Manaus

As we bring our Brazil trip to a close, maybe a map would be helpful. John was actually quite surprised to learn that we were nowhere near the coast when we were paddling up the Rio Negro. Brazil is one B-I-G country.

Today we left the Ariaú Hotel and began our journey home. But we decided that on our way we wanted to see a bit more of the city of Manaus than its airport. So we made arrangements to spend a day there and see its sights. And, as our flight is not leaving until Wednesday at 3:40 in the morning, we figured we would get a hotel room and sleep in comfortable beds until it was time to get on the plane. 

It did not go according to plan at first. After a long boat ride, we had a long van ride to the Tropical Hotel. We were supposed to me up with a guide there and have a city tour. Unfortunately, he did not show up and we did not have a contact number. So we took a cab into Manaus and checked into our hotel. We asked at the desk there if they could arrange a city tour, and sure enough they did. Our guide was a chain-smoking, obscenity-spouting guy named James. Only 50, though he looked at least a decade older, he had been born in Guyana to a Brazilian mother and an English father. He apparently had lived in Manaus for most of his life. 

He took us first of all to Manaus’s greatest treasure, its opera house. 

You may wonder why there is an magnificent Beaux-Arts opera house 2000 miles into the Amazon jungle. The answer to that is easy. About a century ago this was one of the richest places on earth. And that was because of Manaus was the rubber capital of the world. 

A little history here. Rubber is native to the Amazon. The Portuguese discovered the Indians playing with balls made from the sap on of the local trees. They were intrigued, but did not see much use for it. Neither did the rest of the world, though the British discovered that it could erase pencil markings. Natural rubber is a somewhat problematic substance. It cracks when the weather is too cold. And when the temperature rises, it begins to melt. 

A number of chemists experimented with adding substances to rubber to make it more useful. Almost by accident, Charles Goodyear discovered that mixing sulphur with rubber and heating it made rubber waterproof and durable. Unfortunately for him, a British chemist made the same discovery about the same time and managed to patent the process first. 

Almost overnight, rubber became one of the most valuable substances in the world and the “rubber barons” of Manaus were the among the richest men in the hemisphere. The Brazilians tried to keep a monopoly on rubber. But British smuggled a rubber tree out of the jungle and set up enormous rubber plantations in Malaysia. The fortunes of Manaus collapsed almost as fast as it arose. 

But fortunately, the opera house and some other grand old buildings remained as a memorial to that era. James told us to go inside of the opera house and sign up for a tour in English. We did so, and had a wonderful young lady guide us through the edifice. She pointed out that the ceiling shows the base of the Eiffel Tower. 

Note the "governor’s box." Brazil had abolished the monarchy about a decade before the opera house was built, but old architectural habits are hard to break. 

Like many nineteenth-century opera houses, the boxes have limited sight lines, and today the seats on the floor are those most in demand.

The square outside of the opera house is quite charming. There is a monument to the various rivers of the world in the center. The architecturally-uninteresting parish church of São Sebastian is in the rear. 

Our guide assured us that the light and dark on the paving stones represented the confluence of the Rio Negro and the Amazon, but we saw the same kinds of designs in Rio. I believe this kind of stonework is called “Portuguese pavement” though I have no idea whether they actually have this in Portugal or not. 

Away from the plaza and the opera house, the rest of Manaus is just pretty ugly. We looked at some of the ships moored in the river.

There is a Victorian market place that was in fact build by the British. James, our guide, is on the left. He was taking a short break between cigarettes.

We walked through the market. John was fascinated by the guys pitching watermelons from the truck to a stall. 

Some of the fish looked a little different from the stuff we get at Ralph’s.

We returned to the plaza to go to a juice bar. The Brazilians are very fond of “sugo” and there are places to get fruit juices on every corner. Sitting there, we watched the plaza start to come to life for the evening.

In the late afternoon, once our tour was over, we returned to the hotel. We found a nearby churrascaria for dinner. We’ll be on the plane soon and back home to Los Angeles!

We’ll just be bringing home wonderful memories and a couple odd souvenirs.

Amazonian Wonders

Today will be our last full day at the Ariaú. And while I do not think I will return here, I have had a wonderful time and will leave with fond memories of this nearly deserted resort. We woke up to heavy rain.

Globo has a corrugated steel roof, so when it rains you really hear it. But as the porches are well-covered we just opened all the windows and enjoyed the downpour. After all, when you are in the world’s foremost rain forest, how can you complain about the rain?

We had a special excursion planned for this morning. The regular trip was to another, slightly larger, native village. But Anna, the radiologist from Rio and her daughter Maria, really wanted to do one of the optional trips. They had to have four people for it, so we agreed to go. In the end, Josh and the whole Ukrainian family went, too. We had two excursion for the morning:  first, we would swim with the dolphins, and second, we would see an actual indigenous group show us some of their “rituals."

I had some reservations about the dolphins. John wondered if they were penned in and that is how we would get to swim with them. I I hoped not. And, as it turned out, I need not have worried. They were not imprisoned, but merely bribed.

We took the “canoe” out into the middle of the Rio Negro. There was a small platform moored out there. We disembarked. They put life jackets around our waists. The look was not flattering to anybody, particularly me, so I wisely deleted those photographs. We went into the water. One of the guys from the hotel had a cooler filled with fish. He tossed a couple in the river. At first nothing happened. Then we started to see little breaks in the water. At this point, we all went in. 

