Dois do Junho Boat

Saturday 4th June 1988

I got up at 07:30 hrs. and had the basic breakfast of bread and butter with coffee which was provided by the hotel. I then walked down to the mud and plank waterfront which passed as a dock. A procession of men in flip-flops were carrying huge sacks of produce along springy gang planks and loading them aboard the “Dois do Junho” boat.

At 09:00 hrs. the tickets went on sale at a table amongst the stacks of cargo which were being transferred to the spacious hold. I got ticket number 3. Porto Velho to Manaus 1st Class cost 5,600 Cruzados.

At the boat I met Frederick, a Swiss photographer who was also taking the same trip. Having got our tickets we went back into town to get hammocks in order to reserve our sleeping spaces on the upper deck.

From the hotel I picked up my trusty nylon hammock which looked like one of those orange nylon net bags that you get oranges in. Frederick bought one for 1,500 Cruzados from a wandering vendor in a purple felt trilby.

The Porto Velho fish market (called Cai n’água) in Rondônia is the main landing port and the major trading market in the region. We walked around the dock area examining the fish market selling huge fat river fish (douradas, curimatãs, sardines and tucunarés) and the wooden shacks along the railway track where the poorer folk lived.

Children played happily in the mud of the riverbank and hurled sticks weighted with globs of mud tips, like spears. Fred rattled off snaps like a machine gun from his trusty camera. At noon we went for lunch in the floating restaurant by the steam train behind the railway station.

The place had the air of a formerly posh restaurant which had seen better days and had gone to seed. The waiter was formal and polite in his jacket and bow tie. Faded posters of tourist attractions adorned the walls and locals fished outside the mesh windows.

We shared some concoctions of unknown local fish and had a couple of beers. Expensive but nice. This was something of a Last Supper of decent food before the monotonous fare that we would get on the boat trip.

We then wandered up the Avenida 7 de Setembro looking in the shops for some shorts for Frederick. We failed to find any short trousers apart from the garishly coloured and wildly patterned Bermuda shorts which were favoured by the locals and on sale everywhere. Fred decided to go without.

We went to his room in the hotel opposite mine and dossed about for a while. We decided to move on to the boat at about 15:30 hrs. but spent a long time in the hotel lobby examining the array of maps on the wall and getting recommendations for places to visit from another guest.

I got my bags from the Hotel Samara and met Marlene who turned out to be a Swiss girl who was also going on the same boat to Manaus. She got her kit packed up and we sat in MikeDonalds (!) Restaurant for a while drinking vodka and orange.

At 17:00 hrs. we took a taxi to the dock. The driver was hard pressed to get the three of us and our luggage into the Volkswagen Beetle. He had to stop and tie down the front hood which kept flying up and obscuring his view because he was unable to close it properly over our rucksacks. The engine in a VW Beetle is in the back while the boot is in the front.

On the boat we found a mass of hammocks and a lot of new passengers had accrued during the day. We struggled, crawled and wriggled through humanity and baggage to our thin strips of hammock space.

There was a lot of excitement and fond farewells when the solid, trusty old boat sounded it’s horn and we chugged away from the dock at 18:00 hrs. The brown water of the Madeira River swept us along between afforested banks and Porto Velho quickly disappeared behind us.

The Madeira River (Portuguese: Rio Madeira) is a major waterway in South America and the biggest tributary of the Amazon. Most of the passengers settled into their hammocks for the night. There was one other gringo on the boat, an American from California called Mike Weise who was on his way to study Amazonian dolphins in Manaus.

The Amazon River dolphin, or boto, have the characteristic dolphin smile and, unlike their marine cousins, bulbous foreheads and long, skinny beaks. Most strikingly, males can be pink. The colouring is believed to be scar tissue from rough games or fighting over conquests. The brighter the pink, the more attractive the males are to females during mating season.

As darkness fell a powerful spotlight stabbed into the gloom periodically to check that we were on course and that the way ahead was clear. Big black beetles and other flying whirring bugs clattered aboard the boat, attracted by the light.

I spent a cold restless night in the unfamiliar hammock which was build for portability rather than comfort, getting up occasionally for a piss in the stinking toilet at the stern.