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.

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.

Avenida 7 de Setembro

Friday 3rd June 1988

We arrived just after dawn in Porto Velho. I took bus 301, destination “President Roosevelt”, from outside the Hotel Pontes for 35 Cruzados. It took me to the main shopping street where I checked into the Avenida Sete de Setembro, 1103 and got a double room for 600 Cruzados.

The reason that I was here was to get a boat along the Amazon to Manaus. Manaus is the capital and largest city of the Brazilian state of Amazonas. It is is located at the east centre of the state in the centre of the world's largest rainforest, near the confluence of the Negro and Solimões rivers.

The city was founded in 1669 as the Fort of São José do Rio Negro. It was elevated to a town in 1832 with the name of "Manaus", an altered spelling of the indigenous Manaós peoples, and legally transformed into a city on October 24, 1848, with the name of Cidade da Barra do Rio Negro, Portuguese for "The City of the Margins of the Black River". On September 4, 1856, it returned to its original name.

It is famous for The Amazonas Opera House, inaugurated in 1896, which has 700 seats and was constructed with bricks brought from Europe, French glass, and Italian marble. More than 120 years old, it represents the city's heyday during the rubber boom. It was chosen by the magazine Vogue as one of the most beautiful opera houses in the world.

While I was in Manaus the Opera House was closed to the public as it was under renovation and covered by tarpaulins and scaffolding.

The girl on the Information Desk at the rodoviária de Porto Velho told me that the boat “Dois de Junho” left from Porto do Cai N´Água on Saturday at 18:00 hrs. and would cost 4,800 Cruzados for a hammock on the four-day trip.

I walked down Avenida 7 de Setembro to the river where the railway station was, decked out with white-washed brickwork and steam engines, like something from the Indian Raj. I found the two-storey boat “2 de Juhno” further down the river and learned that tickets went on sale at 09:00 hrs. tomorrow.

I walked back through the street market stalls in the tropical heat. Music blared from the many shops selling flip-flops, Bermuda shorts, vests and felt hats. Stalls displayed leather goods, nylon bags and digital watches. I bought some postcards and wrote them at the hotel.

For dinner I found a splendid restaurant, the Lindacap Restaurante, on the Rua Joaquim Nabuco, just along from it’s junction with the Avenida 7 de Setembro. Here you got as much as you could eat from a fine array for 300 Cruzados, called the Executive Lunch.

I posted my cards and walked up and down the lively Avenida 7 de Setembro with it’s noise and bustle and street traders. A lorry with a huge bank of speakers drove up and down blasting out music and, presumably, advertisements. Vinyl record stalls added to the noise.

I changed a travellers cheque in Guaportetur at 925 Avenida 7 de Setembro after waiting with a nervous young assistant for his boss to return. I also bought a sleeveless T-shirt and a capacious money belt. Female Police Officers patrolled the streets and I sipped a Coke and watched a traffic cop who blasted his whistle and almost danced through his traffic-directing routine.

At 16:30 hrs. I went to the flicks (cinema) to see “No Way Out”, a good, atmospheric suspense thriller set in the Pentagon. A coverup and witch hunt occur after a politician accidentally kills his mistress. “No Way Out” is a 1987 American neo-noir political action thriller film directed by Roger Donaldson and starring Kevin Costner, Gene Hackman, Will Patton and Sean Young. The film is based on the 1946 novel The Big Clock by Kenneth Fearing.

When I came out it was dark but it seemed to have got hotter. Crickets chirruped and people roamed the street in summer wear. I like Porto Velho. It has a nice atmosphere. Cracked, irregular pavements and a pleasant musky scent in the air, and sometimes the smell of alcohol on the breeze.

After a cold shower to cool down I went out for a huge tuna pizza and a couple of Coca Colas. The streets were finally quiet when I walked back to the hotel for an early night at 20:30 hrs.

Porto Velho

Thursday 2nd June 1988

I got up early and ensured that the time here was definitely one hour behind that in Brasília. I made up a litre of vodka and orange using Tang powder for the coach trip and then took bus 202 to the Terminal Rodoviário de Cuiabá.

I was getting used to the Brazilian bus system with it’s conductor and turnstile half way along the bus. I had fun at the cafeteria, which was one where you told the cashier at the entrance what you wanted and then paid in advance, as I didn’t know what half the options were called in Portuguese. I managed to muddle through and get something to eat.

