Lagoa Santa: "You have reached your destination" ("turn around as soon as possible")

After one night in a hotel with the strangest people (probably coming from a dungeon party, right in the middle of the night, as I did,  together with all sorts of pilots and air stewardesses) I had thought that leaving Belo Horizonte would be hassle-free and straightforward. The hotel was chosen especially for that: out of town and near the highway. And yet, in a place where there were just two highway directions possible, I took the wrong direction. Twice :( The main reason being that the GPS application that I had downloaded turned out to be shitty. It would consider just one itinerary and go berserk every time I ran astray. It would not adapt the itinerary and try and put me back on the right track. The result was, I was half the times stuck in a place I knew was not the right one, with the GPS adding to my frustration by telling me what I already knew: that it was not in the right place.
Secondly, trying to play it clever I had downloaded the free version, ignoring that the free version was mute. Which means that even when I was on the right track I had to concentrate even more on the small (for a GPS) screen of an iPhone and in the end of the day look like a  zombie, with my eyes red and watery.
I know this all sounds a bit beyond the point, but the truth is, you need to know where you are heading in Brazil. In other words, you do NOT want to take the wrong exit off a Brazilian highway because, depending on how lucky you are that particular day, this may be the last time you take a highway exit, especially if this is the exit to a favela (shanty town) and you have an iPhone as GPS stuck behind your screen (mine did not last long, unfortunately…).

Anyhow, after riding  for the first time of my life on a highway that ended in a dead end (the one starting -and ending- at the Belo Horizonte airport, in 2013 at least), and turning around for at least an hour and a half, I finally managed to get northbound, towards Diamantina (pronounced: "Diamantchina"). Soon all was OK. The GPS was happy, the car less noisy than at its last days, and the highway not extremely packed. I soon realized that lorries, no matter how huge they are, behave like cars in Brazil. This of course does not apply in case of a frontal collision, when things suddenly get dramatically less democratic. I soon decided to always give way to angry drivers.

The road was long, and another small downside was, the car had no cd player. Considering that I had burnt quite a few cds to keep me awake and that the site (autoeurope.be) had a bloody Chevy (a big Chevrolet) as a picture for my rental car, this was turning into a practical joke. As I realized later, it had no heating either! Autoeurope managed to rent to me a Fiat Vivace (the Brazilian equivalent of Fiat Uno) without heating or cd player in the place of a huge Chevy. I guess they don't have pictures of Fiats in their archive. And that was not all: the exhaust pipe was hanging from a thread. It made a horrible noise when the car was on anything else but a completely flat road. I soon had a name for my car: La Casserole.
La Casserole became with time even more noisy. Roads in the historical towns of Belo Horizonte are without exception paved with stones, or should I say rocks,  that you can hardly walk on (I am not exaggerating). Driving  around in sleepy villages with my Casserole made me very embarrassed because of my noise pollution, to the point of almost bringing the car to the garage, but then I thought, this is not my bloody business. I preferred to think that at a certain moment the exhaust would just fall off and leave me in peace. It did not.

Highlights of the place: Getting there safely, sleeping well, having a nice breakfast. The plane did not crush etc.

Downsides: Missing my Tom Tom

Next: Diamonds are forever