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Ok, so where did we get up to? We wanted to write another blog but we got kicked out the internet cafe. everywhere in Manaus seems to shut before 7pm. Think we´d just left Paris, sorry Rach, no postcard from Paris, I know we said we'd send one from every country, but France doesn't count. We weren't allowed to leave the airport anyway. The flight to Rio was long and boring. We got bumped up to the front row exit seats by the guy on the Air France check-in desk. This was in the hope we could get off first and so have more of a chance of making our connection. We discovered there is no point getting off the plane first as you still have to wait for your bags and typically ours seemed to come off last! We spent time worrying if our bags were on the flight or not. At least we got through immigration without much of a wait! The guy hardly even seemed to look at us. He just stamped each visa sheet and let us through. Didn´t even ask for our yellow fever certificates which we thought you needed to enter the country (in your
cheezy asda top
you guys thought we were joking but no, its here to get cheezy photos
how much was the bet for? face, Sue, we got another stamp!) they have an interesting system for customs, you fill out the form and go to nothing to declare. they take the form and ask you to push the button, if the light goes green you can walk right through, if if goes red you have to have you bag scanned. Luckily it went green for us! We knew then we had to make it to terminal 2 for our next flight and we knew we were in terminal 1. Without speaking Portuguese it was quite hard to find out where to go. We had to run along a walkway between the two terminals which is really hard carrying two bags in the heat and humidity. We got to the desk to check in about 32 mins before our flight time. We assume it would have shut 30 mins before the flight so we were very lucky!
The whole of the next flight was in Portuguese so we didn't understand any of the announcements or the flight attendants. We arrived in Brasilia and there didn't seem to be much there. We decided to get some Reals from a cash machine as we thought they would
be useful as we only had US dollars. the machine said visa, but told us it couldn't process our card at the time and told us to find another machine which wasn't very useful!
The next flight was slightly better as some of the announcements were also made in English. there was some turbulence, we thought it was very weird that the flight attendants sat in empty seats in the cabin when it wasn't even bad. we had bad turbulence on the transatlantic flight. the woman beside us was holding onto the chair so much! it did properly feel like we were falling though!
we collected our bags in Manaus and went out to be met by Edwardo. its nice being met by a smiling guy with your name on a piece of paper! he took us out to the car which was driven by his wife Christina, and introduced us to their dog, Tyson, a cute rotty puppy!
on the journey Edwardo told us a bit about Manaus.
The city lies on the Rio Negro, 10km upstream from its confluence with the Rio Solimoes, beyond which the mighty combined river is called the Rio Amazonas (river amazon). the
view of manaus from top of hotel
they build weird here, all on top of each other. city's business is making electronics and it has 400 factories. he also told us the only road out of Manaus is north to Venezuela, to get elsewhere you have to fly or go by boat so it's almost like an island.
They drove us to the office for green planet tours where we met Andre, who seemed really nice. He was the guy we'd been emailing from the UK. We paid for the tour and they told us we'd be better getting some reals to pay for the hotel to make it cheaper so on the way to the hotel they took us somewhere we could change some dollars.
They dropped us off at the hotel which looked just like a shop front, we went in and the guy only spoke Portuguese. We filled in a form and they gave us our room key. The guy took us in an interesting lift to our room - at each floor it seemed to get the level slightly wrong, either a little too high or low so we didn't use it again!
We were really down when we saw our room as it didn't really seem much. We took photos and on them it seemed ok! We sorted out all our stuff ready to go on our trip. We decided then to go for a walk to the internet cafe we saw on the map in the guide book. Turned out to be above a shop which seemed to sell everything! It was here we wrote our last blog from! After we got thrown out we went back to the hotel and it really didn't seem bad at all. Think we were down before as we couldn't phone home to let them know where we were. Still when we try and phone home a woman spouts Portuguese at us (we now know it says that the number doesn't exist) don't know what we can do to make it work. Anyway managed to chat to people on msn. The air con had cooled the room down a lot by the time we had got back, it was so hot and humid there. unfortunately the air con made a huge amount of noise. Because of this we decided to not sleep with it on, but ended up having to put it on and off in an attempt to not boil! We woke up early and both had showers and got ready. The shower was either on or off with no temp setting so luckily it was about right! better than the boiling shower Heath had in France as she is a window licker and couldn't work out if you moved the temp bit it got colder!!!!
We decided to head up to the bar on the top floor as we had seen signs for it and they were serving breakfast which was good. We ate and then it was close to 8am so we collected our bags and went down to the lobby. We paid for our room and left our bags there. Andre had said we could leave them there while we were away but we were still a bit dubious. It was 8.30 when a guy motioned for us to come get into a car. There were two other people in there so we went. We saw a green planet leaflet on the dash so we knew it was the right car. We're now in the airport so don't have time to write more. Hopefully from Rio we will find somewhere we will have time to stay and write up the rest of the stuff we have done up to now!!! We're having fun anyway!!!!
speak soon! xx
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Rob & Scott
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Hey!
Look at you too get lifts from dodgy men hehe. Hope ya both doing ok xxxx