The bus to Porto Velho cost 3,940 Cruzados and left at 09:00 hrs. Porto Velho (Old Port) is the capital of the Brazilian state of Rondônia, in the upper Amazon River basin, and a Catholic Metropolitan Archbishopric.

Located on the border of Rondônia and the state of Amazonas, the town is an important trading centre for cassiterite, the mining of which represents the most important economic activity in the region, as well as a transportation and communication centre. It is on the eastern shore of the Madeira River, one of the main tributaries of the Amazon River. It is also Rondônia's largest city, and the largest state capital of Brazil by area.

The landscape we passed through was much the same as usual, becoming greener and more tropical as we progressed. We were in cowboy country and large grassy areas were populated by cattle. Several cowboys boarded the bus with their cowboy hats, denims, cowboy boots and saddles.

We stopped at dinner time for a hearty lunch of meat, rice, beans, pasta, eggs and salad. At many places along the road the grass verges were being burned away. In the evening the bus stopped at a Vaccination Centre where compulsory yellow fever jabs were given to those without cards to prove that they had already been jabbed.

Yellow fever vaccine is a vaccine that protects against yellow fever. Yellow fever is a viral infection that occurs in Africa and South America. Most people begin to develop immunity within ten days of vaccination and 99 percent are protected within one month, and this appears to be lifelong. At this time, in the UK in 1988, it was said that immunity would last for ten years and nobody who had been given it had ever caught yellow fever.

Recipients of the injections had to line up and roll up one sleeve as a medic went along the line and jabbed them one by one with the same needle attached to a large bottle of vaccine. Luckily, I had a certificate of yellow fever vaccination in my passport and was ushered straight through and back onto the bus.

We stopped at several “Wild West” style towns with hard packed red earth streets, open-fronted shops and saloons. The vodka and orange helped to pass the time but didn’t do much to help me to sleep. It seemed to go straight through me, necessitating frequent visits to the bog (toilet).

Cuiabá

Above: Guaraná berries.

Wednesday 1st June 1988

I was glad when dawn broke and the temperature increased to a comfortable level. We pulled into the Rodoviária de Cuiabá at 07:00 hrs. and I took Bus 202 to the centre of town to look for a hotel. The first one was full and the second one didn’t appear to exist anymore, but I eventually took a really nice single room in the Hotel Samara at Rua Joaquim Murtinho 150 for 600 Cruzados.

I was beginning to look a bit scruffy, so I washed some clothes, had a shave, a haircut and good meal to restore my humanity. I went to the centrepiece of Cuiabá which is a small green square called Praça de República. The modern but very stylish basilica, the Cathedral Basilica Bom Jesus de Cuiabá, fronts this square, as does the tourist information office and the small natural history museum.

The staff in Tourist Information Office were friendly and gave me a photocopied map but were unable to recommend any attractions to visit in the city. I walked around the pleasant, modern town, browsing along the pedestrian shopping lanes and looking at unspectacular churches.

I went back for a siesta in the afternoon and in the evening I went for a walk-about finishing up in a supermarket where I bought a few snack things including yoghurt with honey, which was yummy. Tourists seemed to be a novelty in Cuiabá and I attracted quite a few stares. Most of the locals were dark skinned so I stood out.

Back in my room I spent a relaxing evening making a list of all my kit (I know how to live!), having a long hot shower and listening to the radio. Vodka and guaraná juice, which the ants were partial to, helped me to have a good night’s sleep when I went to bed early to catch up after a night spent on the coach.

The word guaraná comes from the Guaraní word guara-ná, which has its origins in the Sateré-Maué word for the plant, warana, that in Guarani means "fruit like the eyes of the people" or "eyes of the gods”.

sertão

Tuesday 31st May 1988

I took the 700 Bus which raced through the grassy void surrounding Brasília at breakneck speed, lurching violently as we took the sweeping bends, threatening to roll over! At the Rodoviária de Brasília I found a small Post Office and rattled off a postcard to my friend Martin McCormack before having an eggburger while waiting for the bus to Cuiabá.

We left at noon and sped along a seemingly endless black ribbon of road through the extensive sertão. A sertão is the "hinterland" or "backcountry". In Brazil, it refers to one of the four sub-regions of the Northeast Region of Brazil (similar to the specific association of "outback" with Australia in English).

Northeast Brazil is largely covered in a scrubby upland forest called a caatingas. Its borders are not precise. It is an economically poor region that is well-known in Brazilian culture, with a rich history and much folklore, something like the American South.

