Driving in Rio de Janeiro, circa 1980s
I lived in Rio state from 1982 to 1984 when I worked for a large American corporation as a physician assistant, taking care of their employees and their families for basic primary care and coordinating specialist consults. One of my responsibilities was accompanying patients to medical appointments in the city to provide oversight and interpret in Portuguese. Rio was a 200-kilometer drive from the location of our compound on the coast near Angra dos Reis. For these official trips we had motoristas who drove us in one of the company cars. The motoristas taught me a lot about official traffic regulations and gave me many tips about the cultural “rules of the road.”
For personal trips on my days off, I was on my own. I would spend the weekends in the city or head up to visit friends in Nova Friburgo, in the mountains northeast of Rio proper. Driving was an adventure every time I got in the car. People drive on the right like the US, so at least I didn’t have to make that transition. But most roads were two lane and there were a lot of trucks because that is the main method of transporting goods.
Within Rio itself, roads curve around the morros, those big black humps that are iconic representatives of the city. And because of these unusual geologic formations there are many tunnels. You are required to turn on your lights when entering a tunnel. Leaving a tunnel the first few times I was puzzled by people sticking their hands out of their car windows and making a gesture of opening and closing their fingers. I quickly learned this was a message telling me I had left my lights on.
I also discovered I had to drive much more aggressively than I did in the states. I had several scary moments on multi-lane highways that narrowed at a tunnel entrance, with buses on both sides of my little Volkswagen cutting me off in between them. I had no choice but to accelerate like crazy and get out of their way.
Stopping at red lights could be risky, because of the very real risk of assault. The unwritten rule was to keep moving unless there was cross traffic, regardless of whether the light was green. Early one Sunday morning I picked up an American friend at the airport and was zipping along Copacabana’s beachfront road, running every red light in sequence. She kept slamming on the brakes though she was in the passenger seat! I explained to her that if I stopped at a red light, we would very likely be rear-ended, and the driver responsible would be spitting mad, asking why the hell I had stopped.
One afternoon in Rio a huge rainstorm blew up out of nowhere and because the roadside drainage system was overwhelmed, I got stuck in water nearly up to the bottom of the doors. To make matters worse, I was in a very bad area of town. Panic began to set in when a bus passed me, and I pulled into its wake and made my way out of the low-lying water by ferociously tailgating. Once on dry asphalt I passed the bus, and a bunch of guys leaned out the windows, hooting and applauding.
Applause was not the norm, however. Machismo was alive and well on the highways, and many times guys who were perfectly happy poking along became enraged at being passed by a blonde and sped up to pass. Another way of expressing displeasure was for the man in question to lean out the window as he passed me, screaming ”Motorista de fogão!” which loosely translates as: you should be driving a stove.
On the open road trucks often traveled together because of the risk of hijacking, and these slow-moving convoys could be difficult to pass in mountainous areas. Truck drivers had a messaging system where they turned on their right turn signal to indicate it’s not safe to pass, and then the left blinker when the coast was clear. Since it’s nearly impossible to see around these huge semis, this was very helpful.
I lived to tell the tales and realized if I could drive in Rio I could drive in most cities. And driving made it possible to explore so many gorgeous places I would have missed otherwise.
Photo by Mauro Lima on Unsplash