border man with his big shiny gun sticking out of his trousers in a Starsky and Hutch kind of way and dressed undercover, took offence at my card and shouted at me for filling it in with English. I pointed out to him that the example on the window was in English to which he asked me why I couldn’t speak Portuguese. I could think of so many answers to this but thought better of it mainly because of the gun tucked into his belt. I was hoping it would accidentally go off and shoot him in his ‘man bits’ but luckily before I could say anything he decided to let me pass saying, next time make sure it’s in Portuguese. Yeah, as if I’m ever going to come this way again, I like wasting four hours of my life stuck in no man’s land! I suppose to be fair to him, this border must be a very stressful place to work and I’m pretty convinced the two guys with drugs loaded in their rucksacks would have come this way a couple of days ago making it quite a dangerous border crossing. Still, in the seventeen countries I’ve visited I’ve come into contact with at least twenty eight languages so did he expect me to learn them all? I’ve learnt how to point in all of them though!
After over four hours for what was a measly mile journey I was at the bus station in Foz do Iguaçu in Brazil. I accidentally tried to fiddle the taxi driver out of cash but we sorted it out in the end, I’d done him out of one dollar which he seemed to take offence at. Surprisingly the youth hostel bloke was still in his office at the bus station, all the guidebooks said that he should have buggered off by now. I booked a place in the hostel closest to the Foz do Iguaçu waterfall and got a taxi here. I’m amazed how much cleaner and developed Brazil looks, I still find it amazing how within a relatively short distance of a border things change so dramatically. It’s while in the taxi that I discovered a bizarre Brazilian ‘fact’ but I’m not sure that this is true. I was told by the driver that currently they don’t have traffic police in Brazil which basically means that although there are speed limits, no one is here to enforce them. I discovered this while my driver did about 200km/h in a dodgy old fiat. I also discovered the way in which the police deal with the problem, they put speed bumps on major roads so my driver was doing 200km/h one minute and then 50km/h the next and then going back up again, a bit like horizontal Bungy jumping. All motorists here also seem to think that they were racing drivers a fact not helped by the use of race track type starting lights at traffic junctions. The hostel is nice and it’s good to relax here in what is the last country of my long journey.