I was looking forward to the downhill ride to leave the Andes. Because of strikes by angry miners and students, nobody was allowed to leave the city. I tried my luck though and thanks to a motorised police-escort I made it out alive. But pretty promptly the fun came to an end when the backtire broke for the very first time in the entire trip and with that I also broke another spoke. I didn´t want to take the risk to keep on going downhill on the horrible Bolivian roads with a f*cked up wheel, so I accepted a ride in a truck...
In Bolivia I took advantage of the rediculously low prices to splurge for a very last time. After the royal treatment in the fancy hotel I got onto a couple of the worst buses in the world. One ride was supposed to take 18 hours and ended up being a 30 hour comedy of changing wheels and taking breaks to let the engine and the driver cool down...

I bussed my way to the border between Bolivia and Brazil and planned on riding again from there on. My last bordercrossing seems to be the hardest though! On the Brazilian side they give me a very hard time because I can´t find my ´yellow fever vaccination card´. They tell me to go back into Bolivia to buy the vaccin for 20 US dollars and above all, I´ll have to wait for 10 days before I can get into Brazil.
On one of the following attempts (the next day already) I have more luck. A Brazilian doctor is behind me in line and starts getting really very angry at the official who is giving me a hard time. The nice doctor drives me around time to get the vaccination and all the necessary paperwork for free and he convinces the guy at the border to skip the 10-day incubation period...

Thus I could make my way into the Pantanal. The Pantanal is an unspoiled natural zone the size of France. Here I take a 4-day tour on which we go looking for wildlife. I´ve seen enough cayman and crocodiles for the rest of my life now, but there was also a cool part of piranha-fishing. We went horsebackriding, saw some huge parrots, anteaters, monkeys, plenty of birds and mosquitoes... You name it, we saw it...

After the couple of days out of civilisation I arrived in the pretty big city of Campo Grande. Here I thought I would be ready for a great party. I´ll never forget the party Kurt and I had in the North of Brazil when they won the world cup 5 years ago. Now Brazil beat favorite Argentina in the final for the Copa America, but the party is in nothing comparable with the crazy scenes back then...

From Campo Grande I wanted to take one more bus to Sao Paolo so I could cycle into Rio de Janeiro (my final destination for this amazing adventure) from there. But none of the buscompanies was willing to transport my bicycle, so I ended up taking a bus straight to Rio. That means I was in Rio two days early and with a kind of a sad feeling. I really wanted to arrive ther by bike, eventhough it would only have been the last 400 kms. It also means I don´t make the 10 000 kilometer limit, not the biggest of my concerns, but that would have been nice...
In Rio I try to drown my little dissappointment and in this amazing city that is not too hard at all! Arriving at the hostel I barely had time to take a shower and I was out barhopping already. I met some pretty cool people in the hostel and because I wanted to keep all the touristy stuff for when Christophe was here, I did nothing but barhopping, clubbing and crashing on the most famous beaches in the world...

On Friday I picked up Christophe and the last couple of day we´ve been doing some serious tourism. We went sightseeing in Rio, went to a crazy footballgame between Vasco da Gama (the team Romario plays for) and atletico Minas Gerais. Still that same night we watched the final of womens beachvolleyball for the Panamerican games on Copacabana and had a taste of the uncomparable atmosphere around there.

After even more sightseeing between the two of us, we left Rio. Together with two Italian sisters who were staying in our hostel as well, we headed for the idyllic island Ilha Grande. The weather was not that nice anymore, but the impressive environment and the great atmosphere at the hostel made up for that!

Sadly, the big bicycle-adventure is all over now... I looked forward to this for years and it all past by just like that! It has even been a lot better than I dared dreaming of and I´m sure I´ll have to be very old and senile before I forget about the great stuff I´ve been through!!
Now I´ve still got two more weeks to enjoy Brazil together with my good friend VDB as a more or less normal tourist and after that... back to reality... :-? a kind of scary...