Upon leaving Dona Romana and her home of cataclysmic faith in central Tocantins, the final push to Brazil’s northernmost parts entered a most precarious phase.

There was only one road north now, the infamously decrepit and dangerous Belém-Brasília, “about which the Quatro Rodas listing for Paraiso de Tocantins warns ‘avoid the highway at night, when it is customary for assaults to occur.’” [To Belém & Back, p.99]

The problems were the road’s remoteness, and quantity of elephant-length potholes which impeded any kind of escape during armed assaults. The annually updated Quatro Rodas (“Four Wheels”) map indicated the northernmost stretch to be in “precarious” condition.  We had already traversed such a section near the highway’s start in Brasília, where we “averaged only thirty-five kilometers per hour…. It didn’t take a calculator to figure out that if this pace kept up along the vast stretches of Red Rage Road at the other, Amazonian, end of the Belém-Brasília, it could take twelve hours of daylight to go only four hundred kilometers – and we still wouldn’t reach the next town.” [p.34]

The Belém-Brasília wasn’t meant to be this way.  “Constructed in the 1970’s by the military governments at the time, it was part of a master plan, called the Program of National Integration, to populate the stubbornly wild Amazon region by resettling half a million families from the poor, drought-stricken Northeast and, as a bonus, keep all foreigners at bay.” [p.121]  [hover over images for captions]

After a flat tire that, kindly, occurred in Imperatriz (“Empress”), the largest city on our route, all that remained was the longest and most remote segment prior to reaching Belém. “While still dark out that morning, I wrote in my journal: ‘If I drive well today, I should be fine.  If I don’t, I’ll be toast.” [p.129]

Amazingly, while the stretch through western Maranhão was as awful as a highway patrolman, who had lethargically been looking for a bribe, warned, soon after the Pará state line the decrepit highway had recently received a resurfacing – allowing us to reach Belém safely that late afternoon.