Advertisement
Published: February 4th 2008
We didn’t get around to doing some of the things we were going to, such as the zoo, mainly due to laziness! The climate kind of makes you that way!! Also, getting information about various places has proved much more challenging than we expected. We did find our way to the banana market which was interesting. The huge piles of bananas were quite extraordinary, as were the heaps of watermelons and papaya.
About half an hour from the Cathedral on the 120 bus is the beach resort of Ponta Negra. It seems strange to find sandy beaches on a river, but the Rio Negro has several. At this time of year there seems to be only one small beach actually in the town, but that’s not what we went there for. We were looking for Marina David, described in the Rough Guide as next to the Hotel Tropical. It’s actually a twenty minute walk in blistering sunshine! It wasn’t surprising though as we haven’t found our guidebook particularly accurate so far.
The reason for finding the marina was to take a boat trip to the
Museo do Seringal Vila Paraiso which is an old rubber plantation. It wasn’t easy
to get there as a water taxi wanted 60 Reais which we were not prepared to pay. It turns out there is also a cheaper service akin to a water-bus. This was only 6 each so we waited for the next departure.
The Rio Negro has several tributaries and lots of communities on its banks. We whizzed past various beaches and communities before being dropped at the museum and promised a pick-up an hour later.
The museum was great and we highly recommend it. The main problem was that the guide speaks only Portuguese (this is Brazil and you should speak our language!) but we managed to communicate and understand most of what she told us. When she found out we were English, she seemed delighted to tell us that it was an Englishman (Henry Wickham) who single handedly (possibly with the aid of his wife) destroyed the rubber industry in Brazil by taking seeds to Kew Gardens in London which then went on to provide the rubber plantations of Malaysia. They proved more lucrative and killed off Brazil’s rubber trade.
We were shown around the plantation houses including the rubber baron’s living quarters and those of
the workers. What a contrast between the two!! We were shown how to extract the latex liquid from the trees (at night otherwise it congeals during the heat of day) and then how it is smoked to preserve it and formed into 30kg pieces. They used to be 50kg but the workers were getting injured too often! It was all very interesting.
Our guide also found an ants nest and hit it with a machete until thousands of them came to the surface. She then put her hand into the ants and picked up a load. She rubbed her hands together crushing them all which gave her hand a sweet scent. It was a very strange thing to see but she called it “Indian Perfume!”
Our promised return boat didn’t turn up. That was quite concerning as our only alternative was to wait for the security guard to finish work late in the afternoon. We hadn’t brought lunch with us and none was available. We waited a couple of hours and eventually managed to flag down a passing boat, coincidentally the one we had caught to get there. It wasn’t his fault as he had told us a
different boat would collect us. We were then given a 30 minute boat journey which skimmed through sunken forests and past the occasional river dolphin. It was superb.
Whilst in Manaus we have frequently seen images on TV from the Carnaval celebrations in Rio, Salvador and Recife. The celebrations here are a bit tamer but probably have a less commercial and more authentic feel to them. In the Amazon the festival is called
Carnaboi for some reason, presumably to distinguish itself from the more famous versions. On Saturday night we saw some live music on the plaza which was entertaining, but the main event was on Sunday.
At 5pm (more like 5.45) the parade began. It was great to hear a proper samba band and see the crowds of people in the streets. After the pictures from Rio it was a bit disappointing though. It seems that AIDS awareness is this year’s theme, although some people thought the free condoms being handed out were balloons looking at what they were doing with them!
Much better was the fancy dress parade held in the plaza. There were many different categories including original and traditional costumes. The men’s original
competition was won by a very ordinary costume (in our humble opinion!) whilst what we thought was far and away the best didn’t even finish in the top three. People dressed as cats, frogs, Africans, Indians, and there was even a scantily clad belly dancer. We also enjoyed seeing the traditional women’s dresses adorned with thousands of feathers. They were truly beautiful and how you distinguish one as being better than another, who knows!
At the same time as the fancy dress, there was an enormous street party which we joined in for a while. At one end of the main street a band was playing. To us they seemed like a cross between 80’s sensation Madness and 70’s band Slade. They certainly had the crowd going though and amongst the multitude of fancy dressed and more conservatively dressed were several lines of congas making their way along. At the opposite end to the band were the giant mannequins which were very entertaining to watch. With a boat to catch the following day we couldn’t stay out all night though!
In the last blog I mentioned that we had moved to cheaper accommodation, the Rei Arthur. Our room
American Clock
Apparently you can tell it´s American by the number 4, written as IIII in Roman numerals!is comfortable with fierce air conditioning and an equally fierce fridge. That’s all you need really as long as the shower works okay. So far, so good, but just one problem - there are rather a lot of cockroaches! It’s not an unclean room so I guess that they don’t fumigate here the way they do in Argentina. Hopefully our resident gecko patrolling the walls keeps the population at bay!!
Advertisement
Tot: 0.069s; Tpl: 0.016s; cc: 10; qc: 26; dbt: 0.029s; 1; m:domysql w:travelblog (10.17.0.13); sld: 1;
; mem: 1.1mb
