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Published: April 10th 2006
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Hammocks in the dining room!
If your hammock was over the table space, you had to take it down and put it back up 3 times a day, so that the tables could be used for meals. Having left the gorgeous Brasil coast, we headed inland to Belem, to get the ferry down the Amazon to Manaus. Strictly speaking, we weren´t actually on the Amazon for the first part of the journey - we got to it via a tributary (the Rio Mar), which led us around the biggest island sitting in the mouth of the Amazon, Ilha do Marajo - an island which is bigger than Switzerland! A couple on the tour had bought a map of the Amazonia region and every so often would take it up to the captain to find out where we were on the route - this was when we discovered that the captain had never seen a map of the Amazon before! I guess he just knows it by sight - which is very impressive when you see how many tributaries there are.
The first thing for most people when arriving on the boat was to sort out hammock space - space being the key thing, and there not being very much of it at all. I wimped out (yet again, I know, but if given these options I will take them if I can afford it!) and paid extra
Extra passengers...
Locals hooking up to the side of the ferry to sell produce to share a cabin with 2 other girls. It had a set of bunkbeds and we took it turns to be the 3rd person sleeping on the floor - comfy enough with 2 thermarests on top of each other, and definitely more comfy than the hammock space! Since we had 5 nights on this ferry I was very very happy with the decision to upgrade. We soon also discovered that what we had heard (all bad) about the food on the ferry was indeed true, despite the fact that as cabin passengers we got our own table, more variety and more food generally! To sum it up - rice, noodles, beans, rice, noodles, beans. Often the hammock guys got the same but without the noodles. (!). There was always some meat too and I know I have eaten meat on this trip but I saw this stuff being loaded onto the boat from a van and it did not look good, plus no sign of any refigeration anywhere, so I gave that a miss. I took a bottle of tabasco sauce with me as we had been warned about the blandness of the food and found I was very popular
with the locals, as even they wanted the tabasco to spice up their food! Unfortunately I discovered that after 3 days of the same thing twice a day that not even tabasco could save it! .. Luckily someone else had soy sauce and suddenly that became the tastiest thing in the world!
On the first full day we had great fun watching the world float by and seeing how people live along the river - basically they live in houses on stilts, and some even have floating pens for their animals. A lot of them also seem to have a satellite dish though, which makes for an interesting combination! Had brought a book to read and also playing cards, but somehow never found the time for them! Over the next fews days I did do some reading and played a bit of poker (for sweets, not money!) but mostly there was lots to see as we passed by.... one morning we had a fantastic disply from the river dolphins - a whole group of them swam back and forth beside the ferry, jumping out of the water and generally playing around. They were too quick for me to get
Amazon housing
Your house may be on stilts in the middle of the Amazon, but you can still have a satellite dish! a photo, but I really should have got a video clip on my camera - I couldn´t tear myself away to go to the cabin and get my camera though! Later in the day we also saw pink dolphins - I had never even heard of these before and when told about them I thought they might be quite a pale pink, but actually it was quite a strong colour, more like salmon pink - quite a contrast to the muddy river water! There´s more about link dolphins and a photo on this site:
More on Pink Dolphins Arrived in Manaus late at night, and eventually got to our hotel around 2am. It was good to be on solid ground, although to me, it still felt like I was on something that was moving, for a good few hours. Went back to the docks area during daylight - it really was a hive of activity, with all sorts of produce being loaded and unloaded on the floating docks which move with the tide. Manuas is a strange place, it has lots of extravagant architecture from the rubber boom times, mixed in with normal big city bustle and run down poorer areas.
The boom ended when the British smuggled the rubber seeds back to London and managed to cultivate them in Kew Gardens and then start new plantations in the Indian colonies which were much more efficient. The Teatro Amazonas (theatre) is an example of the extravagance which was affordable during the rubber boom - the designers of the building went to great expense to prove to the world that a city situated in the middle of the jungle could match any in Europe. Everything but the tropical wood was imported: Murano glass chandeliers, Alsatian tiles, Carrara marble, furnishings from Paris, and seats with red velvet upholstery.
The plaza in front of the theatre, Praga Sao Sebastian, is covered in black and white paving stones in a wave pattern that symbolizes the meeting of the Rio Solimoes and Rio Negro (more on that later..). In the plaza there is also a monument with four ships representing the four corners of the earth, i.e., Africa, the Americas, Asia, and Europe (Australia was a still colony when this was built).
We took a few days out of Manaus to take a trip into the jungle again, this time staying on land with some
local families. Accomodation was in hammocks again, but this time it was all a lot more spacious, and anyway there were no other options available, so it was a hammock for me too! Our hosts looked after us very well, and always had lots of ideas for things to do.... we went for walks in the jungle, went out on small canoes, went piranha fishing, and made jewellery, blow pipes and flutes from jungle materials! The food provided was excellent, not like the ferry food at all, and it was all produced in a tiny hut over an open fire. With this being the rainy season, a lot of the forest was under about 10m of water, which meant we could actually canoe through the forest - slightly bizarre, but absolutely beautiful. We saw all sorts of animals from the canoes or in the camp - tucans, parrots, snakes, caiman, and my favourite because I´ve never seen one before, a tarantula! (To be specific, a pink-toed tarantula). I was very glad of the zoom on my camera, so I didn´t have to get too close...!
On our way back to Manaus, we visisted the meeting of the waters, where
the Rio Negro joins the Rio Solomes to form the Amazon. The waters run side by side for about 3km, and there is a temperature difference between the 2, due to the different speeds they flow at. The black river is the Rio Negro (fairly obviously if you know any spanish or portuguese!) and the brown, brown / yellow one is the Solomes.
Leaving Manaus, we drove north towards Venezuela, passing across the Equator on our way. Next stop Venezuela!
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