Manicoré

Sunday 5th June 1988

Dawn broke colourfully over the green strip of jungle on the east bank of the river. Fellow passengers chortled at the size of my feet (UK size 12) and the fact that one of my hammock strings had snapped during the night.

Everyone was very friendly which was just as well as the deck full of hammocks was very intimate. We all crowded around the dining table at the far end of the web of hammocks for our breakfast of coffee and crackers.

There was little to do after that. The little kids had great fun crawling amongst the baggage in the limited space below the hammocks, most of which were reoccupied after coffee. There was little to do and even less space to do it in.

The boat had a little tender with an outboard motor which sped off and returned with two 2-foot-long fat fish. We stopped off at a village in the middle of nowhere in the Amazonian Rain Forest and a Belgian bloke was amongst the passengers that came on board here.

The next excitement was lunch which was served very early at 10:30 hrs. Communal plates were shoved onto the table and everybody pitched in for the battle for rice, beans, spaghetti and chicken. There was plenty for everyone, so that those that lost out in the first offensive only had to wait a while for the next lot. In the afternoon Californian Mike and I climbed onto the roof to join the Belgian who was sitting cross-legged and stringing little yellow glass beads onto hundreds of metres of fishing line.

We sunbathed and read books and dozed. I started reading “Garden of Sand” which was written by Earl Thompson who was born in Wichita, Kansas in 1931. This, his first novel “A Garden of Sand” describes the events of his birth and early childhood in vivid detail.

Destitution, hunger, cruelty, rootlessness-all the odds stand against Jacky, the young boy at the centre of this powerful, popular American classic, yet still he prevails. Resourcefully, doggedly, Jacky nurtures his spirit of independence, his capacity to love, and his faith in a nation's dream in a journey that takes him from Wichita to Corpus Christi and from poverty to possibility.

The light breeze hid the awesome power of the sun and we got quite sunburned in a relatively short period of time. We also had to contend with occasional soakings from the reservoir water tank which was full and slopped over the brim whenever there was an unusual roll of the ship.

At 17:00 hrs. supper was the next big event of the cruising day, substituting fish for chicken with the usual Brazilian staples. With my customary ability I managed to get in on the first sitting. After dark I sat with the other gringos on the roof chatting about Latin America until the lights attracted too many flying bugs for comfort.

Back down below on the deck amongst the mayhem of hammocks Frederick was taking photographs of the proudly posing Brazilian folk at leisure, swinging idly in their brightly coloured slings. Eventually everyone dozed off until at 23:30 hrs a clamour of excitement signalled that we had arrived at Manicoré, a municipality located in the south-east of the Brazilian state of Amazonas.

The town is located on the banks of the Madeira River about 3 kilometres (1.9 miles) downstream from where the Manicoré River merges into the Madeira. Manicoré's origins date back to 1637, with the expedition of Pedro Teixeira, a Portuguese explorer and military man and is a major centre of logging.

Here we were due to change to another vessel. We moored up alongside our new floating home and everybody clambered aboard like raiding pirates, rushing to secure the prime hammock spaces. It was a bigger boat so there was a lot more room.

I walked up the steep concrete slope and had a Coca Cola in a café before returning to the “Principe do Mar II”. Rumour had it that we weren’t leaving until tomorrow morning, but I didn’t want to risk being left behind stranded ashore in Manicoré.

On board a woman had hysterics because her little daughter had fallen down the stairs between the lower and upper decks. Luckily, she was not badly hurt. I slept better that night, fatigued from my lack of sleep last night.