A Week on the Amazon

On the Banks

Last night I arrived in Belém, Pará, on the banks of the Amazon river, 120km from where the river empties out into the Atlantic Ocean. The river is brown, like a sewage canal, but very cool. I arrived from Fortalzea, in the Northeast, by bus. This was arguably not a smart idea, because said bus traveled along what to the best of my judgment appears to be the shittiest road ever. It is important to note that this “Highway BR-316” is classified as a paved road,though it would server the world better it it were just plain dirt. As it is now, it is the remains of a 2-lane road, with huge potholes,bumps, and oddly positioned slabs of concrete in the center, totaling the width of about 1.5 cars, and the remainder on either side is dirt. I drew a diagram in my notebook, which i will show you when i get back or eventually take a picture of and upload. It is ludicrous. I also made a little video clip of part of the ride, with these huge Scania (European big-rig) trucks passing the bus at a brisk 10mph. Until about 200km from Belém it’s like this, with the bigger vehicles weaving around the potholes to minimize tire and cargo abuse. However, the bus was a comfy leito, which means the seats were like business class, reclined, and were only 3-across in the bus. It wasn’t too bad, since I slept a great deal of the way. I left Fortaleza at 1:15 pm and arrived around 6:00 pm the following day, to give you an idea. Despite being way too long, the trip was interesting though. We passed through vast expanses of the sertão, which is a dry inland region in the north/northeast of the country. Every so often we passed little hut and shanty villages, a lot of which has many houses made out of dirt or clay bricks with straw roofs. Lots of ranches,too. There were tons of animals, and at one intersection there was a herd of cows just standing there on the traffic island. I must have spent hours gazing out the window at the scenery, which was gorgeous, and somehow the trip passed by.

Dining out in Belém

When I got to Belém, I decided to “splurge” a little when I found the Estação das Docas, which is basically a converted and renovated dock warehouse on the riverfront which now has nice restaurants and live music. I sat down at a relatively fancy and expensive place and ate _pato no tucupí_, which is a tasty duck cooked in tucupi sauce, whatever that is. It comes in a broth with a green vegetable that’s slightly bitter and vaguely resembles Chinese broccoli, but it leaves your lips with a numb sensation similar to when your hand falls asleep. It was quite delicious though. Then I had açaí (an energy-rich amazonian fruit)-flavored ice cream, and also another flavor of some amazonian fruit I’ve never heard of and I’m sure there isn’t a translation into English anyway. And by expensive, I mean 12 or 15 dollars for a meal. The next day I saw an artisan fair in the city center which was kinda cool, and I took a walk around the Mercado Ver-o-Peso on the riverfront. There, merchants hawk various goods ranging from exotic amazonian fruits and vegetables, most of which I’ve neither heard of or seen before, to dried fish, shrimps, random “medicinal” powders and potions that supposedly cure or treat any kind of ailment and all sorts of other random stuff that I wouldn’t even know what to do with. When I passed by around 10 am, some of the fishing boats that were unloading were doing so from a small inlet, which because of the tides, was empty. So, the boats were sitting on the mud at the bottom of the inlet unloading their catches while two guys were kicking each other’s asses in a Fight Club style fight. When I returned around lunchtime, the boats were afloat again.

Steerage Class

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The main reason I came to Belém was to take a boat trip up the Rio Amazonas. For the full experience, I decided to go in hammock class. And you thought steerage didn’t exist anymore. 5 days in a hammock on a boat is not as comfortable as it sounds, trust me. In order to make the most money, the boat company sells as many places as they have life vests, which is a lot. On the bottom deck of my boat, in what I have deemed steerage, there must have been around 200 people, hanging side by side with little or no space between hammocks, while on the top deck (where I was, hilariously called first class) each person got to hang his hammock on a numbered hook, ensuring each person had precisely 1.5 feet of space in which to hang. There is a men’s’ side and a women’s’ side, and in the middle, couples can hang their hammocks. Not joint hammocks, mind you, but they can hang individually next to one another. One American couple I met bought a 2-person hammock and was prohibited from using it.

I showed up the night before to get a good spot, and stayed on board because they let you. There were plenty of other people there already,and I met this family of evangelical Christians who chiefly wore clothing with some form of “Jesus” written on it. One of the kids seemed to get a kick out of saying my name, and would constantly come to my hammock, say “Avishai” in a funny accent, and just stand there and stare at me. Definitely the most amusing people on the boat were my neighbors, a gaúcho (southern Brazilian cowboys) family from the Porto Alegre area. They introduced me to mate, a type of herb that they make tea from and drink from this hollow wooden ball with a special filter straw that’s called a “bomba.” They told me that a friend of theirs was held up in US customs for a very, very, very long time when he translated this to officials as “bomb.” That said, mate is very good. It also has 3x the amount of caffeine than coffee, which means that after having it 1-2 times a day for the last week, I am feeling some serious withdrawal today ;-). On my birthday, the gaúchos woke me up singing happy birthday in Portuguese extremely loudly so that within a few seconds the entire deck joined in. It was really cool. I don’t really have that much more to right about this trip right now, but here are some highlights:

• Indians occasionally paddle up to the boat in their canoes, and sling a rope with a metal hook on the end onto one of the railings and attach themselves to to boat. Sometimes just for a ride, but most often to sell fruit to the passengers.
• At one port-of-call, some kids entered to boat to sell cheese; one of them failed to notice we left until we were a few hundred feet away from the pier—he had to jump onto a neighboring boat.
• Whoever designed this boat obviously didn’t think it would be a good idea to install a cargo door so you can load and unload with a forklift. Everything is done by hand and it takes hours.
• Locals dance forró on the top deck all afternoon.
• Showers on board took water straight from the river. Gross. Needless to say, the bathrooms were also quite nauseating.
• Breakfast: a piece of bread, butter, terrible super-sugary coffee with floating bits of condensed milk. Lunch: Beans, rice, spaghetti with ketchup sauce, meat. Dinner: Beans, rice, spaghetti with ketchup sauce, meat. Every day.
• Friday I visited the most gorgeous beach I have ever seen, on one of the Amazon’s tributaries. Clear water, no waves, nice sandbar in the middle with little kiosks. I was there for a few hours while they were unloading cargo.

And that is how you spend a week on the river.