Nightmare road through the jungle

A small silver commemorative coin reminds Brazilians of a great vision their leaders had more than 35 years ago: building the 8,000-km Transamazonica highway. However, while the coin is still much-valued by collectors, the road - which today is nothing more than a run-down stretch through green wilderness - is not.

The Transamazonica, or the Trans-Amazonian Highway BR 230 as it is officially marked on maps, was at the time the biggest road project ever undertaken. It was launched in 1972 to serve as a lifeline through one of the world's most hostile terrains, the Amazon jungle. The road was inaugurated as "the last wonder of the world in the 20th century", at anticipated costs of some $8 billion (Dh29.36 billion).

The time envisaged for construction of the road was three years. At the beginning, the workers used bulldozers, army equipment and fire clearing techniques to cut a ten-metre-wide swath through the jungle. But, the jungle grew back faster than the work went ahead.

"What remained of the Transamazonica vision is a sole picture of misery", says Herbert Douteil, a Christian missionary of German origin who lives in Cruzeiro do Sul, a small town at the headwaters of the Amazon River in Brazil's westernmost province of Acre. The road, which was meant to be paved all along, is today not more than a cart track in most sections, if at all.

Dirt track

Frequent rainfall inundates the track and leaves it soggy. "After the rains, the road is poorly patched with a mixture of sand and mud," says Douteil. "How the road will look like after the next spell of rain is not too hard to imagine."

Initially, the road was designed as a two-lane highway to allow heavy trucks to deliver cargo over thousands of kilometres to remote jungle villages as well as buses to connect the outposts. In its present condition, not even a well-equipped four-wheeler would manage to get through the nightmare road's worst sections.

"We definitely do not recommend driving down along the Transamazonica," says Adrielle Santos-Peuckert, a Latin America travel expert in Schwangau, Germany, who runs an agency offering trips to the region's lesser known destinations. "It's mainly uncharted territory, the road condition is very bad, and there will be no help out there whatsoever in case of an accident."

Many mistakes have been made during construction and maintenance, says Douteil. "Where it is paved, the tarmac layer is only five centimetres thick. One doesn't need to be an engineer to imagine what happens when five-axled heavy-duty trucks drive on that surface".

However, for many the Transamazonica remains a myth. A myth of conquering an impregnable jungle, of establishing a connection between the relatively wealthy east coast of Brazil and the underdeveloped centre of Amazonia, inhabited mainly by tribal people, pistoleros, and woodcutters.

It was a vision that drove Brazil's leaders since the times of military rule in the 1970s; the persistence of the junta to obtain access to the country's resource-rich heartland and to farmland that could be cleared for cultivation of tropical fruits and timber.

Besides that, the rulers were looking for places other than the densely populated areas on the coast to launch urbanisation projects. In the 1960's, this idea was implemented with the foundation of Brazil's then new capital Brasilia, an artificial town in the middle of nowhere, about a thousand kilometres northwest of Rio de Janeiro and Sao Paulo.

Construction of the Transamazonica began in 1973. The engineers' layout revealed a consistent road connection across the South American continent and the jungle. The road starts in Joao Pessoa in the east of Brazil. From there, it leads to Juazeiro do Norte, and, across the federal states of Maranhao and Para, to Altamira. Behind this little jungle settlement, the BR230 dips into the Amazonas plains. In Altamira, a monument reminds of the launch of the ambitious project.

Tribal regions

As the road continues, it passes by a turn-off to the bustling river town of Santarem and runs in an endless straight line besides the river Tapajos through tribal regions to Humaita, a regional capital deep in the Amazon jungle some 5,000 kilometres from the starting point of the road.

From there on, conditions really turn bad. From Humaita, a road leads north to Manaus, a route that "is too bad even for the devil", as the locals are given to say. The Brazilian road authority admits this part of the road is "absolutely not motorable". Currently, it is overgrown by jungle plants, bridges are in a state of disrepair, and there are rumours that indigenous people "tell" strangers in no uncertain terms that they would be better off avoiding their territory.

The Transamazonica leads from Humaita westward to Porto Velho, a legendary town of gold diggers, where pistoleros stroll around with guns on their waistbands just like in the old days.

Driving further, after a couple of hundred kilometres through the green hell of the jungle, the Bolivian border town of Rio Branco appears, one of the most remote settlements within the Amazon region and the hometown of legendary caoutchouc workers' leader Chico Mendes.

In Rio Branco, the Transamazonica comes to its inglorious end. The original plans were to connect this lawless part of Brazil with the town of Leticia in Colombia, from where it is easy to reach the trade town of Iquitos in Peru.

But, a few kilometres behind Humaita, the Transamazonica suddenly comes to a dead end in the small indigenous town of Labrea, further travel made impossible by the imposing jungle.

Cost overruns mean the Transamazonica has eaten more than $18 billion up to now but that's significant for those who are still keeping track - 1,200km of the road were never built.