Equipo Williams

We flew from São Paulo to Manaus last Friday afternoon and got to our hotel around one in the morning. Jessie had booked the tour (AmazonGeroTours) and the operator of the agency picked us up from the airport and gave us a few pointers on Manaus.

We flew from São Paulo to Manaus on Friday afternoon and got to our hotel around one in the morning. Jessie had booked the tour and the operator of the agency picked us up from the airport and gave us a few pointers on Manaus.

I’ve always wanted to see the opera house in Manaus since watching Fitzcarraldo; people who haven’t seen Fitzcarraldo have generally responded with a “that sounds interesting” when I’ve told them I’m going, while people who have seen the movie have responded mostly with raised eyebrows. It is a neat building and the square in front and blocks around it are charming. The whole town was incredibly wealthy at the beginning of the twentieth century with the rubber boom and the buildings are beautiful if rather faded.  After rubber seeds were smuggled out of Brazil in the late nineteenth century the British planted rubber plantations in their colonies that eventually started out-producing the Amazon rubber in the 1920s. 

Our hotel was just to the north of the opera house so that was our base of operations for the day. We walked around Manaus for the morning, had lunch at a vegetarian place (antidote for the normal meaty Brazilian fare), had a rest through the hot part of the day, and then went out for ice team on the square. The annular eclipse was supposed to be peaking at about 3:19 in Manaus, but it was a cloudy and smoky day. It definitely got darker, but it turns out the sun is really bright and scattered really bright light is still really bright. After a dinner of Portuguese food (not vegetarian) it was back to the hotel to repack and get ready for the trip to into the jungle.

Our tour operator picked us up from our hotel and we walked to their office to meet our guide and the others who traveled into the forest with us. It was a half-hour bus ride to the port on the Río Negro. Manaus is actually on the Río Negro and the junction between it and the Amazon is a few kilometers downstream. The meeting of the waters is very impressive: I knew that the rivers didn’t mix and ran together next to each other for several kilometers and had seen this in google earth. I thought that the satellite resolution was the limiting thing and that there would be a at least a few meters of transition between the rivers when viewed from the water. Nope. One could put a ruler on the surface and have one end clearly in the Río Negro and the other end clearly in the Amazon. It is very sharply defined. Not only are they different colors but the Río Negro is a good 5C warmer and we dangled our hands in the water and felt the transition.

After landing on the Amazon side, we boarded a bus for an hour’s trip down BR319 and then 45 minutes by boat to the lodge. Most of the time the boat can take one all the way to the lodge but we are here at the end of a unusually dry dry season, so we were able to get about a half a kilometer away from the lodge before we ran aground and had to walk the rest of the way.

The lodge was nice: dining hall in the center, comfortable rooms with air conditioning (although the nights were pleasant and we didn’t use it) and plenty of nature all around. The lake in front of the lodge was mostly dry but that afforded for some good bird watching and there was a troop of capuchin monkeys that wandered through about once a day.

Staying at the lodge for four nights let us have a pretty relaxed pace: we did several trips by boat down the river, hiked over to see the locals preparing manioc, and did a couple of hikes through the jungle. We generally did an activity after breakfast and then waited through the heat of the day before heading out again at three in the afternoon. We were at about 3 degrees south of the equator and darkness came on quickly at about 6:00 pm. A couple of times we came back after dark which was pretty exciting.

The wildlife was one of the main reasons we came and we saw a good bit: river dolphins, piranha, jumping fish, several types of monkeys, caiman, butterflies, bullet ants, leaf-cutter ants, and more birds than we can remember.

The unexpected thing I really enjoyed was seeing how the people lived in the area.  There is a very sparse population of people who live along the river, mostly of mixed European and Native ancestry.  Seeing their floating houses, eating with them, and watching them refine manioc was very interesting and an aspect of the forest that I hadn’t considered.

The only downside was that Audrey re-injured her knee while hiking on uneven ground. As I mentioned we visited in the dry season and many of the things that would have been accessible via boat we had to walk to. The ground was muddy since much had recently been underwater and that strained her knee. That required some replanning, and the kids actually did leave by boat since they were light enough while Jessie and I hiked around the shallower parts. The water had receded an additional 6” during our stay but that made quite a difference.