Cycle News is a weekly magazine that covers all aspects of motorcycling including Supercross, Motocross and MotoGP as well as new motorcycles
Issue link: https://magazine.cyclenews.com/i/127749
ADVENTURE Enduro Internacional da Independencia By Chris Jonnilm Photos by Patricia de Moraes Manata (Right) "Pardon me, have you seen any motorcycles go by here?": In the Enduro Internaclonal da Indapendancia, you take the help where you can find it. (Below) At the beginning 01 Day One, the entire contingent 01 riders makes its way out 01 Rio de Janeiro. Four days 01 adventure lay ahead. "1 don't think this is the right trail." We were still only midway through Day One, and it wasn'{ the first time this unsettling thought had occurred to me - nor would it be the last. Over the course of the four-day competition, the sensation would in fact become all too familiar. Looking back on it now, however, I can say with some surety that the realization in this particular case was the most sobering~ Moments earlier, I had taken a right turn off a dirt road, onto a downhill trail that "more or less" matched the kilometer reading in the road book. Just as the hill's pitch steepened to the point where turning around - or even gracefully stopping, for that matter - became an impossibility, a lightbulb clicked on and the aforementioned sentence crept into my mind. The give-away that something was amiss? My trail led straight to a 20foot cutout cliff in the hillside, below which sat a common farmhouse. Though I was a bit too preoccupied to double-check the roadbook at the time, I didn't recall an instruction to the effect of, "71.8 km - Jump off cliff onto roof of house." I laid the KTM 250 on its side, dragged it around and tried in vain to ride back up the hill, while an irate and overweight farm lady (presumably an inhabitant of the house below, which I was now showering in a hail of rocks and dirt) screamed Portugese obscenities in my ear. Feeling about as popular as ewt Gingrich at a PBS board meeting (and about as virtuous), I mumbled my apologies and pursued a different plan of attack - begging. A poor sap on a' WR200 had followed me down the hill ("That'll learn 'im to mooch off my stellar roadbook-reading skills!"), and we coaxed a group of locals into helping us slide our bikes down the bank into the house's backyard. from there I rode down the front steps onto the dirt road below, which I followed back up to the correct route - and straight into a checkpoint. While shaking the sand out of my gloves and reinstalling my fogged goggles at the check - an easily makable check at which I was nonetheless over 10 minutes late - another soon-to-be-farniliar thought occurred to me: ''I'm not very good at this." f you'd told me just a week earlier that I'd be lost on a motorcycle in Brazil, I'd have rated your reasoning powers right up there with those of Forrest Gump. After alJ, I no longer work for Cycle News, having switched to sister publication Personal Watercraft Illustrated more than half a year ago. And not entirely by coincidence, my last stint on a motorcycle had occurred at more or less that same point in time. I had just started part-time graduate school, and missing a week of classes wasn't exactly the best way to kick things off. But it's hard to tum down an all-expenses-paid voyage to the largest country in South America, and when alJ of the CN guys turned out to be otherwise disposed during the week in question, that's exactly what I got. After a last-minute trip to the Brazilian consulate to arrange a visa, and another last-minute trip to the laundromat to clean my petrified riding gear, I found myself on an airplane bound for Belo HOl;j.zante - the nation's third-largest city and a hub of the cotton-raising region. I learned these particulars on the plane, perusing the information that CN Marketing Manager Mark Thome had printed out from his computer's CD-ROM and handed to me as I sprinted out the of6ce door. Tums out Brazil occupies .nearly one half of the continent - or 3,286,470 square miles - and is bordered by Venezuela, Guyana, Suriname, French Guiana, Uruguay, Argentina, Paraguay, Bolivia, Peru, Colombia and the Atlantic Ocean. Their seasons are the opposite of ours, and they boast some 6000 miles of scenic coastline. Not being a java head, I didn't particularly care that Brazil is the world leader. in coffee production; on the other hand, the mental image of veg- I