On the last day of our trip we got a quick breakfast and left the town of Passo Fundo to head to the airport in Porto Alegre. This was about a four hour drive through a rolling area of small farms and forests. We saw a bit more corn and pasture land on this trip than on our previous ventures. We noticed some roadside vendors selling beef hides and also a large yard of what looked like Eucalyptus logs. Eucalyptus is used for a number of things that include burning to dry grain. Most of the trip was on a two lane winding road and many of the grain trucks from the Passo Fundo area must need to make the same 180 mile trip to the export terminals at Porto Alegre. Porto Alegre is a city of about 1.4 million located at the junction of five rivers and is also a large port city where soybeans are also exported.
Early in the afternoon, we caught our flight from Porto Alegre to Rio De Janiero and said goodbye to our guide Marcelo Arruda and thanked him and Explorations by Thor for a wonderful experience .
In Rio we had a six hour layover and then an overnight 8 hour flight to Miami. After a short layover in Miami, we boarded a plane to Baltimore and our group said goodbye to each other there after about 33 hours of traveling. It was a great trip and we all learned alot about Brazilian soybean production and culture along the way. Each of us brought back some tidbits that will be useful in our work with soybeans in the future and we all plan to share our experiences with others.
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