Background
Amazonas State and Manaus
- largest state 606K
- 3.3 mil people
- Export consumer goods
- Geographic prox to Venezuela
- Manaus is the largest city, some figures say 1.7 million, others 1.2, others 2.0.
- It is on Rio Negro. Mosquitoes aren’t a problem. The river that is considered the Amazon is the second river that joins the Rio Negro downstream from Manaus. It is called the Solimoes Amazonas, or Rio Salimoes
- Today products are manufacturing assembly, timber, brazil nuts petroleum. Manufacturers include Ebrarear, Harley Davidson, and most consumer electronics giants. The incentive is that Manaus was made a free trade port.
- On the map, note that Manaus has only a couple roads out, and those aren’t good. One goes north to Venezuela and Guana. The other eventually goes south, though that is a bad road. Better to head east. So the only practical approaches to Manaus are by river and by air.
Rubber
- Rubber was like a “gold rush” to Amazonia, with Manaus as center
- In 1786 a Brit botanist collected seeds and started growing rubber in plantations in East. That ended the golden age.
Tourist info for Manaus
- MAN-OW-ews
- We dock downtown at a floating dock
- There will be shuttle bus from floating dock to terminal (about a third to half mile)
- ATMs in terminal
- Once into the terminal You will walk through an area that looks like a big beer hall. They serve the beer 1 – 4 liters with a “stick” in it with ice to keep the beer cold
- There’s a green sign to follow to the city. You will walk on a long ramp. Come to a open bus terminal. Be careful.
- There are old buildings in the terminal area that will be refurbished. For now, they are “ruins.”
- Then you come into a gated park with an iron fountain from Glasgow. Very, very important to have iron stuff.
- Walk past clock tower to Opera House… 20 minute walk.
- Opera House: Not a working concert venue. Mostly a museum- tourist thing. Opera house is closed on Sunday. Costs $10 or $5 for seniors for a tour. Hand painted curtain. Reception area has beautiful inlaid floor. Chandeliers are spectacular.
- Not in walking distance, other place to visit: Palicio Rio Negro. Open week days, no charge. Take cab.
- Big ships can’t go further than Manaus.
- There is a market within walking distance.
- Want a ride? Promise a free shuttle bus to store. Those jewelry stores own the mines. Don’t go unless you are interested in $1K or more. Times are tough for jewelry, so might get a deal. Price paid: don’t know if better than everyplace else. It is 40 minutes plus a sales presentation and then a 45 minutes to wait to go back to the ship. He wouldn’t recommend it
- There is a river boat cruise to see the rivers. Also go to the island to see how people live. See rubber demo and manioc again. Can be very muddy. Might see giant lily pads but this is not the season. You will also see very colorful neighborhood
- One of tours goes to an army zoo. Illegal to take pets from forest. So army takes the pets and puts them in this “zoo.”
- Manaus by night
- Alive with music, performances
- Stay on main street
Our Experience
In a sentence, Manaus represents the best and worst of the Amazon we visited. The best was a tour that went by boat to Lake January, a smallish lake across from Manaus, between the Rio Negro and the Amazon. It was a nature experience, which only works when you have a guide that specializes in bugs and birdwatching. The worst, though still an adventure, is downtown Manaus. Downtown is dirty and gives a feeling of impending doom. You feel like you need to run back to the ship and get a bath. The rush of people, the thousands of small stalls selling Everything, the dirty streets, the drop dead people lying in the streets, the drop dead beautiful women, before they get fat after having kids… The city is out of a science fiction movie. It had a opulent past that suddenly ended many years ago. The entire downtown has been more or less left to decay since. Maybe downtown Detroit is the closest example.
The performance
Last night, the 15th, we had a performance by a local dance group. The theme was a history of dance in the region, starting with Indian dances and ending with Carnival. It was interesting and both Chris and I thought the same thing: dance hadn’t really changed over the entire history of the region. You might even go so far as to say that the costumes haven’t changed either. The group was mostly teens. They were scantly dressed for most of the dances. I’ll have some videos posted when I get home.
