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Hello all! We have not long been in Manaus after our boat trip down the Amazon. Of course there is no internet access on the boat or in the little towns between and a fair amount has happened so it may take a while to update you!
(Mon 15th Oct) The bus journey from Rio to Belem wasn´t quite as bad as we had anticipated. We made loads of stops to get food and sleeping wasn´t so bad as we had a double seat each. We arrived in Belem at about 4pm and got a taxi straight to the hostel.
When we arrived at the HI hostel, the guy couldn´t speak a word of English. We managed to communivate that we wanted a dorm room for two. He charged us R$28 each and proceeded to say something about upstairs and downstairs in Portugese. When a lady motioned for me to follow her upsatirs and a guy took Neil in the opposite direction, we realised that we had to sleep in seperate dorms! A little while later the manager of the hotel (who could speak a little English) approached us and told us that we had been undercharged and the rooms we had should have been R$38. He was quick to mention that if we bought a Hostelling International card from him for R$40 then he´d keep the price as it was....we bought the cards thinking that it would probably save us money in the long run. It wasn´t until later on when two English girls arrived in my dorm that i found out he had used the same trick on them!
(18th Oct) On Thursday morning we took a walk dowm to the ferry docks to try and have a look at some of the boats that sail between Belem and Manaus. As soon as we got there a guy latched himself on to us asking if we were wanting to go to Manaus, stupidly we said yes and so after that he wouldn´t leave us alone! He took us to his ´captain´who tried to sell us some tickets but we couldn´t understand what he was saying or what we were buying so we told him we´d leave it and maybe come back later. Of course he wasn´t happy with this and his little friend followed us out of the dock and up the road. We had a slight suspision that he was going to follow us all the way back to our hostel but Neil managed to wave him off. Eventually we decided to buy the tickets from the hostel and managed to get them for R$100 each instead of the R$140 we had previously been offered. The rest of the afternoon was spent sleeping as we had to pick Sarah up from the airport at 12.30pm.
We took a taxi to the airport at 11.30pm. When we got there we realised that her flight had been delayed and wasn´t due to arrive until 2am! So we sat and waited....When Sarah arrived she was really tired as she had been travelling for more than 24 hours. We drove back to the hostel and went to bed!
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