Interoceanic highway (Peru, Bolivia, Brazil)

[Stephane Dumas]

I spotted these videos about the Interoceanic highway, an highway linking the Pacific coast in Peru crossing thru Bolivia, Amazon rainforest and Brazil to the Atlantic coast http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interoceanic_Highway

[Grzrd]

This is how to celebrate the opening of a major new highway in style: (1) don't wait for the offical ribbon-cutting, (2) don't even wait for the road to be completed, and (3) have a race to see who can be the first to "clinch" the new road :

http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/1f007d22-4e5c-11e0-98eb-00144feab49a,dwp_uuid=672232c6-1385-11de-9e32-0000779fd2ac.html#axzz1HosJDYwE

Take the high road: a rally in Peru
By Naomi Mapstone
Published: March 24 2011 16:09 | Last updated: March 24 2011 16:09
Among the snow-capped peaks of the Andes at more than 16,000ft, blood vessels in the brain swell, inducing a dreamlike state, and breaths come in fragile white puffs. The story of the world's second-highest mountain range is writ large in loops and folds of solid rock, deep chasms, dizzying precipices and rich mineral seams. A human being can feel very small.
But even in this remote corner of Peru, evidence of humanity's enormous footprint is close at hand, in the perfect bitumen curves of a new two-lane highway.
A flame-red Mitsubishi Lancer Evolution IX guns into view, its souped-up engine buzzing angrily as it strains against the altitude ...
The driver, Nicolas Fuchs, is among the frontrunners of the first Inter-Oceanic Rally, a 1,370-mile race from Peru's Pacific coast across the triple hump of the Andes, through the Amazon basin to Brazil. It is an epic journey, intended as a celebration of a long-held dream — the opening of the first fully paved road to traverse Latin America east to west.
When the road is finished this year, it will give Brazil access to Pacific ports for the first time in history, bringing it closer to the surging economies of China, India, South Korea and Japan. Peru hopes the road will help it become an important conduit for China-Brazil trade, as well as increasing its own bilateral commerce with both countries...
The journey, if not the race, begins in Lima, the capital, where Alan García, Peru's president, is waving the rally cars off with a chequered flag outside the French baroque-style presidential palace. García has been merrily inaugurating sections of the highway for a year now, hoping to add it to a goodie bag of legacies he can reach into in 2016, when he is expected to stand for election again.
The road — "almost finished"  for about six months — is refusing to co-operate. The biggest obstacle is Puerto Maldonado's bridge, which looks like a forgotten Lego project. Anyone wanting to cross the Madre de Dios River must use a barge. A section of road could also soon be swallowed up by a $4bn hydroelectric dam.
Alejandro Toledo, Peru's former president who set the highway in motion back in 2004, may yet get to cut the ribbon, if he can win next month's presidential election ...
It is go-time in Nazca, a scruffy town on Peru's south coast famed for its ancient geoglyphs. Etched into the desert, so big they are best seen from the air, are the stylised forms of a spider, a monkey, a hummingbird — and a little man who looks a lot like an astronaut. While tourists fly over the world heritage site, the locals have eyes only for the 30 mysterious throbbing beasts parked in their main street ...
The drivers have a death-defying day ahead of them — 295 miles of steep, winding road to Cusco, the Incan capital and the jumping off point for Machu Picchu. Mauricio Diez Canseco — also known as "Brad Pizza" , a popular fast-food entrepreneur — gets knocked out of the race early, but the sense of euphoria follows the drivers up into the mountains.
"The route is spectacular. We drivers are proud to be crossing the frontier from Peru to Brazil for the first time,"  says Richard Palomino, a Peruvian transport mogul and driver, who has a team of 16 mechanics following his $100,000 Evolution 9 Mitsubishi ...
"It's marvellous but extremely dangerous,"  says Luiz Facco ... "Today we have a lot of mountains, with escarpments that drop 1,900ft — if you make a mistake, you die." ...
From a lofty outcrop on Pirhuayane Pass, we watch the rally go by. Within an hour the cars will have dropped almost 16,400ft into the steamy Amazon jungle ...
Luiz Hobson, a member of Brazil's military police, is looking mournful. Only five rally cars have passed immigration for the final, 211-mile lap to Rio Branco. The rest have ground to a halt on the Peruvian side because their chassis numbers do not match those on their papers.
This is not uncommon in rally cars, which change parts often. But Hobson, part of a motorcycle escort for the rally, is taking it badly: "There was going to be a giant party in Rio Branco. There are so many people waiting for the cars to arrive,"  he says. "We feel terrible."
The engineers may have conquered the jungle, three mountain ranges and a desert, but no one beats bureaucracy.

Also, here is a link to a Sept., 2009 NPR report (with video) on construction of the highway:

http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=112535943

[Grzrd]

It is an epic journey, intended as a celebration of a long-held dream — the opening of the first fully paved road to traverse Latin America east to west .... The road — "almost finished"  for about six months — is refusing to co-operate. The biggest obstacle is Puerto Maldonado's bridge, which looks like a forgotten Lego project. Anyone wanting to cross the Madre de Dios River must use a barge ....

This is an anti-climatic post; the Puerto Maldonado Bridge was inaugurated in July, which completed South America's first paved road from the Peruvian Pacific Coast to the Brazilian Atlantic Coast:

Puerto Maldonado, Jul. 15 (ANDINA). Peruvian President Alan Garcia on Friday inaugurated a 723-meter-long bridge over the Madre de Dios river on the border between Peru and Brazil.
The Continental Bridge is part of the newly constructed Inter-Oceanic Highway, which links Atlantic ports in Brazil to Pacific ports in Peru.
The country's longest bridge was built with an investment of US$30 million and will help accelerate economic and social integration between the two countries, as it will connect Madre de Dios' capital city, Puerto Maldonado, with a number of surrounding Peruvian and Brazilian provinces.

The completed Inter-Oceanic Highway has now been "clinchable" for about seven months; has anyone on this forum driven at least a part of it?

EDIT

Here is a more comprehensive August 3, 2011 article about the bridge opening:

When outgoing Peruvian President Alan García Pérez inaugurated the 723-metre Continental Bridge over the Madre de Dios river last month, he was actually putting the finishing touches on a much larger project. The bridge completed the 2,600km long road known as the Interoceanic highway, or Carretera Interoceánica and Estrada do Pacifico in Spanish and Portuguese respectively, which links Brazilian ports on the Atlantic to Peruvian ports on the Pacific by road for the first time.
The Interoceánica is part of the wider project of the Initiative for the Integration of the Infrastructure of the Region of South America (IIRSA), set up in 2000 by 12 South American governments the IIRSA is a wider objective to improve integration of the countries. Construction on the highway has been ongoing for almost five years, while the total figure of investment has been put at US$1.6bn by the IIRSA project sheet.
In Peru, the new road heads West from the border town of Iñapari, in the Amazonian Madre de Dios region, rising up to cross the Andes with a pass higher than Mont Blanc, before descending towards three southern seaports on the Pacific Ocean–San Juan Marcona, Matarini, and Ilo. In Brazil, the highway reaches into the Arce and Rondonia regions, where it connects to the country's existing network of highways offering multiple routes to the Atlantic.
Why Build?
A banner on the new road declares: "Once a promise, now a reality."  Certainly, the highway's completion is a major achievement: from the Darien scheme in Panama which nearly bankrupted the Scottish state in 1698 to the failure of the Brazilians' 2,000km trans-Amazonian highway in the 1970s, the dream to cross the Americas and connect the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans has inspired numerous doomed projects ....