{Videos here}
Our Adventure Downtown
Saturday we thought we had a city bus tour reserved. We didn’t. The daily Princess Patter did not have the tour listed, so we looked on the tour schedule sheet and it indicated our tour was on “day 2,” meeting at 1:30. Our ticket had a date of Jan. 16, so we assumed day 2 was Jan 16 and we were to meet a 1:30. We went to the meeting place and no one was there. After some asking around, we found the right person and she said that we had missed our tour. It was at 8:15 or 8:30. She had sent a special note around and she was sure we had received a it. We certainly didn’t recall it. Since I bought the ticket within the past 2 days, and she said that she sent the note out early in the cruise and then sent a reminder a couple of days ago, I think that we just got missed.
So, we had no tour. We were able to exchange the tickets for a Sunday tour.
So we ventured into the town. Walking around formed our opinion this was a dirty, almost surrealistic city. Perhaps there are other areas of the city that would change our opinion. Perhaps this is like downtown Detroit, outside the Greek town, and we would find a different scene in the suburbs.
We were looking for some thongs for our daughter, the famous ones from Santarem, but we could not find them. We did see that, except perhaps for consumer electronics, this is an expensive city. Since this is Saturday, the sidewalks, curbs, and stores were flooded with people, which added to the discomfort.
I’ll link to an album of pictures later, so you can see for yourself.
{Album here}
Travel Hints:
As described in the lecture, we are docked near the port terminal. The port terminal is like the Chinese rail station- the focus of travel activity for the city. However, we are not at the one berth that has a walkway going directly into the city. Instead, we are at a floating dock. Therefore, in order to get into the city, take the free bus from our dock to the terminal, which is a ride of maybe 1/4 to 1/3 mile.
From the place where you are dropped off, go to the left side of the building to enter. Once inside, you will be in a glassed in area build for receiving cruise passengers. There is an information service and, most importantly, the only clean bathrooms you will find in the city. Consider aligning your walking plans to these bathrooms.
Walk to the left out of this enclosed area into an area that looks like a food court of a mall. Start watching for the signs, in English, hanging from the ceiling. You’ll continue more or less straight ahead, parallel to the river, entering a beer hall. This is the hall that has the large beer reservoirs at each table. There is a column down the center of the reservoir that is filled with ice to keep the beer cold. It’s a lot of beer, so, unless you want to pee a lot and get drop dead drunk, you’ll need to be with a group of four or more.
From there, take the ramp to the right, which leads to a suspended walkway to the street. To your left note the formerly elegant facades of some crumbling buildings.
Once on the street you will be facing a roadway that has 3 pieces. It is a busy bus stop, part bus station. Be careful crossing all three. The buses and cars come around a corner at a good speed, and if you miss seeing one, …
Once across all three, you can go a couple of ways. You can visit the Cathedral directly in front of you, and then turn left after you leave the Cathedral by the long stair ramp. Or you can turn right and go to the end of the block. There you will see, to your left, a small clock tower. Though this landmark isn’t very high, it does help orient you. Just keep coming back to it. Turn and go past the clock and continue up the street for shopping or to go to the Amazon Theater. Go to the right to get into the common man’s shopping or to go to the Market.
Use the tallest building in town, labeled something du Amazonas… a government building, naturally, as a landmark if you get lost. |
Our Lake January Tour
This was the best tour of the trip. We disembarked from our ship and walked to a nearby riverboat. We cast lines and started downriver, eventually coming to the meeting of the waters:
In this picture, the cafe latte brown of the Amazon is joining the dark Rio Negro waters near the top of the picture.
We turned down a “shortcut” that lead to Lake January. During this part of the cruise we were given a lecture on the destruction of the Amazon forest, how that and global warming had led to lack of rain, though last year was the highest rain total in 50 years, which he also blamed on global warming. He then ranted about the government: they weren’t doing this, they did this stupid thing, etc. He emphasized the story of the Trans Amazon highway. He said the engineers did not consider the annual floods, which can change water levels 30 to 40 feet. Thus a good part of the roadbed would be or is under water for 6 or 7 months of the year. The roads can’t be maintained, they led to deforestation, etc. He railed about the bridge being built across the river, connecting Manaus to two villages of 25K. He said it would have built so many hundred schools.
He also told about a government program where everyone was given so much money per child, apparently considered a lot for the poorer segment of the population, to keep their kids in school. The unintended consequence was that women had more children so they could receive more from the government.
I considered his entire performance inappropriate for a tourist activity. It certainly had the opposite of the intended effect on me.
