PART 8 - LEAVING THE ALDEA AND WHAT NEXT?

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The next day I left for Manaus with Regi in the small boat. Saying goodbye was not easy, and as some of Regi’s sisters didn’t know I was leaving until I said goodbye, with a lump in my throat. “but why?”, they asked. It was complicated. They had hoped I would stay there always, and that felt good, but of course I had to go and in the end they all understood. Regi’s mom cried however.

We got to Manaus late, so after grabbing XSALADA sandwich (an extremely popular Brazilian hamburger with cheese, ham, lettuce and tomato, sold on every corner for a dollar or two) at my favorite place, called “African café” (even though there was nothing African about it), we spent the night in the most dodgy hotel ever. It was strange, cause, I’d obviously been in way worse, but something about that place just spelled seedy.

We spent the next couple of days touring around the city, since all our life had revolved the ODEA and the jungle over the last few weeks, it was nice to get a taste of the city together. We ate ACAI, and saw a movie, and on the last day before Regi went back to Tupe we went to the zoo. It was really tiny, but very cool, as it was run by machine gun armed military. I finally saw actual Anacondas and Jaguar, both the patterned kind and the black kind. The black jaguar was something else, with its piercing ice green eyes. It moved it giant killer body as if it was made out of smoke, and although he didn’t pay any attention to me, he froze when he saw Regi, and swifly moved to a position in his enclosure where he could not be seen by Regi (who was approaching), and then he crouched in an attack position! When Regi finally appeared in his line of vision he looked as if he was going to lunge but the bars were there and he knew it. So he waited and thought, before finally releasing his captivated pose and glare and moving on. It was quite spectacular behavior from a zoo animal.

Anyways, Regi left back to Tupe later that evening and we didn’t know if we were going to see each other again because I still hadn’t made my mind up about Sao Gabriel. Sao Gabriel was a small city, and the northernmost city in the Brazilian Amazon. It was on your way to the rather inaccessible tri-boarder of Brazil with Colombia and Venezuela, a 1000 km, 4-day boat journey upriver on the Rio Negro. It really was in the middle of nowhere, and although there were cars there that had been shipped there by boat, there was no road access to there from anywhere, sort of like an island but surrounded by jungle and flooding Amazon instead.

Anyways, I had considered going there because I wanted to go deeper into the Amazon and see more remote parts of jungle, plus I heard the boat ride was suppose to be beautiful, so I finally decided to go…

What a journey it would be…

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