Manaus Brazil

The Murky Depths of the Amazon’s Rio Negro… The Passport Series

/ Curt Mekemson / 2 Comments

The Tropical Hotel in Manaus Brazil.

Having survived swimming in piranha-infested waters, Peggy played Titanic. The Peripatetic Bone decided to get into the act by posing on the rail. The boat lurched and Bone was on his way to reside forever in the murky depths of the Rio Negro. I leapt and made a saving catch as he went over the edge.

Having gone swimming in the piranha-infested waters of the Amazon, Peggy tempted fate again by doing her Titanic pose.

The Peripatetic Bone poses on railing of the M/V Amazon Clipper shortly before he went plummeting toward the murky depths of the Rio Negro.

After being rescued from his fall, Bone was limited to more prosaic activities, such as steering the boat.

We were wrapping up our tour on the M/V Amazon Clipper. There was the village of Novo Alrao to visit and a jungle walk to take. Then we would return to the Tropical Hotel in Manaus. Good-looking Latin men with sharp knives seemed to lurk everywhere. I told Peggy, “No, you can’t bring one home.”

One of our guides. Nice smile, sharp knife/machete.

One of the women applied the word “hunk” to this machete wielding Amazonian who was demonstrating how to open Brazil Nuts. Brazil Nuts, BTW, live in heavy pods high in the trees. Getting hit by one can cause serious damage.

A touch of Disney in the village of Novo Alrao. I assume the building was an elementary school.

I thought this dog in Novo Alrao, Brazil was quite handsome although his ears made his head look small.

These Amazon River boats were beached at the edge of the village.

A Brazilian houseboat came in for resupply when we were in Novo Ariau. Ten of the world’s largest rivers are found in the Amazon Basin. Living and traveling on these rivers makes sense.

I was much more concerned about the soldiers with automatic weapons who filled the Tropical Hotel in Manaus than I was the guys with the machetes. The soldiers surrounded the hotel and were posted in every corridor, at the swimming pool and in the restaurant. A serious looking gunboat cruised back and forth in front of the hotel’s dock.

A sign posted in front of the hotel welcomed the Defense Ministers of North and South America. We had been invaded. We were lucky to still have a room. To escape from constant surveillance, we took a taxi into Manaus to visit the Opera House, public market and waterfront.

Manaus, Brazil has a large colorful market, which is a must see stop on a tour of the city.

The Manaus waterfront. The market is located in the reddish buildings on the right. The boats in the foreground serve as the major form of transportation up and down the Amazon River. Captains wait for the boats to fill before leaving. It can take several days. Passengers bring their hammocks and sleep on the boat.

That night we took photos of the sunset and then finished up our stay by playing cribbage with another couple that had been on the Amazon Clipper with us. He was a CPA out of Texas who specialized in loopholes and apparently cribbage. We were severely trounced. The next day we made the long flight back to Sacramento. Our Amazon adventure was over.

A beautiful sunset capped off our visit to Brazil and the Amazon Rainforest.

An Amazon Boa Went Slithering by… The Passport Series

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Our boat, the Amazon Clipper, docked for the evening deep in the rainforest on a tributary of the Rio Negro River, Brazil.

Peggy and I sat on the upper deck of the M/V Amazon Clipper, sipped a cold beer and watched the Rio Negro River hurry along on its journey to the Amazon.

Dark clouds dumped buckets of rain on the forest and threatened our cocktail hour.  Thunder and lightning upped the ante. One thousand one, one thousand two, one thousand three… I counted to determine how close the lightning was in a ritual dating back to my childhood. Seven seconds equals a mile. When the flash and the boom arrive together, it’s time to worry. Lots.

Dark clouds and rain predicted a stormy cocktail hour in the Amazon rainforest.

Between watching the river and watching the storm, we scanned the rainforest for wildlife. A flock of parrots flew by heading for its evening roost. Our guide informed us that the dark blob we spotted hidden in the trees was a three-toed sloth, a creature famed for sleeping four fifths of the time and pooping once a week. He makes a rare trip to the ground to accomplish the latter and digs a hole with his short, stubby tail.

Peggy and I clinked our beer cans, toasted the sloth and toasted another adventure. Two days earlier we had been buried in work. An 18-hour day out of Sacramento California via Los Angeles and Sao Paulo had eventually deposited us at Manaus, Brazil in the heart of the Amazon. Now we were chugging up a tributary of the Amazon River on a small boat with six fellow passengers and a crew of three.

The Amazon Clipper chugs up the Pagodo River, a tributary of the Rio Negro. Our ‘canoes’ trail behind. The afternoon’s storm has passed by. Soon we will be experiencing the Amazon night.

The Amazon is a world of the BIG: big rivers, big forests, big storms and big snakes. We had met the river, forest and a storm during the afternoon. That evening we met one of the snakes. Our crew took us out in a large canoe to experience the Amazonian night. An eight-foot boa went slithering by us in the river and checked out our boat.

“It’s a baby,” the guide teased. Right. The boat came equipped with a large spotlight for peering into the jungle. Bright, shiny eyes peered back at us along the shore. They were Caiman, small alligator like reptiles. The crew caught one for us to examine more closely back on the Clipper and then turned off the spotlight.

It was don’t see your hands dark. Something plopped in the water. A creature went crashing off through the brush. It wasn’t particularly scary, the guides are expected to return their guests unharmed, but it was interesting, especially the sounds our imaginations turned into bone crushing snakes and ferocious jaguars.

Back on the deck of the Clipper, the Caiman was turned loose. It dutifully whipped its head around and snapped at us before escaping back to the river.

Peggy and I retired to our small room with its bunk beds and porthole window. High humidity and heat had us sleeping on top of the covers with the porthole window open and hopes of no nighttime visitors. Fortunately our bodies had been pumped full of protection to foil disease carrying mosquitoes and other tropical maladies.

We slept fitfully and dreamed of our next adventure, fishing for the legendary sharp toothed Piranha.

This Amazon piranha was hardly a dream. I caught him on a hand-line. Check out the teeth.