In the heart of the Amazon

Posted by Åsa on 4 October 2009

Manaus 01/10/2009

Hi there everyone! Sorry not to have been able to post for some while, but due to the route we have choosen the internet connections have been very poor or non existant and we have not been able to post for a looong while.

There are many cronicles to write about Los llanos and La Grand Sabanna i Venezuela and our fast ride down through the Amazon basin. I hope you will have patience with me posting with some delay....

But right now we have arrived in Manaus, the capital of the Amazon. It is a very strange feeling after some 2000 very remote kilometers to arrive in this big hub of about 2 million people. The maybe more fascinating thing is that just five kilometers far from the city border we were still biking more or less in the forest and with very few cars around. Even more fascinating when considered that the road we came, the road from the north and the border with Venezuela, is virtually the only road in the area.

In the city it self though the traffic is very intense and noisy, the pollution is overwhelming and it didn’t take us long to miss the tranquility in the forest, the small villages in the road and the sounds and animals of the Amazon rain forest.

The first thing we visited in Manaus was the big self-service ice-cream shop Glacial, here we were retaking all the missed celebrations of 1000 cycled kilometers when the kilometer counter restarts from cero (the last 2000 km or so has been to remote to find any ice-cream for our ritual celebrations), and all the coming missing celebrations too just for the sake of it and the great taste and the cooling effect of the ice-cream (we have around 40 degrees celcius almost daily).

The ice-cream is 100% natural and have all the flavors of the Amazon such as tucumã and acai (fruits of a palms) , coco, cupuaçu, para nut, tapioca, papaya and passion fruit (just to mention some). The best of all is that they are sold in a kind of buffet and you pay by weight, offering a great opportunity to try virtually all of them!! At the end of the long line of ice-cream of different flavors there is a section as ingenious with all thinkable kinds of liquid chocolate, nuts, creams, wafer-rolls and chocolate flakes….

Yesterday we were still sleeping in the forest. For the first time since arriving in Brazil it was actually difficult to get the permission to put the tent in a ranch and there was no shower and nice dinner with the family included. There were mainly companies in the road with the owner living in Manaus and the workers that came to the gate to talk to us didn’t have the permission to let us into the private property.

After we had received a no the third time it was getting really late the parrot hour was long gone (at five-five thirty in the afternoon an hour or so before dusk the parrots start to fly in big flocks between the trees which is a signal for us that it is time to look for a place to put the tent).

We insisted until we were permitted to enter one property (the day before we saw a jaguar crossing the road and we felt it would be nice to be close to other humans), the man working there didn’t even have the key to the gate and the dog went furious with us as we were climbing the wall of barbed wire with bikes and panniers and all.

The man ignored us completely during our whole stay but the dog minded the more…. The barking and half hearted attacks didn’t seem to have any end. We boiled our pasta very much aldente in the little water that was left after a hot and hilly day and built our tent all accompanied by the barking dog. When finally the dog was bored of us we fell asleep till the howling of the howler monkeys and all the sounds of the insects in the jungle. We slept like babies.

15 comments. Tags: Asa. Location: Manaus, Brazil