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Well this blog has been a long time coming! We have been a bit lazy in Brazil (I am actually writing this in Bolivia) to say the least but in our defence we were just doing what the locals do ie. not much.
So I shall start at the start with Rio De Janerio.
To be honest after B.A. we had had enough of big cities and so we spent the best of our 5 days there at Ipanema Beach which was convienently located around the corner from our hostel. It was a balmy 25-27 degrees everyday and we were in heaven after the colder southern countries. We did a day tour around the city which was a good way to take in all the major sights (except Sugar loaf which was closed), and would have been much better if our guide/driver had not got drunk at lunch and spent he afternoon driving around the city like a maniac. The other major highlight for us was all the fresh fruit that was instantly turned into the most delicious, fresh juices while you waited, the sushi in Rio was phenomenal as were the caiprinihnas (an alcoholic beverage made with fruit, suger and local sugar cane rum), so you could say the other highlight was food.
We were keen to get up north as quickly as possible as we only had a month visa and weren´t sure how long it would take us to get around the Amazon on the river boats. So we jumped on a night flight to Fortaleza and had a day wondering around the markets where we bought our hammocks before jumping on an overnight bus to Sao Luis.
By the time we arrived in Sao Luis the next day we were exhausted after 2 days of non-stop travel and hardly any sleep. In that time also the temprature had gone from max 27 in Rio to about a max of about 40 with a relative humidity of about 80%!!!!!!!! needless to say we needed a cold shower and a lie down.
After we had recovered in the afternoon we went for a walk around the town and discovered that we had arrived right in the middle of Bumba Meu Boi a festival that celebrates the legendary death and resurrection of, wait for it, a bull!!! The town itself was very quaint with lots of steep streets and narrow stairways and all the houses were covered in tiles in an effort to combat the heat and humidity (didn´t help in our hostel at all). Along the waterfront were the large government building from by-gone eras proudly rotting away in the over bearing heat. All the pedestrian streets around the main plaza had ben decorated with colourful flags for that evenings upcoming festivities.
So that night after dinner we headed back into town to check out the festival. It was packed with people dancing eating and drinking. On every main street corner there were performers in tarditional African or Portugese dress paying hommage to this mythical bull and all the streets between were filled with food /beverage stalls as well as crazily dressed locals doing their own dances. It was definately a plesant, suprise.
The next day we set off by bus, again, for Belem on the mouth of the Amazon River. We arrived the next day to find the streets full of mangoe trees, to our disappointment they were out of season so none were flowering. There was little to hold our interest in Belem so we set bout trying to book a boat up the Amazon to a town called Santaremand the near by village of Alter do Chao, also known as the Carribean of the Amazon, because of it´s white sand beaches and crystal clear waters. Unfortunately for us while it is the ´dry´ season up here it is also the high water season, when all the rain that falls in the headwaters of the amazon (all over the western half of the continent basically) flows into the amazon propper. This season was also the highest water level since 1953!! So not only was the beach not visable, but it was under at least 4 meters of water, good for swimming but not much else. We didn´t even do much of that as there was a fresh water stingray that wasn´t very agressive, but it´s Indian name translated to ´You-Wish-You-Were-Dead´so we satyed mainly out of the water. It turned out to be a fortuitous stop in any case as Damien had been suffering from some nasty food poisoning and was able to make a much faster recovery away from the boat, crowds, heat and hammocks, although he still spent the best part of three days in bed. One our last day in Alter do Chao Damien, Inaki, Andy, Laure, Steph and I had organised for a guide (we actually it was just Inaki who did the organising as he was the only one with passable Portugese, and so also became our official translator) to take us out for a day first on a walk through the jungle to a beach (flooded) the on a canoetrip through the flooded jungle on the other side of the lake to look for wildlife. The walk was interesting, the guide was very knowledgable and able to point out many things used by the natives as cures (thanks again to Inaki for translating) and remedies for everything from a cold to malaria, to a tree they used to make tea and well everything that could kill or make us seriously ill. In the flooded forset we didn´t see any animals but it was an enjoyable and relaxing experience in itself, to paddle around in the tree tops with little fish darting around through the submerged forset below.
Back to the boat trip! It was a brilliant (apart from the sometimes dodgy food), it was a fabulous way to see how people lived in this region of the world and the wildlife viewing was much better then we had expected.
So once we were on board the boat, earlier the better to secure a good hammock space, we had plenty of time to relax and take in the sights. While waiting to depart Belem we met another aussie Andy, Inaki from the Basque Country (one day they will have their independance) Joe from the UK, Ai from Japan (a nut case I don´t have time to tell you about) and Alex from Brazil. So we had a nice little floating crew for the journey. We also meet two more english girls in Alter do Chao, Steph and Laura.
The cloud formations we saw from the boat were amazing and had me constantly running back to our bags for my camera. It rains only a little on the river due to the lack of trees mainly (I think) but we could see huge stroms out over the jungle and were treated to massive lightening shows and wonderful sunsets just about every evening.
We spotted dolphoins everyday, both the grey and the larger pink river dolphins. We had heard that they were quite elusive, this turned out not to be the case as we would see them a few times everyday in groups of between two and five moving about the river, the more active grey dolphins occasionally jumping and playing as we passed. When I heard pink dolphin, I got the impression of a grey brown maybe pinkish creature, where in fact they were just plain old naked skin coloured pink, and chubby looking, not the most attractive aminals I have seen. Apart from the occasional large blue gray Iguana lazily chewing on leaves of tree we passed, all the other animal sightings were of the feathered kind, mainly parrots, herons, truns, several different birds of prey, kingfishers and the occasional macaw or toucan.