Pretty soon a whole pod of dolphins, aware that this was a free buffet, were swimming around us. The guide was expert at getting them to jump out of the water to get the fish.

One of the unique things about this species of dolphin, besides the fact that they like fresh water, is that they are vaguely pinkish, particularly on their bottom.

After a while, they kept checking us out even when we did not have any fish handy. 

After a while, the fish were all eaten and the dolphins did not see much point in sticking around. As they left, we did too. 

We traded our canoe for a speed boat here and we headed up the Negro and to the other side. The trip took about forty minutes. Along the way we saw some of the classic blue and white Amazon boats. Larger versions of this craft carry residents from one Amazonian city to another. Small ones, like the one below, carry tourists.

We finally pulled up to the shore. We walked up a flight of steps that had been carved into a small sandstone bluff. At the top we found something that looked like a Tlingit long house, but made mostly out of grasses.

We went inside where we were greeted by a man who seems to have some kin of leadership role in the group. He explained that they would be sharing the music and dances that they performed when visitors from other tribal communities came. 

A group of young men were lined up to perform first.

Some of the women just waited for their turn in other dances.

Although the music and dancing were great, John was even more fascinated by the youngest children from the tribe.

For the last dance, some of the dancers came up and chose some of the visitors to dance with them. Nobody wanted me apparently, but John was picked right away. 

They danced around the gathering space and then outside.

The tribe makes various handicrafts and we did some shopping at the store they had set up. Here is Anna, the doctor from Rio, in the center, and Francisco, our guide, on the right. 

We were allowed to wander about the village. It was obvious from the clothes on the clothesline that they wear western dress most of the time and save this traditional garb only for visitors or ceremonial occasions. We even saw a satellite TV dish. But we were not under any illusions that we had wandered so deep into the Amazon that we were meeting people untouched by Western ways. 

We saw some pets in the village including dogs and some birds.

Finally, we had our pictures taken with the group before we left. 

We returned for the same old stuff for lunch. After that, we thought we would relax in our room. But John brought a roll back with him, and before we knew it, we had visitors. Lots of them.

They are pretty insistent on getting anything they can, and somehow they seem to have learned that getting close is sometimes rewarded. 

We decided to pass on the afternoon trip and just spent a quiet remainder of the day enjoying our Amazon tree house. We leave early tomorrow for Manaus and from there to home.

Piranhas!

We woke up in our cute little house up in the canopy of the rain forest. I think it is the only room here with satellite TV. Almost all of it is in Portuguese, however, but John loves to channel surf even when he does not understand a word of what is being said. 

He also loves all the windows.

One of the great things about the Rio Negro is that there are few mosquitos here. The river gets its name from the amount of decaying organic matter it accumulates through the rainy season and spring flooding. This material is sufficiently acidic to make the river a poor breeding grounds for the nasty little pests. 

Today we had a hike through the rain forest. This is still the very beginning of the rainy season, and you can still walk on the forest floor. In a few months, this will be completely flooded with six to ten feet of water. I am sure I would find that interesting, but somehow being able to see all the layers of the forest was great. 

I have to admit that I wanted the Amazon forest to look a little more exotic than it does. I wanted it to be filled with the giant prehistoric looking palms and ferns. Instead, it looks much more like the forests I grew up with in the northeast or the midwest. The tree are different, of course, but not as different as I expected. Francisco, as usual, explained everything to us. 

The most important trees are the hardwoods. Because of the pattern of flooding, nutrients are found on at the topmost layer of the soil. The trees therefore have extensive root systems on the surface. And for the tall ones, this increases the risk of falling. And so some create unique methods of buttressing the trunk in order to stay upright. 

With kids, we talk about the decomposers in the forest as the FBI:  fungus, bacteria, and insects. We certainly saw a lot of fungus. 

Some of it quite beautiful.

And we came across this substantial termite nest.

Even though we think of the middle and upper layers of the rainforest as supporting the most life, there is plenty of life

and beauty on the forest floor.

On our way back, we saw more bird life.

Francisco amused us on the boat by making little objects out of fronds. He decided that John must be a great hunter.

Not exactly. 

In the afternoon, however, John did prove to be a pretty good fisherman. Our afternoon excision was going fishing. But not just fishing for anything. We were fishing for piranhas!

Once again, Francisco took us out in the canoe. We went a few hundred meters from the dock and then he pulled over to a bank that look just like any other one on the rivulet. We were all given bamboo rods with strings and a hook attached, and everybody was given a handful of what looked like stew beef. We all tossed our rods in the water. And pretty soon we felt something pulling on them. Most of us lost a bunch of beef before we learned when to pull in the rod. John was one of the first to catch one.

And not long after he caught another one. 

Even I managed to catch a couple, though I think I was better at unhooking them and tossing them back for other people.

In fact, all the little ones we did toss in, but kept the big ones for supper. 

In the evening, we walked down to the banks of the Negro. Josh, our companion from Birmingham, England, had found half a dozen alligators sunning themselves there earlier. We were not so lucky, though we did catch glimpses of eyes watching us from the small pond nearby. We marveled at the loveliness of the Amazon sunset

and wondered how much longer the Ariaú Towers would be left.