MANAUS, in the heart of the Amazon

SUMMARIZING NOTES FROM THE BOAT (cruise-ship this time)

-it´s all secundary forest now and looks even less interesting than before. It´s not the indiginou´s straw-huts anymore but small and ugly jungle-towns. You see cattle grazing on vast pastures along the river-bank.

-this boat is luxury (enough space for everyone, several floors, big showers, perfect food, too many televisions, a vidio-room, a bar, everything cleaned 3 times a day etc.) but it is far from exciting compared to the first one.

-On the second boat food was served in the hammok. We got to listen to exciting stories from an American couple that goes travelling 5 month every year (for instance: he did the Darian-gap on foot and both backpacked all the way from North to South-Africa before they had got to known each other)

-I am sunbathing on the roof of our ship at this moment -it´s GREAT!!!

-great people here, too: 8 Serbs, an old Duch couple, a Finnish guy and 3 Peruvians etc.

-All of a sudden none of the passangers looks poor anymore. We´re back in Brazil. People dress and behave Western again. (it´s nice, it makes you feel more relaxed about your luggage)

-It´s nice to be back in Brazil again. And it´s fun to rediscover again all the Brazilian words and phrases that I once ago -it feels a long time ago, was able to use so easily (and that would now not come out at all anymore) and the too-sweet Brazilian Coffee and stuff.

-If I was to recommend this trip to anyone I´d definately recommend the upper part of the river (uncompftable but a lot more exciting!). However, I enjoy this trip just as much: Very convenient way of travelling: There´s plenty of time for reading, preparing further trips, watch the rain-forest pass by, sleep, talk and doing nothing. However: don´t expect anything very exciting. Looking at a map you should think one couldn´t get any closer to the heart of the Jungle but being here -on the Amazon-River, is a not very Junlge-like thing.

-In Iquitos we went to visit Belém (together with two guys from our hostal: Maryland + London). It´s a huge floating Ghetto: A great number of canoas goes among the houses built on pools. There are restaurant-canoas, kiosk-canoas and prostitut´s canoas. Kids would be playing + swimming in the dirty water. Same thing as everywhere: On a sunny day everything looks a little less bad.

-I hadn´t visited any nice market for a long time so I enjoyed this one very much: Jungle-Fruits, plenty of illegal monkeys, snakes, turtles, caimans and a Tulcán. All ki9nds of medical plants, and more turtles and crocodiles offered for food. Clothes, shoes and all kind of items.

-still indecided where to go next. I´d love to join Martine and continue all the wau to the Atlantik coast (again!) and from there back through the 3 Guyanas. However, this little side-trip would be very expensive, there´s nothing much to do there and except for the European Space-Centre in French-Guyana nothing much you wouldn´t be able to do or see in other countries (and George-Town seems to be extremely dangerous plus the whole trip would put me under time-pressure regarding the rest of my plans.

The alternative would be to go to Venezuela directly (12hrs, 22Dollars)

-We´re in Manaus not (got here, Sat at 2pm) and tomorrow moring we´re off for a 2nights/3days Jungle-trip (150Dollars). Sounded VERY promising!

Still on the way

Wow!!!! The last week has been VERY exciting. We've been on so many boats -big and small ones- I can't count them any more. The most exciting one was doubtlessly the last one that took us here to Iquitos. When we got on that boat four days ago, there where four hammoks there. By the time we got here there where maybe 200. People would put them everywhere. We thought they might put maybe 2 more hammoks in the little space where we had ours -on the last day (we got off the boat early to take a faster one and safe 10 hours on that one) there where 13 plus 2 adults and 3 kids sleeping on the floor under them. What an experience!!! We hadn't had the faintest idea of what would await us -we had been warned about the food but in the end we were positively surprised: A huge old swimming "box". One floor for cows and bulls and pigs (plus the chicken they'd saughter on the way for food). And tons of bananas, sugar-cane and other stuff I'm not able to name plus the engines plus more hammoks plus plus plus... (just imagine the stink down there -80pigs? and the noise...). On our floor there were millions of hammoks -you couldn't get through by the end of the trip plus at least 6 huge turtles and a monkey (and dead monkeys the people had as "snaks"). The boat would go day and night and stop wherever there are people standing on the river-bank waving with a piece of white cloth. I have no idea how they managed to steer that ship in that absolute darkness duing the nights. The view wouldn't change too much, of course but I loved sitting on the roof of the ship (that's where they put tha maybe 600 chicken -they smell worse than pigs) and enjoy the sunsets. We also saw some turtles and parrots. The little straw-huts every now and then along the river seem to belong to another world, seem to belong to a set of toy houses. (They wouldn't have any electricity there, of course but apart from that I was pretty surprised how life and people don't seem to vary much from life and people in Talag).

It was a great trip and I enjoyed it very much. However, by the end of it we did get a little afraid of illnesses and stuff you can get when too many people are stuffed togehter in a too little place.

Iquitos is GREAT the people are very nice. There is little motor-cars all over taking you everywhere for 2 soles. It's a very nice atmosphere, quite some tourists. The wealth of the 19th century (thanks to the rubber boom that prevailed the area here) can be seen everywhere in the arcitecture, the streets, the promenade along the river etc.

Tomorrow night we'll catch a boat to the triple-boarder Peru-Colombia-Brazil and from there another boat to Manaus. I pressume all of this will take us another week. We should be in Manaus by Monday (I'd LOVE to go all the way down to the Atlantik-coast and from there into the Guyanas -however this "little side-trip" will be rather time consuming and not the cheapest neither).

By the way: Sleeping in the hammoks don't bother me at all. Quite the opposite: I actually enjoy staying in them very much and thanks to Martines ear plugs I was able to get a quite normal amount of sleep :)))

going down the Amazon-River

(It's been a while that I wanted to tell you about all the smaller and bigger -but always interesting- events in Talag, but I'll skip that now.)

Well, I'm already in Coca (together with a duch friend, Martine, I got to know in Otavalo some days ago). Coca is the last city in Ecuador (ehm, I want to say the city situated the furtherst out in the Jungel). I was quite surprised to find out how much I like it (we arrived at 6 this morning). There is a lot of people because of elections, we had a breakfast-lunch outside in a reasonably nice restaurant (decorated with huge crocodile-skulls and tortoise shells and stuff) and I was fastinated by the amount of chonta-curo (huge cartapillars that they eat here -extraordinarily rico, I must say) they are selling here (in Talag they were way rarer) -6 on a stick with a piece of Yuka would cost you 1 dollar.

There is a chilean guy next to our hotel room that is planning to go down the Rio Napo/Amazon all on his own in a canoa he is trying to purchase now. Of cours I'd LOVE to join him but maybe it's not so bad that I'm running out of time (Visa-wise) right now and cannot do that for this reason :). Apart from him there doesn't seem anyone around who is planning a similar trip.

We already got our tickets to Nueva Rocafuerte (Jungel-border with Peru) and from there we'll see. We haven't managed to find any cheap hammoks yet and I should make sure I get some more cash until our boat leaves at 8 p'clock tomorrow morning. (we'll arrive around 5 pm).

I'm of course very happy there are two of us, but so far it seems easy and I guess I would have managed on my own if I would have had to. (You know, sun is shining as it always seem to do here -oh, I had already started to miss the jungel!).

Dear Mom and Dad: I don't think I'll be able to contact you before arriving at Iquitos, Peru (500,000 habitants= the biggest town ww without road access) which should take us AT LEAST a week or more.