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Published: February 1st 2008
It’s been a whirlwind couple of days. Now that we are back to being proper tourists again it seems we have to pack so much in! So, we left Porto Velho behind and flew with Gol to Manaus.
Here we are staying in the
Manaus Hostel (not to be confused with the Hostal Manaus!) which is nice but stretching our budget a bit too far. We have found cheaper digs in the Hotel Rei Arthur and that’s where we’ll be spending the second half of our time here. You’ll find out what we think about it in Manaus Part 2!
Manaus is a city with a population of over 2 million these days. Life is centred on the port and the River Amazon trade. There’s certainly more hustle and bustle here than we have been used to for a while and it feels slightly strange because of it. It’s been a city of boom and bust and boom again, first thanks to the rubber industry upon which the city was founded, but it deteriorated badly after that bubble burst. Now cheap consumer electronics can be found all over the place and that now seems to be the focus of industry.
Carnaval
No doubt we´ll find out more about it at the weekendA short way from the river is the Teatro Amazonas, and amazing opera house which may seem quite out of place in a jungle city. We joined a tour in English as our Portuguese isn’t really coming on too well! It was great to see the different rooms and the small museum area, but the best bit is the auditorium itself. The huge stage curtain withdraws up into a giant cupola above. Seen from below, the cupola is painted to resemble what you would see if you stood underneath the Eiffel Tower in Paris. It kind of works! We even got to hear the Amazon Symphonic play for free. On occasional Thursdays there´s an opportunity but even arriving an hour before it started we were queueing around the building!
The main reason for coming to Manaus though is to sail down the River Amazon. The city itself is situated on the Rio Negro, so called because of its thick black colour. 16km downstream the Rio Negro meets the Rio Solimoes. The two combine to form what we know as the River Amazon. We took a tour out to the area where the two rivers meet which was very
interesting. It began at the floating dock which was constructed from pontoons brought from the UK over 100 years ago. The dock can’t be static because the river can vary in level by as much as 15m in a year.
The Solimoes water comes down from the Andes and is cool and full of sand and silt. The Negro gets its colour from the rotting vegetation in the jungle and is warm. It is also slower. What happens when the two meet is intriguing. For about 12km they run side by side with the water hardly mixing. It is amazing to see the contrasting colours as the two bodies of water begin to mix together.
After viewing the “meeting of the waters” we were transferred into smaller boats. These enabled us to venture up small tributaries to get a feel what life is like in the area. Whilst it was nice to see the birdlife, we were both a bit appalled to see children paddle out to meet us on canoes so that we could have pictures taken with an alligator, a monkey or a sloth. We don’t agree with this and therefore didn’t participate in the photos.
How anyone can justify capturing a sloth and then carrying it around like a baby or a doll is beyond me.
More interesting were the Victoria Amazonica Lillies. These monsters grow to over 2m wide as our guide demonstrated by lifting one out of the water. We walked along a walkway through the jungle to view the pond where they grow. Their flowers grow away from the leaves on something akin to an umbilical cord. They only last 3 days and on day one are white, on day two pink, and on day three a dark red or purple. They were named after Queen Victoria and are protected by vegetarian fish thanks to huge spikes growing on their underside.
Our meal was fantastic too. We got to try three different types of fish although I can’t even begin to try and remember their names. Earlier we had seen examples of them in a contraption built by one of the communities. They raise a wooden board out of the river so that fish are brought to the surface. We also saw a crate of various fish, piranhas included, on their way to the fish market.
All in all
it was a great trip to go on and we thoroughly recommend it to anyone who finds themselves in Manaus.
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santanesia
Maria Biggane
Great description!
I enjoy the reading specially because I'll be in Manaus in 12 days.