Because the sertão lies just south of the equator, temperatures are nearly uniform throughout the year and are typically tropical, often extremely hot in the west. I was under the illusion that it was always hot in the interior of Brazil, and so apparently were a lot of the other passengers who were dressed, like me, in T-shirts or summer short-sleeved shirts.

The night was cold with patches of fog and rain although in theory the sertão is distinctive in its low rainfall compared to other areas of Brazil. Because of the relatively cool temperatures in the South Atlantic Ocean, the intertropical convergence zone remains north of the region for most of the year, so that most of the year is very dry.

We passed rolling hills, grass, woolly trees, deep red earth and isolated farms. I curled up into a ball and dozed on and off as we travelled through the night.

Brasilia

Monday 30th May 1988

I arrived early in Brasília at the Rodoferroviária which was initially planned in 1956 as a state-of-the-art railway station on the Brasília extension of the Goiás Railroad, in place of the former Vera Cruz Airport in Brasilia. It was inaugurated in 1976 as a station, but due to the low use by passengers, it was reopened in 1981 and was also an interstate Bus Station, and is called Rodoferroviária de Brasília.

Brasília is the federal capital of Brazil and seat of government of the Federal District. The city is located atop the Brazilian highlands in the country's centre-western region. It was founded on April 21, 1960, to serve as the new national capital.

The Tourist Information Office was useless, but I found out that I needed to get a bus to the Rodoviária in the centre for 45 Cruzados. Central hotels were expensive at more than 2,200 Cruzados for a room, so I took Bus 700 to the nearby suburb of Taguatinga for 55 Cruzados.

By around 1749, near the Córrego Cortado, appeared a small settlement, formed by pioneers and drovers who sought to establish allotments in the Captaincy of Goiás, this was the first landing of the white man in the land of the future city of Taguatinga previously occupied by indigenous macro-Ge linguistic branch, as acroás, the xacriabás, the xavantes, the kayapos, the javaés, etc. However, some of these adventurers settled, excited by the possibility of gold and diamonds, near the Cut.

To contain the constant invasions on land near the new capital, the city Taguatinga was created on June 5, 1958, on land which previously belonged to the Farm Taguatinga. Initially, the city was called "Villa Sarah Kubitschek" but then its name was changed to "Santa Cruz de Taguatinga", leaving only "Taguatinga". Often it is called by locals simply "Taguá".

The consolidation of the city took place much later, almost two centuries after this period, mainly generated by large populations attracted by the construction of Brasília. It was the beginning of settlement then the first satellite city of Brasília.

In Taguatinga I got a room in the Hotel Globo for 500 Cruzados as the recommended Hotel São Paulo was closed. At the hotel I met a Brazilian who was now an Australian citizen from Perth. He explained that the reason that all of the shops were closed, and the city was so dead was because it was a Bank Holiday for Memorial Day. Super!

I needed to change up some travellers cheques so he suggested that I try the Hotel Nacional, the most luxurious hotel in the centre, for cambio (money exchange). I took the bus back to the Eixo (the centre).

The city of Brasília was designed in the shape of an aeroplane (or a drawn bow and arrow, or “like a bird flying eternally free”!). The Rodoviária was at the centre where the residential wings join the body. All of the government ministries and parliamentary functions are in the nose area and the Rodoferroviária is at the tail.

The city is located at the top of the Brazilian highlands in the country's Central-West region. It was founded by President Juscelino Kubitschek on 21 April 1960, to serve as the new national capital. Brasília is estimated to be Brazil's third-most populous city. Among major Latin American cities, it has the highest GDP per capita.

Brasília was a planned city developed by Lúcio Costa, Oscar Niemeyer and Joaquim Cardozo in 1956 in a scheme to move the capital from Rio de Janeiro to a more central location. The landscape architect was Roberto Burle Marx.

The city's design divides it into numbered blocks as well as sectors for specified activities, such as the Hotel Sector, the Banking Sector, and the Embassy Sector. Brasília was inscribed as a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 1987 due to its modernist architecture and uniquely artistic urban planning.

At the exclusive Hotel Nacional, I changed $100 US dollars at the mediocre rate of 200 Cruzados to the $US dollar and was informed that there was a City Tour leaving at 14:00 hrs. at a cost of 1,600 Cruzados. This was a good idea because the city boasts that it is only 40% buildings and 60% open space, so everything is separated by a vast area of red earth gamely trying to support grass and dotted with hardy trees.

