Driving Part 2: Highway

Between the larger cities is mostly highway driving. For the most part this is pretty easy. The majority of the roads we used are new, but I've heard others are pretty bad. We hit a few stretches of what Brazilians call bad and it looks like all the potholes have connected to make a lace pattern that beats your car to smithereens.

They have a different approach to on and off ramps, but it actually works pretty well. Our TomTom is mildly helpful in most areas. They don't seem to have any traffic police on the road, which I suspect is a major cause of their traffic jams. Instead they have lots of speed cameras. The speed limit changes seemingly arbitrarily and often near the traffic cameras. On several occasions we would pass a horse-drawn cart on the shoulder transporting produce or other various products (including but not limited to piles of grass) to market. We also passed the 21st century version of the horse-drawn cart - a two door sedan loaded down with a back seat full of corn going about 30 km/hour.