Edifício Manaus Shopping Center

Thursday 9th June 1988

I got up at 08:30 hrs. and set off for the Venezuelan Consulate at 1620 Rua Recife. Several friendly people aided me to get the right bus and told me when to get off. I got the bus from the main depot by the cathedral.

In the Venezuelan Consulate an attractive female secretary got me to fill in a duplicate application form for a visa while she sang along to her radio. I had the requisite ticket out of the country, yellow fever vaccination certificate, a wadge of travellers cheques and two passport photographs, but a problem emerged when she noticed that I had less than a year validity on my passport which would expire on 22/03/1989. She said that I had to get a letter from the British Consulate.

I took Bus 505 back to the city centre and found the British Consulate in an export agency office on the twelfth floor of the Edifício Manaus Shopping Center located in Avenida Eduardo Ribeiro, 520. The Consul complained that the Venezuelans were always coming up with new conditions to make things difficult for British travellers.

He rang the British Embassy in Brasília and told me to revisit the Venezuelan Consulate tomorrow and come back to him if there were still problems. My next destination was Boa Vista but I met an Australian who told me that the road to Boa Vista was washed out so there would be no buses for at least a month. I would have to fly there.

Boa Vista (literally Good View; figuratively “Fairview”) is the capital of the Brazilian state of Roraima. Situated on the western bank of the Branco River, the city lies 220 kilometres (140 miles) from Brazil's border with Venezuela. It is the only Brazilian state capital located entirely north of the equator.

I then spent a happy couple of hours browsing around the shopping lanes. I bought a new diary (notebook) and some flip-flops as my current ones were practically worn through. I tried to ring the KLM Airline Office on Avenida Japurá but as it was so difficult to make myself understood I had to walk up there.

They told me that they had telexed the Rio de Janeiro branch but had had no reply so I should come back tomorrow. I got a cold litre of milk at the supermarket and bought some postcards which I wrote in a bar near the hotel while I waited for Mike and Marlene to come back. They had been to the zoo (Zoológico Manaus Tropical).

In a room a procession of Jungle Trip agents came to call and Marlene got a cheap 3-day tour leaving tomorrow. A group of us then went out to eat in the same place as last night. We kept bumping into people from the boat who greeted us enthusiastically.

I finished up having a beer drinking session with an Aussie guy and Israeli Jem until 01:00 hrs. The bars on the Avenida Joaquim Nabuco are quite lively with prostitutes, friendly drunks and an eccentric medicine man with a musical instrument which looked like a bow and arrow. He was a great character.