The BR-364 has been the organizing artery of this entire journey south through Rondônia, but today it becomes something else — the road through which Brazilian settlement history plays out in almost textbook form. From rubber tappers and telegraph wire to colonist soybean farmers and Parecis tollbooths, the 560 kilometres between Cacoal and Campo Novo do Parecis compress a century of westward expansion into a single afternoon's drive.
The day begins with an 8:00 departure from Cacoal, heading south along the BR-364. The highway here rolls through the agricultural patchwork of southern Rondônia — ranches, secondary forest, and occasional towns strung along the road at regular intervals, each one bearing the marks of the INCRA colonization projects that reshaped the region in the 1970s and 1980s.
Pimenta Bueno sits at the confluence of the rivers Apediá and Barão de Melgaço, and like Cacoal it owes its origins to two distinct waves: the telegraph line that Marechal Rondon's commission strung through here in the early 1910s — giving the town its name, in honour of a 19th-century Cuiabá-born military engineer whose geographical notes Rondon had used as reference — and the BR-364 itself, which transformed what had been a tiny settlement sustained by a telegraph post and the rubber trade into a municipality of forty thousand. The town received its current status only in 1977, the same year as most of its neighbours along the highway; before that, the whole corridor south of Ji-Paraná was technically administered from Porto Velho, 700 kilometres away. Fuel up at the Posto São Roque on the way out of town before continuing south.
Resuming south, the road climbs in stages toward the Planalto dos Parecis. Near the state border with Mato Grosso the landscape shifts noticeably: the dense Amazonian vegetation of Rondônia gives way to something flatter and more open, the transition from rainforest to cerrado that marks the edge of the plateau.
Deleting this waypoint is permanent and cannot be undone.