Advertisement
Published: August 8th 2007
We flew into Manaus on 8th July (from Belem - city at the gateway to the Amazon). Hmmm, in a nutshell Manaus ( approx 1,7 million citizens)is the ugliest city i have ever seen. It seems that the whole place is a massive market where people sell just everything. We knew it would only be our stopover on the way to the real Amazon.
Today we came back to Manaus from a 3-day joungle trip into the Amazon!!!!it was awesome!
What we did:
we were taken to a pretty remote place in the jungle where, on the first day, we went fishing piranhas (I have to say it as i'm so proud of myself: i caught 3!!!! but lost one as it just flew over the boat and fell back to the water) we kept them all to make soup later on (which tasted better than i had expected), spotting and catching alligators (and holding a couple of small ones!), the following 2 days we did some trekking deeper in the jungle finding out some interesting facts about flora and fauna, going for a swim (10 meters away from the place where we had been fishing for piranhas two days
our camp in the jungle
earlier!!!!the current there was pretty strong and piranhas stick to quiet waters) spotting animals, canoeing, visiting a native family's house (no, not Indians), trying some weird fruit from their garden etc. We also spent one night in the forrest, sleeping in a hammock and listening to the noise of the jungle was a great great experience!
Tomorrow we are planning (as we haven't got the tickets yet) to take a boat (6day slow boat) up the river to Tabatinga on the border with Paru and Colombia. 6 days on the boat!!!!!!!!!!!!! we think we will get crazy already after a couple......
keep your fingers crossed for our sanity!
(I´m writing this after the boat trip)
I was amazed how much I was enjoying being on the boat - so, SO relaxing!
I thought it would be hard to survive those 6 days especially when they rang the bell (breakfast time) at 6am on the first day. Lunch at 11am and dinner at 5pm. After a few days this became: breakfast at 5am, lunch before 11 and dinner after 4pm!!! they switched the lights off at 8pm every day which made almost everyone go
to bed. The upper deck was opened until approx 10pm as people were watching TV (if not sports, it was some Brazilian soap opera!), but we often felt tired and went to bed, i.e. hammock, at around 9pm. Our body clock quickly adjusted to the new system.
On Day 3 the boat started making its first stops (usually 2 on one day) which didn´t last less than 4 hours. This was the worst part of the trip, boat in a port - no wind, getting hot, having to mind our belongings at all times as people were getting off and new faces were appearing.
I well remember our stop in Santo Antonio - the longest one i think but the worst thing was that we stayed in the port after it got dark. Lights on the boat attracted loads of creepy crawlies, bugs, insects, not to mention mosquitos!!!! they were everywhere, getting tangled in your hair, dropping onto your book when reading, flying into your hammock!!!!!this was awful, Awful, AWFUL!!!!!
Once i saw a beetle - size of my fist (good it was not moving!)
We had to stay in Tabatinga (Brazil) for the night, it borders with
Leticia (in Colombia) and Santa
a typical house in the Amazon
Rosa (Peru). There was a big fiesta in Leticia on that day - to celebrate the union between those three towns.
The fast boat (from Santa Rosa to Iquitos - Peru, still in the Amazon) that we took the following day was a nightmare.......(almost 11 hour long) but we saved time.
Straight from Iquitos to Lima (there are no roads to get to Iquitos, it´s either by boat or by plane), we took a cheap flight.
Advertisement
Tot: 0.169s; Tpl: 0.021s; cc: 20; qc: 79; dbt: 0.1082s; 1; m:domysql w:travelblog (10.17.0.13); sld: 1;
; mem: 1.2mb
Olimpia
non-member comment
!!!!!!!!!
Ewcia kochana az by sie chcialo byc tam z Toba. wspaniala wyprawa. trzymaj sie cieplutko i baw sie dobrze!!!!!!!!!!!!