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Last year, during a seven-month period, the author drove nearly 25,000 miles in a 1988 Toyota 4Runner from Connecticut all the way to the southernmost city in the world – Usuhaia, Argentina, passing through some of the world’s most beautiful scenery on some of the world’s worst maintained and most dangerous roads. He ended his twelve country odyssey in Paraguay, where he sold his car and flew home to the USA, forever changed by his life on the road during what was a truly remarkable undertaking. While a full recounting of his journey would require many volumes, the author has agreed to provide us with glimpses and insight into what he experienced. This is the fourth  in a series of five articles. Two months into what was to have been an extended stay volunteering in  a remote part of Brazil’s Espiritu Santo province, the pull of wanderlust came over me once again and I decided to return to the road. For the past month I had lived in a cabin on the plantation of a local coffee farmer I befriended, far outside the rural town of Pancas where I had been going during the day to teach English.

Overlooking Pancas

So it was that with mixed emotions I bade farewell to the farmer and his family, and headed for Brazil’s Cabo Frio peninsula, an area of unbroken beaches and idyllic scenery near Rio di Janeiro. Late in the afternoon of the second day, I arrived in Arrail do Cabo, a town at the tip of the peninsula, where I would [or so I thought] spend a day or two before continuing on.

By the time I had gotten settled, it was nearly sunset. Following the advice of a local I met while searching for a hostel, I drove to a long beach to the northeast which stretched for ten miles along the Atlantic ocean and which was reputed to offer a stunning view of the sunset. Wide and smooth, it presented an all too appealing opportunity for some off-road driving. The sun reflected off the sand, and made it appear far more compact and solid a surface than it actually was. Unfortunately I paid more attention to the colors filling the horizon than the surface under my tires and I drove onto the beach in a triumph of enthusiasm over caution. About one-half of a mile down the beach, I noticed that I was gradually bogging down in the sand. I drove closer to the waterline in order to be on more compact sand, but the further south I went on the beach, the worse the problem became. Small sand dunes disrupted the path along the shore, and at that point I decided to turn around and head back. While turning around I slid down the back edge of a sand dune and watched sand envelope my front tires. I shifted to low gear to gain control of the situation, but I had already lost too much momentum and the sand was so fine that engaging the gears only made matters worse.
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Brazilian Hitchhikers

I was over a mile from the entrance to the beach and a nearby hotel. The slim prospect of  being towed successfully so far across sand made me try repeatedly to free myself by shifting between forward and reverse. While I did not manage to free my car, I did destroy the replacement clutch plate that had been installed several months before in northern Mexico. I was stranded completely. It was now dusk, and I had no choice but to leave the 4Runner and  to jog down the beach for help. My offer of cash did much to get attention, and within a couple minutes of reaching the hotel, I had eight Brazilians eager to help.  Pressed for time, our motley procession headed to my car and began to try and free it. While I steered with the car in neutral, the Brazilians pushed my car out of the rut it was in and onto relatively firm sand near the waterline. My transmission was still useless, but I thought that I could perhaps push-start it and force it into first gear. After a couple of unsuccessful tries, my helpers gave me as hard a push as they could, and I managed to force the car into first gear, where it remained stuck, unable to shift anymore. At least I avoided a tow, and everyone cheered loudly as my car ambled along the beach at five miles an hour in first gear. I dropped off my Brazilian helpers at the hotel and paid them before limping into town and finding a mechanic, who assured me that I would be back on the road in two days. Somewhat relieved, I returned to the hostel where I was staying, and planned out the remainder of the drive through Brazil to the Foz de Iguacu waterfall. As it turns out, finding a replacement clutch plate for my 1988 Toyota 4Runner, a car never sold in Brazil, was exceedingly difficult. Twice the mechanic made the trip into Rio Di Janeiro, and twice he was unable to find a match. Finally he found a clutch plate of approximately the right size and sent it to a machine shop, where it was slightly modified to fit correctly. Throughout this period, I stopped by the mechanic every day, only to be told each time that my car was almost ready and that surely I would have it the next day. On the morning of the ninth day, my car was ready.