My Soapbox:
If his position is the rule, then it shows that the working class assumes the government should take care of them and solve all problems. If they just had the right government, all would be fixed and they would have no problems. They have swallowed the global warming bilge hook line and sinker, blaming it for everything, even if they are referring to contradictory effects. (One fact that is commonly mentioned, even in the Lonely Planet series, an admittedly leftist-leaning travel company, is that the Amazon creates 20% of the world’s oxygen. OK, first, that’s wrong on the face of it. Algae create most of the world’s oxygen. (reference) Second, then they should support CO2 generation, since it makes for healthier forests: CO2 is the forest’s food.) There are layers upon layers of contradiction coming from this guide and others. A couple: the “way it was is the best way, the one “in balance.” Well, first, decay causes both CO2 and methane. So the natural flooding creates a lot of pollution. Methane is a more effective greenhouse gas than CO2. Second, the soils are poor and cutting down the forest leaves a nutrient poor soil- they can’t grow anything on it. OK, let’s look as S. Carolina’s red soil. It has some of the same problems and probably, left alone would be as sterile as they claim the highland Amazonian soil is. (The floodplain soil is topic for another discussion.) But, what is happening now is that the government is enforcing a policy where the small farmer, even those whose families have been here for millennia, can no longer subsist. The laws are draconian and cost a lot for the poor farmer to implement. The land will be sold to the state or to large companies and the farmers will be added to the city barrios. The soil needs to be rehabilitated: ph neutralized, and nitrogen and phosphorus added to make sustainable soil. The issue is how to obtain those raw materials necessary to fortify the soil and how to do it given the rain cycle. I’m not an agronomist, but I suspect growing soybeans, harvesting, then plowing the plants under or letting the fields set for a year, then growing soybeans and other crops that will enhance the soil is part of the solution, not the problem. I don’t know the details of the geographic history, but I have read some information that suggests that limestone is the bedrock of the region. Use that as the neutralizer. Anyway, I’ve gone on long enough. The guide was haranguing us as a captive audience, and he was, at the least, ignorant of the full picture, and suggested a corporate lack of initiative on the part of the Amazonians to do the heavy lifting themselves instead of relying on government. |
In Lake January we docked at a floating “recreation” complex. It had a knick-knack shop and a restaurant; kind of a Cracker Barrel on a raft. We got into 12 passenger long boats for a cruise of Lake January. I would say Lake January is actually a “bay” of the Amazon. It has a narrow inlet/outlet and, at its widest, it is probably 1/3 mile wide. It is long and winding. We were told that, as the rainy season progresses, the Lake becomes somewhat indistinguishable from the river around it.
Since our guide was a bird watcher, we were able to see- due to his knowledge of bird calls and where to look, a number of birds species. I won’t list them here and I don’t have a camera that can provide good pictures. None-the-less, it was a treat.
We saw the floating gardens, where the locals grow their food on old boats or rafts, to keep the gardens from flooding. We also saw several fishing nets. He said that the people clear an area of the ever present water grasses and reeds and put in a net. They look like gill nets. At 11 they go out to the nets and find the fish they want for lunch. They cook and eat. At dinner time, they repeat. So they eat fish every day and don’t need to refrigerate or preserve any meat.
When we returned, we took a long, wooden bridge over the forest. He showed how far up the river rises- the trees have a water mark, which was perhaps 20 feet more than it was today. We saw the big pond lilies, an orchid, and a couple new species of birds, including parrots and a woodpecker the same size or bigger than a piliated.
We returned to the big boat for the cruise home, which was uneventful save for the haranguing guide.
(Videos and photos to be added)
City Tour
Sunday we went on the city tour. First stop was the Opera House. It was interesting.
Flashes weren’t allowed inside, and wouldn’t work anyway. I found that videos did a good job. So, rather than say a lot of words, I’ll let the videos speak for themselves.
{Videos to be added here.}
Next stop was an Indian museum. This was in a Catholic school. The guide was an Indian who grew up in the rain forest and had even returned after his education to live as an indigenous Indian with his family. He spoke good English. I learned some things. Here’s a picture of a way they kept babies and toddlers occupied while they went about their work. Look familiar?
The next stop was the Military Zoo. It was small, but we did get a look at some of the animals. A slide show will suffice to illustrate.
We were running late, so we went back to the ship. On the way I took videos of our drive, so you can see the city for yourself. I had to take the videos out the side, so things go by almost in a blur. I did learn how to minimize the blur, so the pictures get better as time passed.
{videos of city drive here}
