Manaus, Brazil (day 1)
In the early morning of Thursday, March 1, we sailed into Manaus. This is a city of almost 2 million people located almost 1000 miles up the Amazon River.
I don’t know about you, but this is not what we would have expected in the interior of the Amazon. Manaus was founded in 1669 but really hit its stride in the second half of the 19th century as the center of the rubber boom, when huge amounts of money flowed through. Rubber trees are native only to the Amazon region, so this area had a monopoly on rubber (one of the essential ingredients of the industrial revolution) and there were strong laws to protect that monopoly. Natives were ruthlessly exploited as laborers to go through the rainforest where the trees were scattered & tap out the latex. However, in 1876 a fellow named Henry Wickham smuggled 70,000 rubber tree seeds to England, where they were grown into trees in Kew Gardens in London & transferred to British possessions in Asia, the source of most rubber today. Wickham was branded a criminal & traitor in Brazil, but was knighted in England.
During the height of the rubber boom local rubber barons built fabulous mansions & even an opera house. The famous Teatro Amazonas (trust me, its famous even though you and we may never have heard of it before) is an elaborate pink & white structure, all of which was imported from Europe. Even the wood floors & seats, made of Brazilian wood, were manufactured in Europe & then sent here. It took 15 years to build, was opened in 1896, and has hosted many world-class performers (there are no highways here, so the only way for performers & the components of the building to get to Manaus was by boat, & now by plane).
We took a tour of the Teatro. The orchestra was rehearsing on stage and the concert hall was quite elaborate (remember, every bit was imported from Europe & shipped up the river). It was very rainy that morning (this is a rainforest, after all), so that is why Mary looks a little soggy in these pictures.
Upstairs were several salons with inlaid wood floors, painted ceilings and a porch with statues on the corners. We had to put slippers over our shoes to protect (and help polish) the floors.
A lego model of the Teatro was on prominent display in the front corridor.
Next to the Teatro is the Palacio da Justica. The woman with the umbrella in the first picture is the orchestra’s concertmistress.
We went to see the Cathedral, officially the Nossa Senhora Conceicao Catedral, which was nice & not overly elaborate.
There were some nice mosaic sidewalks near the Teatro, reminiscent of Copacabana in Rio, and we passed the clock tower & many vendors’ stands.
We visited a building called the Palacio Rio Negro, which was originally a rubber baron’s mansion but is now a cultural center. Inside were some beautiful wooden stairs & rooms (presumably made in Europe too) & some unusual paintings, including one depicting Amazon women warriors attacking the Teatro with flights of angels descending. Another showed the first flight of a Brazilian named Dumont who, they claim, invented the airplane before the Wright Brothers (a claim not accepted by anyone outside Brazil, as far as we can tell). Just looking at that thing you can tell that it could never achieve controlled flight.
Of course, we found the Biblioteca Municipal (although it seemed too small to be the central library of such a large city) and we also walked by the old Customs House, built in England and then disassembled and transported here piece by piece.
The dock area of Manaus is particularly interesting. The river’s height varies by some 40 feet from the dry season to the wet season (we are about halfway through the wet season now so there is still quite a bit of rising yet to come). So they have built floating docks, which rise & fall with the river. Also near the dock are the ruins of a block of old buildings, reduced now to their interesting facades with vines & trees growing through the openings.
We had a beautiful sunset, then that night we had a Folklorico show on board the ship depicting Amazonian dancing from the Indians through the Samba. The pictures are pretty fuzzy but they give you an idea. After that we went to bed, having had a very full day & needing to get up early the next day.
Boca de Valeria, Brazil
On Wednesday, February 29, we stopped for a few hours in Boca de Valeria, a tiny Amazon village of about 75 people. This was quite a change from all the cities with millions of folks. While it gives an idea of the lifestyle of rural Amazonia, since cruise ships have started visiting here it has changed some. We saw a couple of satellite TV dishes & we were told that some of the monetary influx from the ships has been used to improve the schools in the area, at least one of which now has a computer.
