Lunch: Vilhena
Vilhena arrives around midday — a natural place to stop. It is the easternmost city in Rondônia, sitting at 615 metres on the edge of the Parecis plateau, which gives it a noticeably cooler and drier feel than the lowland cities to the north. Like Pimenta Bueno, Vilhena grew from a Rondon telegraph post established around 1910; for decades it was little more than an abandoned station, its two remaining families noted by Claude Lévi-Strauss when he passed through in 1938 and described in Tristes Trópiques. The BR-364 changed everything: when Juscelino Kubitschek himself flew in by FAB aircraft in July 1960 to inaugurate the road, Vilhena was still just a clearing in the forest. Today it is the most prosperous city in Rondônia by human development index, driven by soy and cattle operations across the surrounding plateau. The city's grid follows the old military avenue names — Marechal Rondon, Major Amarante, Capitão Castro — a reminder of how recently the army built the place from scratch.