4 posts tagged “amazon”
I do not know how much more rice and beans I can eat... I never want to see them ever again, although we had soup today... rice and bean soup.
We passed the eve with a bottle of Caipininha which sounded like a good idea, but the hangover wasn´t. We are now all going insane, spending 5 days on a boat with nothing to do. Nobody speaks English, but the locals are all very friendly. They communicate with sign language and still talk us to death even though we have no idea what they are saying.
Men in Brazil are weird. We weren´t allowed alcohol on the boat, but the bar guy said we could have our bottle on the last night. We asked if he wanted a drink and he replied quite bluntly, no, as I will start a fight if I drink because I want her (pointing to me!!!!).
Brazillian men sometimes treat women as objects which as you can imagine, doesn´t go down well with me at all. Every man I walk past has to stare... it is getting irritating...
We are still on the boat, still cramped although we stopped at a couple of ports today, but only for ten minutes or so. Today we saw more little canoes but this time they were selling fruit and fish.
A little girl , 13 and her brother 10 waited upstream until they saw the boat approach. As it got near, they furiously rowed their little wooden canoe to the boat, slung and iron hook on the side of the boat (still moving at great speed) and moored their canoe to our boat to sell what little they could carry in their canoe. It is amazing how quickly these kids have to grow up and what danger they go to for money to survive.
Today we saw more insects including dragonflies, huge wasps and lots more spiders. Later on in the evening the boat was filled with Beetles... hundreds of the things.... it was a bit gross... I stayed in my hammock.
I have been eaten to death by mosquitos, including bites in my nose and lips... it hurts.
For food today, the menu was rice, beans and chicken....
Sleeping in a hammock is reasonably comfortable. The trick is to go to bed before everyone else and take up all the room... Tony didn´t latch on to this and got no sleep. He was wedged between me and this old Porteguese guy who wasn´t moving for anyone.
It is very very humid on the boat and all our clothes are damp without getting a chance to dry which if fine until you get into your damp hammock and try to sleep. The thunderstorms are amaing to watch though. There is no city lights at all at night and the fork lighting lights up the entire sky. I am feeling better today. The doctor on the boat gave me some weird potion for my sickness and now I feel fine.
Because we are sleeping with the fruit, there are lots and lots of spiders on the boat. I haven´t worked out which ones are poisonous yet. I guess it is just pot luck.
For breakfast we got a bread roll and lunch and tea we had beans, rice and chicken. There is a horrible smell in the canteen which kinda puts you off your food, but it is the only thing to eat and was included in the fare.
After breakfast we hit a bit of the Amazon which was rather poor. every few hundred yards, mothers and children in little wooden canoes would row furiously up to the boat, to catch bread, clothes and other left overs which were thrown into the river by the crew. I think the youngest child we saw was of about 5 years old, rowing his own little canoe.
Sounds Romantic doesn´t it!!! Well 50 pounds for five days, what do you expect. For double that we could have had a cabin, for a few pound more we could have stayed in the air conditioned part of the boat. But being travellers and spending too much money on Beer, we decided we needed to cut back so went third class... how bad could it be?
Our other option for getting to Manaus was to befriend local fishermen and give them a little money for them to take us up stream, but they can be a bit crazy so we opted for the boat.
We got to the boat three hours before departure, and already the boat was full of people. We were in Hammock class without air conditioning. We set up our hammocks in what little space there was left. Each hammock was a foot apart, we were packed in like sardines, amongst boxes of melons, tomatoes and oninons (remember we went third class!).
There were so many people on the boat, I thought we were going to sink. When there was no more room for hammocks, they made hammock bunk beds, placng the hammocks on all different levels. It was the craziest thing I have ever seen.
What could be worse than being cramped up in a hammock amongst 50 other people than being cramped up in a hammock with sea sickness and a thunder storm on its way...
