Pura vida...Evita's voyage to the Seven Seas

Once the parts finally arrived here it took the mechanics just a few days to rebuild the engine, and it appeared back at the marina, shiny in a new coat of Volvo green paint with all the expensive stuff (pistons, pumps, bearings etc) hidden away inside. Then the installation, and the nervous moments as 200kg of engine was swung up on board Evita by the boom from a raft in the water beside us. No disasters though, and the engine is now installed, and purrs into action at the turn of a key (maybe I am speaking too soon as we have yet to do a proper trial, but it sounds good anyway). The work was ably done by the mechanic we used at the start of the process, leaving me to rebuild the cockpit, seal up the floor so that we could reverse some of the chaos in which we have been living for the past few weeks.
The wait had been long, and frustrating. In the UK they say patience is a virtue. In Brazil it is a necessity. It has not only been the long wait for the parts; it is virtually every dealing we have with anybody in any official or professional capacity. Doing the paperwork to firstly enter the country, then to extend our stay and then to leave involves traipsing around three different offices each time, spending untold amounts of time sitting in waiting rooms outside empty offices, or sitting in offices, in front of the official who is playing games on their phone while we all wait for the boss to stamp a piece of paper. The temptation to shout at people is always there, but you know it makes no difference. In the end, the person you are dealing with is seldom has the power to make anything happen; there is far more deference to the hierarchy than there are signs of empowerment, and no signs that anybody places value on time, so that your time and theirs are there to be wasted. So a great place for a chilled laid back holiday, but a difficult place to get things done.
To overcome our feelings of impotence while waiting for Volvo to deliver, we sought a sense of purpose in the therapeutic world of shopping. We did wonder at one point whether it was really a good idea to be buying tons of food to load up a boat that might not go anywhere for a while (what if they send the wrong parts/the mechanics failed to order something crucial/the parts never arrive) but we fitted in four trips to the Carrefour megastore down the road (another one for fresh stuff before we leave). As always, some of our staples are hard to find: How will we manage without new supplies of pesto sauce? How to we choose from all these unfamiliar brands of pasta? We have taken on board some Brazilian specialities though - those delicious black beans and a few bags of tapioca. Protein is as usual the most difficult component of the diet to deal with - made all the more complicated by Raul's new found vegetarianism. I hope the fish are obliging on this next passage.
We have now been in Cabedelo for about 2 and a half months, which has given the little sea/river creatures plenty of time to build their homes on our hull. We have a lot of miles to cover, so figured a scrub was in order but after looking into the murk we were very pleased to find that the marina offers a bottom cleaning service. One of the guys spent an hour or so on the end of an air hose under the boat scraping off the barnacles and other little hitch-hikers. Hopefully that should give us an extra half a knot, which of several thousand miles can add up to days.
Since returning from the Amazon we have made one touristy trip, to a place called Inga some 90km inland. There are a number of curious stone carvings in the rocks by a river, and the archaeologists seem entirely unable to reach a consensus on who did them, and when. They have been dated to somewhere between 200 and 6,000 years (I would have thought the amount of weathering would narrow the range considerably, but hey what do I know?), and have been attributed to the Mayans, the Phoenicians, local indigenous people and of course aliens from outer space. The penultimate group, with an age of 200 years, seems to be winning but I guess a bit of speculation draws in the tourists (it worked for us!).