Before the tour started I had time to go to the Rodoferroviária de Brasília to get a ticket to Cuiabá for tomorrow at noon for 2,960 Cruzados. Cuiabá is the capital city of the Brazilian state of Mato Grosso. It serves as the Geographical Centre of South America and forms the metropolitan area of the state, along with the neighbouring town of Várzea Grande. The city was founded in 1719, during the gold rush, it has been the state capital since 1818.

We drove through the sterile commercial, banking and residential sectors in a half-empty tourist coach. Most of the workers had gone elsewhere for the Bank Holiday weekend so it was pretty much deserted.

Our first stop was at a small mediocre chapel with a modern design which boasted to be the first building to be inaugurated in Brasília. The next stop was at The Santuário Dom Bosco or St. Dom Bosco’s Sanctuary, the only building that I really liked in the capital city. It was built in 1963 and from the outside it looked like a dull blockhouse.

However, inside it was fantastic. Santuário Dom Bosco is made of 80 concrete columns that support 7400 pieces of illuminated Murano glass, symbolizing a starry sky, which cast a blue submarine glow over the pews. The central chandelier weighs 2.5 tons and adds an amazing 435 light bulbs’ worth of energy to the monthly electricity bill. It was designed by the famous architect Oscar Niemeyer.

All the walls were made up of panels of sky blue through to black glass with clear dots of unstained glass to represent stars. A pink panel of glass at each corner admitted sufficient daylight to keep the church sufficiently light. A huge crucifix of wood dominated the stage. In the interior of the sanctuary the blue hued light made you feel like you were in a huge fish tank or aquarium.

The coach drove on down passed the skeletal TV tower and the sports section with the Estádio Nacional de Brasília Mané Garrincha, also known as Estádio Nacional Mané Garrincha, Estádio Nacional de Brasília, Arena Mané Garrincha or simply Mané Garrincha, which is a football stadium and multipurpose arena.

We arrived at the headquarters of the Brazilian Army Headquarters where the huge, echoing entrance portal was made in the form of a cutlass handguard. We saw the tomb and memorial museum of President Juscelino Kubitschek, the father of Brasília, in a white, cut-off pyramid along the central Eixo Monumental near the tip of the arrow.

Juscelino Kubitschek de Oliveira (12th September 1902 to 22nd August 1976), known also by his initials JK, was a prominent Brazilian politician who served as the 21st president of Brazil from 1956 to 1961. His term was marked by economic prosperity and political stability, being most known for the construction of a new capital, Brasília.

We went on to see a lot of the buildings designed by Oscar Niemeyer, including the cathedral which represents a crown of thorns, the various ministries and government buildings around the “Three Powers Square” and the Presidential Palace. The Catedral Metropolitana de Brasília is a hyperboloid structure constructed from 16 concrete columns, weighing 90 tons each.

The Palácio da Alvorada is the President of Brazil’s official residence since the inauguration of Juscelino Kubitschek. The Palace is situated on a peninsula that overlooks the Paranoa lake.

The Three Powers Square, or Praça dos Três Poderes in Portuguese, is named after its surroundings being the three governmental powers of Brazil: the Executive, represented by the presidential office (Palácio do Planalto); the Legislative, represented by the National Congress (Congresso Nacional); and the Judiciary, represented by the Federal Supreme Court (Supremo Tribunal Federal).

Oscar Ribeiro de Almeida Niemeyer Soares Filho (15th December 1907 to 5th December 2012), known as Oscar Niemeyer was a Brazilian architect considered to be one of the key figures in the development of modern architecture.

Niemeyer was best known for his design of civic buildings for Brasília, a planned city that became Brazil's capital in 1960, as well as his collaboration with other architects on the headquarters of the United Nations in New York. His exploration of the aesthetic possibilities of reinforced concrete was highly influential in the late 20th and early 21st centuries.

I found none of these buildings overly impressive and the whole city had a sterile, futuristic “1984” feel about it. People lived in blocks in sectors. There were no road names, only numbers and letters, so the address of my hotel was CNB4 Lote 1.

I took a bus back to Taguatinga and had a huge chicken risotto in a Chinese Restaurant near the hotel before going to bed early at 19:00 hrs. I had to wage war on the resident mosquitos before retiring, and once again when I awoke at 02:00 hrs. to their infuriating humming.