Advertisement
Published: September 7th 2012
Edit Blog Post
Third leg of our 4,000km Amazon trip. Tabatinga to Manaus.
We braved sleeping in hammocks and booked ourselves on the Bandierante II for the 3 day rapid boat trip to Manaus. This is a much cleaner and tidier boat than the one we took from Yurimaguas, we´ve got a cafe on the top deck selling cerveja (we´re in Brazil now so its´Portuguese!) and blaring out Brazillian music. On our deck we have our own TV and a little dining area. The food was pretty good, soup on the first night was "Rosemary standard", with egg butties and very sweet coffee for brekky. As the days went on, the quality of food did dip a little, mainly rice, noodles and beans but not bad all things considered. The river keeps getting wider and wider and we´ve not been able to see as much wildlife but we still managed to see plenty of the river dolphins. Mainly small grey dolphins but also a few of the larger pink ones.
The hammocks are a great place to catch up on some reading and the sunsets are almost too beautiful to be real, feels like you´re in a photograph only better because you
get the wind in your face and the smells of the jungle in your nose! Had a couple of visits en route from the Brazillian Army/Police. Had to empty our bags yet again, they are certainly on the look out for smugglers here, we´d had a thorough search at the port in Tabatinga before we´d boarded the boat. It turned into a bit of a party boat at times as our Ukranian friend (his nan was from Khelmitsky, probably the one who tried to overcharge me for spuds in 1995!) and his new found Brazillian friends managed to get through 120 cans of cerveja in one night!
At around 8pm on the 4th day we finally arrived at Manaus which looks strange all lit up along the river bank, with it´s highrise buildings.
We stayed in a decent hotel after the 3 nights we´d spent in the hammocks, it had a fancy buffet for brekky which was beltin apart from the cake which had a tuna as a filling! Who possibly thought that that would taste nice?? Any hopes of part 12 of our footy tour happening in Manaus vanished when we reached the local stadium which was
just a building site as it´s being rebuilt in time for the 2014 World Cup.
As a treat to Mrs P we went to the theatre to watch some Amazonian dance festival, I´m thinking tribal type dancing, but oh no it´s contemporary! Now Mrs P loves dancing, thinks it´s sexy, but even she said "let´s sneak out at the break", it was that bad! No chance, these tickets had cost me 3 quid each!! Basically the 1st show ran along the lines of; girl wearing a nightie in a box (think of that bird out of the ring), can´t find her way out, eventually does, finds buff bloke in just his undies (Mrs P liked his body movements), they dance, seem to get on quite well, then another bloke in his PJ´s enters the scene, he seems a bit dim at first but slowly the girl starts to fall for him, the blokes then kick off, we think they were fighting over her, eventually thy make up and have a dance over some eggs with the girl. No idea what that was about! Then the bloke who had his PJ´s on stripped down to his undies and began smashing
the eggs on her head, right mess, glad we don´t have to tidy up! Other guy then takes girl back to her box and washes her with water resulting in a wet t-shirt competition moment, shame she´s got smaller boobs than me! Overall the show was not really our cup of tea!
The second show was actually not bad. Much more fluid in their movements and the girl looked like a girl and the lad looked like a bloke who liked girls. It was incredible how strong and flexible the dancers were. When these lot get down to "tiffin" they´ll be able to do stuff that the guy who wrote the Kama Sutra wouldn´t have thought possible!
After the show we tried Tacaca, it´s a jungle soup with shrimps and an anaesthetic leaf that looked like snot, strange but kinda nice, Mrs P couldn´t feel her tongue afterwards!.
Overall we've decided that some peeps here in Brasil can be a little rude. There were times at the theatre when it was like being at the zoo, with heckling and wolf whistles coming from the audience. Some girl turned up late during the performance, chatting away on her mobile, come on show some manners!!!
Over 2,500km completed, only another 1,500km before we hit the Atlantic!!!
Advertisement
Tot: 0.085s; Tpl: 0.01s; cc: 12; qc: 54; dbt: 0.0544s; 1; m:domysql w:travelblog (10.17.0.13); sld: 1;
; mem: 1.1mb