That Roar in the Jungle Is 15,000 Motorbikes.

Pict by Lalo de Almeida for The New York Times

By Alexei Barrionnuevo Via: nytimes

"TABATINGA, Brazil — This sweltering Amazon outpost is a border town on the move — on two motorized wheels, that is.

During the afternoon rush hour, Tabatinga’s main avenue is a sea of scooters and motorcycles. Whole families pile onto a single scooter, even families of five: husband, wife and three children. Mothers breastfeed infants while fathers navigate a road nearly uncluttered by traffic signals.

With more than 15,000 motorbikes and only 47,000 people, Tabatinga resembles a small version of Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam, another chaotic place where cars take a distant back seat as the preferred mode of transportation.

“I have never seen a place with so many motorbikes,” said Sabrina D’Assumpção, a resident of Rio de Janeiro who was visiting her husband, a military officer, at the army base here recently. “It is practically a city run entirely by motorbikes.”

Tabatinga owes much of its moto-obsession to its location along Brazil’s extreme western frontier. Nestled alongside Colombia and just across a narrow river from Peru, the town has evolved in the last quarter-century from a military town into a hub of cross-border commerce.

The open border with Leticia, Colombia, allows Brazilians to buy Japanese-made motorbikes there for about $2,000, half of what they cost in Brazil. Chinese-made models, which are less popular, can be had for as little as $900 on the river island of Santa Rosa, in Peru, said Ulianov Mejía, the manager of the Yamaha motorbike store in Tabatinga.

Pict by Lalo de Almeida for The New York Times

A motorbike is part of the household for many people in the Tabatinga area, like this resident of the Indian village.

“Here you can have breakfast in Brazil, lunch in Colombia and dinner in Peru because it’s a triple border,” said Mr. Mejía, a Colombian who is married to a Brazilian woman and has been living here since 2001.

In recent years the relative strength of the Brazilian economy and its currency, the real, has made it easier for Brazilians to afford motorbikes. Easy credit terms allow people to pay in up to 24 installments, and most people walk out of a store with a bike after putting down just 30 percent, Mr. Mejía said. For some, it can be even easier than that.

“If a fisherman from the river doesn’t have documents, doesn’t have a checking account, but if I know him, know where he lives, know his family, I will sell to him without a problem,” Mr. Mejía said.

The ease of acquiring a motorbike has helped fuel the growth of the city, which has doubled in population in the past 20 years, surging past neighboring Leticia, which has about 35,000 residents and about 10,000 motorbikes.

“There are families that have six or seven motorbikes,” said Joel Santos de Lima, Tabatinga’s mayor. “They are cheap and easy to buy, and they help keep the economy moving.”

For those who cannot afford their own motorbikes, Tabatinga boasts 500 two-wheeled moto taxis run by four companies. For one and a half reals, about 70 cents, a moto taxi will take you anywhere in the city.

The drivers are the model of efficiency and reliability, said Waldery Nobre Mesquita, a doctor who uses them daily to see patients. By law the moto taxis are allowed to carry only one passenger, said Anderson de Souza, Tabatinga’s public transportation coordinator.

But that seems to be where the rules stop and the lawlessness begins. Tabatinga does not require motorbikes to be registered or residents to wear helmets. The process of applying for a license plate and insuring a motorbike is laden with bureaucracy, and costs about $500, more than most residents can afford, Mr. de Souza said.

Since a helmet law is enforced across the Colombian border in Leticia, drivers stop at the border and pick up a visorless helmet from stands along the street. Vendors charge 75 cents for the rented helmets, which must be returned at the border.

In Tabatinga the issue is more complicated. City officials here worry that the border’s reputation for violent drug trafficking makes anyone who wears a helmet a potential suspect.

“Where you have trafficking, you have death,” Mr. de Souza said. “When assassins want to kill, they use helmets so they can’t be identified.”

For that reason, Tabatinga informally prohibits the wearing of helmets on motorbikes, though it is not a written law, he said.

That makes matters even trickier when it rains — and rain can be torrential in the Amazon.

Most moto taxi drivers simply don a rain slicker and continue working, some wearing helmets. Rain is the one time when actual four-wheeled taxis get a chance to get in the game. But good luck finding one without calling first.

Trying to cement the area’s motorbike culture, a decade ago Mr. Mejía and a friend tried to line up bikes stretching for five kilometers, just over three miles, from Tabatinga into Leticia. A representative from the Guinness Book of World Records showed up to witness the world-record attempt, he said. But in the end they could not pull it off.

“If it had been something organized by the city, with resources, we could have gotten into the book,” Mr. Mejía said. “Outside of Asia no one could beat Tabatinga and Leticia for having more motorbikes, no one.”

Mery Galanternick contributed reporting from Rio de Janeiro.