The locals have also adapted to the ship visits to earn a few dollars. On ship days people come from all over the area & some dress themselves or their children in colorful feathered costumes. Some of the children have exotic rainforest pets like sloths & monkeys. They then put themselves on display & request a dollar from anyone who wants to take a picture (you won’t see any of those here). So, it has become kind of commercial and Disney-fied, in a rudimentary way. We discovered later that all of the children we saw were from out of the village, because the village children were all in school while we were there.
Anyway, it was high water when we were there, so much of the land was covered with water as we went into the town.
The village consists of a small church & a few small rickety looking houses built on stilts to accommodate the rise & fall of the river.
What you can’t see in the last picture is a dog that was sacked out lying on his side in the road in front of the church steps, while people were walking all around him, probably thinking “how boring, another tourist day.” The town was full of chickens, running loose on the muddy roads & under houses.
This is a river village, so of course there were lots of boats on the shore.
We also saw some interesting rocks & funghi.
We were there too and not to forget, these folks live in the rainforest (lots of it).
Several enterprising folks got into canoes & paddled (or motored) out to the ship, where they importuned passengers entering or returning from the tenders to take pictures & give money. One young fellow had a pet sloth with him, which he would hold up to the tender entrance & sometimes the sloth would grab onto the ship.
We left Boca de Valeria in early afternoon and there was a nice & calm sunset on the way to Manaus.
Santarem, Brazil
After leaving Belem we sailed north around the Ilha de Marajo to reach the primary mouth of the Amazon river. The Amazon, of course, is the largest river system in the world by far. It emits more water into the ocean (46,000,000 gallons per second) than the next 7 largest rivers combined. Of its 15,000 tributaries, no fewer than 14 are at least 1000 miles long. At its widest point the Amazon is almost 35 miles wide, and its mouth is 250 miles wide. The Ilha de Marajo at its mouth is larger than Switzerland. So, through the next few days, the big thing to see (in size as well as importance and interest) is the river itself.
We entered the river early in the morning of Monday, February 27, and we crossed the equator going south in mid-afternoon. So pretty much all we saw that day was lots of river & rainforest.
The Amazon basin contains well over half of the Earth’s remaining rainforest, and it is shrinking (at the hands of human exploiters) at an average rate of more than 9,000 square miles per year. Between 2001 and 2010 an area of rainforest estimated to be about twice the size of Portugal was lost. The loss of this rainforest, which cannot grow back for hundreds of years once it is cut down, would have a large scale impact on the world’s climate (as if global warming weren’t scary enough).
On Tuesday, February 28, we came to Santarem, our first stop on the Amazon. It is a small city of a couple hundred thousand, and there really isn’t much to see there. Some people went on river excursions to fish for Piranha (they caught very few) or to a river resort nearby, but we decided just to walk through the town & see the river culture. The big thing to see here is called the “meeting of the waters.” This is where the blue Tapajos river & the muddy Amazon intersect & flow together for a number of miles before blending. You could see this from the ship but in Santarem they have built a small tower on top of a hill that gives a better view.
One of the publications on the ship invited us to see this “unique natural phenomenon.” However, since we will see another (supposedly more dramatic) meeting of the waters two days later in Manaus it is obviously not unique, just rare. But rare is still pretty good.
Santarem has the obligatory cathedral on a hill, a rather unusual blue one with a similarly painted gazebo across the street. But other than some brightly painted streets (which we have seen a lot in Brazil) there isn’t too much else. We did see an unusual statue of a parrot and we passed a statue of a turtle in the bus (but I couldn’t get a picture of it). So we got on the bus & went back to the ship.
Belem, Brazil
On Sunday, February 26 we came to Belem (Bethlehem), a city of a couple of million located on the Rio Para, southernmost branch of the mouth of the Amazon. Founded in 1616, Belem was the financial clearinghouse for the rubber industry that dominated the Amazon region in the late 19th & early 20th centuries.
Our ship was anchored a few miles down river, and the tenders dropped us at the village of Icoaraci. Village it may be but it had a (rather tumbledown) public library!
