Adventures in the Amazon Watershed

This part of the story is from Thursday, 1 March and Friday. A previous post related our flight past Angel Falls and a couple of the best pictures of the Falls and the area around them. Now I will show a few more pictures and tell about our flight from Boa Vista to Manaus and the river tour we took to go Piranha fishing.


Our day began slowly; Bob had to obtain liability insurance in order to fly the Mooney in Brazil. His previous policy expired on 28 February. The lady who wrote the policy had been contacted by Adelaide and was supposed to meet us at 0830. At about 1030, she showed up with the policy, money was exchanged and we took off for Manaus at 1154.


It being a short hop to Manaus, we landed there at 1452 making such a perfect aircraft carrier landing (on the short end of the runway!), we had to taxi about a mile to get to the taxiway so we could clear the runway!


We checked into the old and picturesque Manaus Hotel in the heart of the old part of Manaus. Manaus has grown tremendously in the few decades of its existence; it is a major seaport, believe it or not! Big ocean container ships dock there and a monstrous cruise ship was there when we arrived.


Across the street from the Manaus Hotel is the old opera house, built in the 1940´s or 50´s. Some kind of an affair involving high school students was going on this evening so we couldn´t go inside to get pictures.

We walked down to the waterfront to see where we might catch a tour boat the next day and also to have some refreshments. A great part of travelling with my brother Bob is the pleasure of adventurous eating!

We received an ominous message from Adelaide: We were to be sure to use the 50PDF sunscreen when we went on the boat tour, and we were to be extra careful as it had been reported that some French tourists had been killed on a boat tour a week or so earlier.

Bob opined that the French tourists were probably strangled by the frustrated natives; the French can be so obnoxious!!

While at the waterfront, I got this view of the brown water that is typical of the Rio Negro (Black River). The color is described as that of weak tea, but I thought it looked more like the effluent from a dairy barn. It turns out that the color is due to decaying vegetation (trees and such) and gives the water a tannic acid content sufficient to make it uninhabitable for mosquitoes, as well as for most fish! What a boon! I wouldn´t have to worry about getting malaria from mosquito bites!
Another interesting scene was this one of a man carrying a wooden bed (head- and foot-boards, side-frames and bottom slats!) on his head. The man to the left is wearing a kind of padded hat like the one on the man carrying the bed. Now the amazing part of this is that it took two men considerable effort to lift this assemblage up high enough so the man could get under it and get it balanced on his head so he could carry it! I would estimate that it weighed in excess of 200 pounds! Why this tropical wood is so dense, even when it is dry, is a mystery to me.
More about the Piranha fishing in the next post.
Signed, the grumpy one.