There were also countless villages and huts dotted along the shoreline. As the boats would go past adults and children sometimes no more then 4 or 5 years old would paddle out in their dugout canoes to catch plastic bags of clothing, toys and food that people would throw off the boats to them. Some seemed only to want to ride the bow waves and others a little more adventurous would try to attach their canoes to the boat as it ´sped´ past in order to sell acai, prawns, fish and other local food products such as palm hearts. If you remember the water was the highest it had been in over 50 years. Most of the huts seem to have been built after that time as they all had about half a metre of river water sloshing around in their houses. The houses were on stilts but obviously the occupants were not prepared for such high waters and had to be content with soggy feet for a few months of the year. It was amusing to note that while most of these houses were little more then a square, single roomed, thached roof huts, with no electricity and no running water, apart from the half meter or so that was flowing through their living room, the majority had managed to somehow get satelite dishes attached to their houses or near by trees. Goodness knows where they kept their TVs.
Someone may like to pass this on to Telstra and Optus, even in the middle of the Amazon, on a boat on the Amazon River the Brazilians get mobile reception, yet in Mummell to make a call or send a text one must go across the road and stand on a fence post waving said appliance around in the hope of attracting a weak signal!!! Incidently news also reached us of the death of MJ, and the much happier news that Damien´s Brother and sister in aw welcomed their 4th(!!!!!) georgous child into the world, and Brendan and Tehgan some good friends from Cobar had their 1st. Well done guys :-)
In the end we travelled close to 3000km on the river from Belem to Santarem, to Manaus, then from Manaus to Puerto Vehlo. It´s a big river, the Amazon proper starts in Manaus, where the Rio Negro originating in Colombia meets the Rio Solimones from Peru, and flows roughly 2000km to the coast at Belem. Did i mention it is wide!! There were whole days on the river wher as the boat slowly chugged up one side of the river (to avoid the faster currents in the middle) that the other shore was nothing but a thin distant tree line on the horizon at least 15km away.
The boats them selves were crowded, dirty (the bathrooms were disgusting!!!), noisy and in hammock class they never turned the lights off incase you wanted to get up in the middle of the night to use the loo. Now when I say crowded, I mean at one stage someone may have worked out how many people can sleep comfortably in a hammock on a single deck. However since then they either forgot or don´t care as there were so many people crammed into the boats that you would have someone swinging above and below you and would invariably wake up in the middle of the night with a strangers bum thrust in your face and only the thin lining of a hammok keeping you apart. The Brazilians seemed to care little for the environment/were very lazy throwing all manner of rubbish over the side when there was a bin in parfect working order within a metre of where they were standing. The food on the boat was for the most part edible, but never varied for the daily stale bread and super sweetened coffee for breakfast, and rice, pasta and some form of ´meat´ with maybe a wilted vegetable for lunch and dinner.Thank goodness we stocked up on lovely tropical fruit, snacks and booze before we left each port! On the last leg of our river journey when it was just going to be Damien and I on the boat we shelled out a tiny bit extra cash for a private cabin with air conditioning, luxury!!!
When we arrived in Manaus we discovered that we had about 5 days before a connecting boat to Puerto Vehlo so took a quick trip with another guy, Mario who we met in the hostel, to a small town about 2 hours away that was renouned for waterfalls and caves, Presidente Figuriedo. We walked for several hours one day up the road and through a well preserved national park, with a cranky old macaw to see some waterfalls and got caught in a massive downpour that lasted about half an hour, it was great fun. The next day we went with a guide to some caves used by the local Indian tribes as a hideout years before. We were keen to explore them until we found out that there was a fungus that lived in the caves which released poisonous spores into the air. Although we did venture in a little way and found a huge ugly spider thing with massive pincers that was enough to turn me back anyway. On our way back from the caves we could hear howler monkeys howling (?) through the trees but the guide said they could project their voices for kilometers and were unlikely to see them, which we didn´t.
So that is it for Brazil finally, sorry it´s so long, hopefully not to boring. We are now in Bolivia and about to had of on a jungle tour then on to a wildlife park for some volunteering. Best way to contact us from now will probably be facebook or email, but keep those comments coming it is always good to heard news from home.
We´ll be thinking of everyone in Mummell for Nan´s 80th birthday bash hope you have a great time. Happy Birthday Nan.
Lots of love Bec and Bondy
- comments
Sowmya In all honesty, you might want to fork over a litlte bit of money for good plans. What's $100 for plans when you're probably going to spend $500-$1000 on material to make the hull and a few more thousand dollars for an engine? You don't want to put a $1500 motor on a boat that some guy designed while watching tv, drinking beer, and put on the internet for free. If you're just looking for ideas and whether you can complete the task before buying everything, just look up how to use fiberglass. Your local library will probably have basic plans to build sailboats, canoes, and rowboats. But a speed boat that would go even 30 mph will need a lot more design to it to prevent excessive roll in turning, plane angle, slip, and a variety of other things that 99% of us take advantage of when we steer around a corner at full throttle.