We were driven into Belem by a shuttle bus & dropped off at an old warehouse complex on the water that has been converted into shops & restaurants. It was a rainy day but there were nice views of the flowing river from behind the complex.
From there we walked to the Mercado Ver-o-Peso (“verify the weight market”). Begun in 1688, the name reflects the strict Portuguese taxes on everything entering or leaving Amazonia. In the market were live chickens, ducks & goats, as well as colorful fruits we had never seen before.
Not far away was the old port, which was crowded with the ubiquitous Amazon river boats, on which people live, sleeping in hammocks. Vultures & egrets patrol the port. The fourth picture below is a painting near the port, not a street.
Of course Belem has an elaborate cathedral, built in 1755, and there was a clock tower that does not look like Big Ben (but this time there was no claim that it does).
We visited the Forte de Presepio, erected in 1616 as the first building in Belem, but did not tour it since the signs are all in Portuguese. Here, and at many other places in Brazil, there were vendors selling coconuts, which are very popular.
Finally, there were several interesting mosaic sidewalks, quite different from what we saw in Rio.
It was Sunday in Belem so a lot was closed & there weren’t a lot of people out & about. We started to walk to the theater, about a third of a mile away, but we found ourselves on empty streets which made Mary uncomfortable, so we went back to the shuttle bus. We found out there that a woman from our ship had been attacked not far from the warehouse restaurants by a woman with a knife (who, we were told, had been sniffing glue, a problem in this city apparently). A couple of other passengers have been mugged in other cities (one right outside the dock in Recife). So maybe turning back from the empty streets was the correct move.
Fortaleza, Brazil
We arrived in Fortaleza (Fortress) on Friday, February 24. It is another big city (about 3 million) with skyscrapers lining its beachfront like Miami Beach.
I could think of only two reasons for stopping here: (1) its on the way, and (2) its our last docking port until we leave the Amazon, so we needed to fill up on water. A shuttle bus took us to the older part of town, but really it wasn’t much fun to walk around. Narrow, crowded sidewalks, lots of traffic, people set up all over the sidewalk selling stuff (and not interesting stuff) – altogether it was not a very pleasant city.
We saw two buildings of note. First was the Metropolitan Cathedral, a 20th century building that is the 3rd largest cathedral in Brazil. It is in a European style, with flying buttresses no less, and we were told it was inspired by the cathedral of Cologne (I have seen the cathedral of Cologne, & it is much more elaborate & beautiful than this one).
The other building was the Teatro Jose de Alencar (named after a 19th century Fortalezan writer). Approaching it on the street you see an ornate but fairly conventional Italianate (we were told) building.
But when you walk through to the inner courtyard you come upon the actual theater, which is made largely of iron in an Art Nouveau style.
It was a whimsical combination, which we enjoyed.
On our way back to the shuttle bus we walked through the Praca Jose de Alencar, where so-called comedians pass the hat and if you don’t put something in it you become the butt of some nasty jokes. Since we don’t speak Portuguese we decided to skip this entertainment, and we walked on through the Praca dos Martires (park of the martyrs) where there was statuary, fountains and a cooling canopy of trees (have I mentioned that in this part of the world it is HOT?).
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UPDATE on Vitoria: You may recall (you can look back if you don’t) that we showed you a church in Vitoria dedicated to Our Lady Of The Good Death & speculated that there might be an interesting story behind that title. Since then, our friend Rita Reimer found the story & sent it to us to share with you:
The Sisterhood of Our Lady of the Good Death (Irmandade da Nossa Senhora da Boa Morte) is a small but renowned Afro-Catholic religious group in the state of Bahia, Brazil. Founded in the early 19th century as a Church-sponsored beneficent Sisterhood for female African slaves and former slaves, it became one of the oldest and most respected worship groups for Candomblé, the major African-based religion in Brazil. Presently reduced to about thirty members (from 200 or so at its height), most of them over fifty, it still attracts worshipers every year, especially at its August festival.
BADER JOURNAL 