After seeing the splendor of Foz de Iguacu and saying goodbye to my new friends who gave me a particularly attractive metal necklace they had made themselves (and which I still wear everyday) as token of their appreciation for the ride, I had a relatively uneventful drive to Buenos Aires across the vast grassland known as the Pampas. Once in Buenos Aires I was reunited with Ben, who had left  Brazil a couple of months earlier but returned to South America for the last leg of my journey.  South of Buenos Aires the driving got considerably more difficult. Large scale flooding had completely submerged parts of the country’s main north-south highway and forced me to take a series of  poorly maintained local routes, which were themselves often flooded with two or three feet of standing water. There were a few close calls where the water was beyond the tops of the wheels and perilously close to the air intake, at which point the engine would have flooded. I resolved to outfit my car with a snorkel for the exhaust and intake prior to another trip.  A little water wasn’t going to stop me at this point, and I continued on to Peninsula Valdez, a remarkable area of wildlife that I had dreamed of visiting ever since seeing it featured in an IMAX movie some years earlier, even though at fifteen years old I could not have fathomed the chain of circumstances that eventually led me there.

Beer truck overturns in Brazil   Flooding on the road through Argentina

The center of the peninsula has one of the largest continental depressions in the world, and is mined for salt by locals. The coastline is rocky and uneven, although it is broken sporadically by beaches. While on a tour of  one of the beaches, we came upon a group of Elephant Seals sleeping and snoring, moving their obese bodies only infrequently. They moved in a comical and awkward fashion – they shifted their weight by contorting their bodies and then hopping forward onto their bellies. This undulating motion, when undertaken with effort, moved them along about as fast as an adult might casually walk.

Despite this, on the advice of tour guides we maintained a safe distance of about fifteen meters from the seals. One seal, a large male with uncommon energy, became agitated and began to hop rapidly toward our group in  one-meter bursts. Rapidly is a very relative term here, but even so, the sight of a three-meter long, one-ton seal headed our way frightened most on the tour group into moving away in a hurry. Ben and I stood our ground as the giant came within four meters, before it seemed content with the results of its display of force and moved back. Coming into close contact with Elephant Seals in their natural habitat along the rocky shores of Valdez was an entirely different experience for me – standing my ground as the aggressive male Elephant Seal bounced over on its stomach to have a closer look was a powerful thrill.
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"Puerto San Julian, a small town in the southernmost part of Argentina situated in a scenic and well-protected bay."

Leaving the natural splendor of Valdez behind, I continued south and saw Patagonia, and saw Patagonia, and saw Patagonia. Patagonia is endless and barren. I drove for hundreds of kilometers and saw only endless plains filled with thick-wooled sheep and marked by decrepit fences. As I drove further south, I finally began to see the end of my long journey ahead of me, and to believe that it could and would be over. Each mile unleashed a flood of memories, as I found myself visualizing the lush jungle landscape of Nicaragua and the chaotic streets of Caracas while I passed the unchanging blur of identical countryside, my mind working to establish meaning and context across the months and miles.  As I drew inexorably closer to the Straits of Magellan and Tierra del Fuego, I came upon Puerto San Julian, a small town in the southernmost part of Argentina situated in a scenic and well-protected bay.

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For this reason both Magellan and Drake wintered here during their circumnavigations of the globe. They took advantage of the location to rest, restock, and also to execute various members of their crews for attempted mutiny. Apparently some did not share Magellan’s and Drake’s enthusiasm for the cold and bleak landscape and the seemingly futile, endless journey south. 

After pausing to look out at the bay and consider what life must have been like for Magellan and his men all those centuries ago, huddled in makeshift shelters wearing rough wool garments and eating coarse food, with no hope of ever returning home alive, I got back in my car and began the final leg of my trip, glad that it was the 21st and not the 16th century, and that I was driving and not sailing.

The articles below are Part I, Part II and Part III of To The End Of The World by Charles Ragsdale:

Part I: Traveling The Americas From Connecticut To Usuhaia
Part II: To The End Of The World Crossing A Closed Border
To The End Of The World - Part 3: Near Disaster in Amazonas 

To contact Charles Click Here
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