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Published: June 23rd 2016
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June 18 we woke at 4:30 to fly to Manaus via Brasilia, arriving about 1 pm after setting our clocks back an hour. Manaus is on the Rio Negro just above the spot where the major branches of the Amazon come together (meeting of the waters). Here, finally, we are really hot and humid, and this is the "winter." It was 98 degrees today and sunny! We went directly from the airport in our air conditioned bus (yay!) to the Manaus Opera House, built in 1896. At the time, this was the rubber capital of the world, and it was forbidden to export any seeds or young rubber trees I order to protect the industry, but in the early 1900s some British men sneaked seeds to Malaysia by hiding them inside the shell of a coconut-like fruit. The conditions in Malaysia were even better for rubber than in the Amazon, and in just a few years the rubber industry in the Amazon went broke.
But meanwhile, the opera house brought a lot of culture to the area, and Manaus became the capital of Amazonas state. The architecture is beautiful, especially considering how hard it was to get any materials hundreds
of miles up the river. The distances did not really deter travelers and merchants, though. We heard that the ladies of Manaus at the time, still trying to dress like ladies of Portugal (in this heat!), had a hard time cleaning their dresses, because the water of the Rio Negro is tea-colored and would stain their whites. So, hard as it is to believe, they would send their dresses back to Lisbon to be laundered, and might not get them back for six months!
Since we hadn't had a proper lunch today, it was especially welcome that we visited an ice cream shop just opposite the square from the opera house. We could scoop our own flavors and pay by weight. I had four flavors of which my favorites were crunchy peanut and banana caramel. Ovaltine was pretty fun, too.
Finally, we got to our hotel for this one night, Tropical Manaus Ecoresort. It is very large and has activities like water aerobics, volleyball, etc., although we were to busy for them. The rooms were nice and cool, and there was a mini-zoo there with a jaguar, capybaras, macaws, peccaries, three kinds of monkeys, and an ocelot. Lots
of wild birds, too, like aracaris, yellow-rumpled cacique, blue-grey tanager.
We had a fantastic dinner buffet, and breakfast buffet in the morning including the tapioca crepes we came to love in Salvador as well as acai fruit, passion fruit, and papaya. One woman in our group is a vegan, and this has been a source of puzzlement for the cooks wherever we go. It has become the big joke that at every meal she gets an avocado. In fact, at dinner the maitre d' approached our guide and asked, not, "Which lady is the vegan?" but "Which lady needs the avocado?" Needless to say, she is getting a little tired of avocados. Last night she was served two for dessert!
June 19 we went to the fruit and fish market after breakfast. We bought some Brazil nuts and a few soaps in the scents of tropical fruits. There was such a variety of fresh fish, some of them six feet long. We knew they were fresh because the place really didn't smell bad. We could hardly hear resolves talk with all the racket of vendors chopping and hacking at their fish.
The real surprise and treat of
the day, though, was that this is the date when the Olympic torch was passing through Manaus, and the torch carriers were gathered in the market where we were, waiting for their turn to carry the flame for a few hundred meters each. There was a pretty big but manageable crowd there, and everyone was in a partying mood. We took photos with the torch-bearers, and some of the local people gave us Brazilian flags to wave. We had to leave the market to board our Rio Negro boat before the actual flame came through, but it was a once-in-a-lifetime experience!
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