Argentina to Brazil, Reflections - November 23, 2025

Cayman

I have had a number of email nudges, asking whether I’m still in Brazil and why I haven’t posted an update. I returned about 10 days ago, but my batteries were truly drained, and it has taken me until the last day or so to feel recharged enough to write this.

I’m sure many of you have picked up on the theme of our last two or three South American travels, road trips, in the best sense of the phrase.

To take you back to our road trip origins, I first met Rob in 1969 when we were both at OISE (Ontario Institute for Studies in Education) the then newly-created entity whose initial primary objectives were to conduct and disseminate research in the field of education, and to offer graduate-level education courses and degrees. I was in my second work tenure at the Institute, my previous role had been in the Education Planning unit where I had worked as a Research Assistant on a project to develop a cost-benefit model for building Community Colleges, a new educational policy initiative at that time. My second stint was in a much more mundane role, story for another day, and it was in this period that I met my very good friend and travel companion Robert, who at that time was a Ph.D. student at OISE.

Rob and I spent many long hours planning a trip that became a central focus for us, to drive motorcycles from Toronto to the southern tip of South America. At that time, 1969/70, there were still many ‘war surplus’ stores in the city where military material from WWII and the Korean War as well as military training materials and equipment were still available. In the absence of MEC and the other outdoor and camping equipment stores that we now have, these stores filled a need and for those who wanted to go camping or rough travelling, they were usually the first stop for tents, sleeping bags, rucksacks etc. They also supplied much of the clothing of the hip young, and military jackets were standard kit everywhere from Vietnam War protest marches to Holiday dinners with family.

Black-collared Hawk

And occasionally, there were true finds, such as the original WWII military dispatch riders’ Triumph motorcycles, still packed in oil and grease, in their original crates that we came across in an ad. These were going to get us to Ushuaia. We would unpack and de-grease the motorcycles, assemble them and then with no more ado, we would simply spend 6 or 7 months, possibly years, it didn’t seem to matter, driving on the adventure of a lifetime. It also didn’t seem to matter that neither of us was even slightly mechanically inclined or that neither my basement apartment nor R’s flat were ideal sites to de-grease and assemble a working motorcycle.

And as unrealistic as it was and perhaps because it was so unrealistic, it became very real and very important at the time. While we spent many long evenings planning and consuming quantities of wine, not surprisingly reality always intruded, and the adventure never did happen. While we rarely spoke of it over the passing years, this was the dream that always sat in the back row of every idle discussion, that awareness of unfinished business.

I don’t think either of us mentioned it 2 years ago when I asked Rob if he wanted to join me in driving the Careterra Austral southward through Chile to the end of that highway at Villa O’Higgins, but I’m sure we were both aware of it. It was the first time we had travelled together in 55+ years and I think that we both discovered that we enjoyed it and could make it work.

In keeping with the unacknowledged links to our original plan, last year we planned to drive from the tip of South America to Buenos Aires but because of scheduling conflicts we had to switch the timing of the trip and the logistics of the route became too complicated. We ended up driving from Buenos Aires through Patagonia from the sea to the Andes.

These two adventures met or at least came close to our definition of our classic road trip, a fixed destination and a minimal itinerary between the departure point and the finish. Simply to drive away and take each day as it came. And while we now require a degree of comfort and control of our itinerary that would have been anathema to our younger selves, the important thing was the trip itself. To switch metaphors, the idea of casting off and simply going where the wind took us. And while to an outside pair of eyes we may have seemed to be following a fairly structured routine, we could still hold to the shadow of an idea, wandering at will and meeting each new adventure with eyes seeing a world for the first time.

What were our hopes and plans for this trip?

For me, it was, as it usually is, about the possibility of seeing and photographing wildlife, in this case in Brazil, and most especially, jaguars.

For Rob, who was fired with the idea of Paraguay as a shadow world with a tortuous history filtered through the imaginations of Graham Greene and John Gimlette, his purpose was to find traces of that lost world. A world that included an Australian utpioan experiment in the wilds of Paraguay as described in an earlier post..

The fact that we stitched our goals together with a cord of roads, 5,00km long meant that at times we felt the weariness that comes with a steady diet of 8 or 9 hour days driving over unpaved, back-country roads. Sometimes tiring, but never boring.

The only negative moments of our travels were generated by our guide in Brazil’s Pantanal. He was brash, short-tempered, autocratic and insensitive, quite the worst guide that Rob or I have ever worked with. He was a control and command guy, possibly useful when guiding a group when that task can become more like herding cats but he had no client skills in a one-on-one situation, as ours was. No collaboration or consultation, no discussions between ourselves and the guide about options and choices. Questions were treated as intrusions and were responded to as personal affronts. He was technically competent, knew the animals and birds and thanks to the radios that the guides all use to notify each other of animal activity, we did have some wonderful sightings but his people skills were woefully lacking and that did leave a very bad taste.

That said, I do need to acknowledge that I’m pleased with some remarkable Brazilian photographs and Rob did get to lift a corner of the Paraguayan veil, even if we did not find any of its darker or more mysterious corners.

On balance, a very successful trip and one well worth the annoyance of an unhappy guiding experience.

Next steps?

The key element in the equation is our age and health and how capable we are of continuing along this path. So a pretty significant question, do we have another trip left in us and are there new roads for us to travel?

More to come!