The Amazon Rainforest, Brazil

I booked a cheap hotel in the centre of Manaus when I arrived at the airport. I was going to spend one week in Amazonas State before returning to Rio for one last week. While I was resting in the hotel, I became aware that Brazil was in the middle of political turmoil. The scandal involving the campaign treasurer for the Brazilian President, Fernando Collar de Melo, P.C. Farias, was breaking and took up most of the new broadcasts.

The next day, I went out to explore the city centre and visited the ‘Amazon Theatre’, a magnificent opera house (2 photos) in the centre of town. I also went down to see the port on the vast Amazon River, the largest river in the world by volume of water, and disputing with the Nile the position as longest river in the world. 

The climate in Manaus was very strange. Situated so close to the Equator, it seemed like three seasons were crammed in to each day! The morning started with spring sunshine, at midday it became a hot and humid autumn, and finally as the sun was about to set, the rains came, making it a wintery evening. Being located in the southern hemisphere, Brazil’s summer is between mid December and mid March, while winter comes between mid June and mid September.

The food was also new to me. I would eat a ‘prato feito’, which is the equivalent of a set meal, and was surprised to find, meat, black beans, rice and spaghetti all on the same plate.

My next task was to book a three-day boat trip down the Amazon to the meeting of the waters and then heading as far up the River Negro as possible. I followed the directions in my guide book, located the offices of a tour guide and negotiated the trip through some complicated bargaining followed by payment in dollars. The double decker boat was arranged to leave from Manaus Port early the following morning.

There were around 6 tourists from a mixture of different countries around the world on our boat, but nearly all of them were young people, mostly couples, travelling on a limited budget. At night, hammocks were suspended between posts on the lower deck of the boat and it was here everyone slept.

The River Amazon is believed to originate in Lake Junin in Peru and is formed just below Manaus from the confluence of two rivers, the River Negro  and River Solimoes. Due to the composition of the areas through which they flow, the River Negro is black in colour, while the River Solimoes is light brown. For some reason linked to temperature, speed and mineral deposits in the water, when the two rivers meet, the colours remain separate and  clearly defined for around 6 kilometres. This wonder of the modern world is known as the ‘meeting of the waters’ and was the first destination on our trip, which involved sailing south from Manaus. We soon left the city behind us, and for the first time in my life I saw a floating petrol station! After an hour or so, the meeting of the waters came into view, and our boat crossed the line in the water before heading back upstream to a small restaurant, reached after crossing a small footbridge of a lake covered in Victoria Amazonica lilies, for food, drinks and my first and only sight of larger Amazonian wildlife – a sloth hanging onto a wooden bench and a baby capybara running around the restaurant. We then headed up the Rio Negro, passing Manaus and continued up river until we moored at a small sandy beach for the night. Food and drinks were served before spending my first night ever sleeping in a hammock on a gently rocking boat.

The night was not very comfortable. I was sleeping deeply when my in my dreams I was being stabbed in back by someone with a long, thin, dagger. I woke up from the nightmare, to realise that a giant mosquito was biting me through the 5mm thick, strong hammock material in a gap between my jacket and my jeans. As I mentioned to my companions the next day, it felt like the mosquitos had knives and forks! I was also bitten badly in the area just above my ankles. The Amazonian mosquitoes, however, didn’t pay any attention at all to the guys working on the boat; they were running around shirtless and the mosquitoes paid them no attention at all! It was the taste of ‘gringo’ that they prized the most! These mosquito bites on my lower leg would come back to haunt me after the trip*.

The programme for the next day involved a walk through the rain forest with our Amazonian Indian guide. We were hoping to see at least some wildlife, but of course the birds and animals heard us coming from a mile off and the only living creature we were able to find was a giant spider which our guide displayed on his machete. By this stage, over two weeks continuous travel was beginning to take a toll on me, as this photo taken during the jungle walk shows. After the jungle walk, it was time for dinner, and then the boat went further up river and moored again.

I had brought a bottle of whiskey with me and I went up to the top deck for a drink, joined by a Spanish guy who I was happy to share a drink and a chat (in Spanish) with. After most of the whiskey had gone, a strange event occurred. It was a dark starry night, and in a lull in the conversation, I heard a distinctive bird call in the distance which was completely new to me. I later found out that it was a bird known in Brazil as the ‘Bem-te-vi’ due to the sound of its call. This translates as ‘Nice to see you!’. In English, this bird is called a ‘Great Kiskadee’. Anyway, there we were, reasonably drunk and I decided that I would try to copy the bird call. I whistled back to the bird I’d heard in the distance, and it not only replied to me, but obviously from the volume of its call, was flying nearer to our boat! Each time it called to me, I whistled back, until it was clearly in the jungle quite close to us. Then another bird of the same species started calling, and soon the jungle nearby was echoing with the loud calls of these birds. I was thoroughly enjoying myself and hadn’t thought about my fellow passengers sleeping in the hammocks in the deck below us. That was until an Italian woman came up to our deck (with her husband behind her) screamed at me in Italian, and then slapped me hard in the face! For two seconds I was so shocked I just stared back at her, then I said slowly and clearly in Spanish “If you do that again, I’m going to throw you overboard!”. I was completely serious and already calculating which side of the boat she would fly over. She muttered something under her breath and then retreated with her husband back below decks. The birds continued calling to us from the shore, but we realised that it was time to head below ourselves and get some shuteye before day three dawned.

I woke up with the mother of all hangovers, but after breakfast was ready for the plan for that day. Ever since we had left Manaus two days previously, a small green canoe had been tied up behind our boat. It was this canoe that we were now going to use to enter a small tributary of the River Negro to explore the rain forest once again. Here are some photos from this canoe trip. I’m sitting at the back smiling.  When we arrived back at the boat after the canoe trip, I lent the guide my umbrella as he seemed to be suffering from the cold rain which had started to fall. 😊

On the last day, we sailed straight back to Manaus, exploring the Anavilhanas River Archipelago, one of the largest in the world, on the way back. We arrived back in Manaus at about 5pm and I headed straight to the hotel, looking forward to being able to sleep in a bed once again. That evening, I was relaxing on the bed in my hotel room when I felt an incredibly strong urge to scratch the mosquito bites above my ankles. I didn’t want to do this, but I soon realised that the need to scratch was stronger than my willpower to resist, so I went down to a chemist’s near the hotel and bought a tube of antiseptic ointment, then returned to the hotel room and one by one scraped off the skin over the bites in order to release the poison below. I then spread ointment on the open wounds and covered them plasters*². Having performed this short operation, I was able to sleep peacefully and comfortably for the first time in three nights.

On my final day before my flight back to Rio, determined to see at least some local wildlife, I went to a small museum in Manaus where there were stuffed versions of the animals I had particularly waned to see, like armadillos and anteaters!

 * Just before Christmas, when I was back in Oman, 5 months after the Amazon boat trip, I noticed sores appear above my ankles. At the time, I thought there were fleas or other bugs in my bed, but then I realised that the sores had appeared in exactly the same places as the mosquito bites in Brazil. Some of the poison must have laid dormant and reappeared once more. Thankfully, this only happened on this one occasion.

*² Entry 4 ‘Band-Aid’ in British English.