Adventure in the Heart of the Amazon - Nov 2 - 5, 2024

 Sunday, November 3rd

 After more than 24 hours of airport/plane travel in our same clothes, we finally arrived in Manaus at 2:30 AM local time.  It took a while for our luggage to deplane, but Immigration and customs were quick, and we headed out to look for our driver which I had booked through Trip Advisor.  Luckily, he was waiting for us, loaded our luggage in the car and we settled in for our drive to the hotel. He spoke little English but managed to point out with great admiration the soccer (football here) stadium where  both the Manaus FC (series D) and the Amazona FC (series B) teams play. It is already clear and most evident on all TV screens we've randomly come across that soccer is the number 1 most important news feature in Brazil (and also Panama). 

 

After checking into the Blue Tree Premium hotel, we quickly headed to our room as we were exhausted.  I had slept little on the plane flights and all I wanted to do was go to bed.  As the electricity and thus air conditioning only works with the key card in the slot, our room must have been 90 degrees.  The air conditioning did initially come on but then stopped working after about 15 min, but we were too hot and fatigued to try to do anything about it (although Chris took a quick “cold” shower hoping for some evaporation to cool a bit). 

 

Monday – November 4th

 

Breakfast in the hotel is served from 6-10 AM.  Chris woke me up at 9 AM and we headed down to breakfast, first letting the hotel maid know about the air conditioning.  

 

Downstairs at the “hotel breakfast” following our 4 hour “nap” we struggled to communicate with local Brazilians as we privately wondered what we’ve gotten ourselves into.  I did study a bit of Portuguese on my Duolingo app but other than please and thank you, I am not very proficient. As spoiled Americans we usually find a fair number of people that at least speak a bit of English, so far that seems a bit less common here.

 

After breakfast we headed back to our room, delighted to find it cool.  Turns out we can’t drink the hotel or Manaus water which was not surprising (and this is apparently true across Brazil), but the only water available in our rooms was in 8 oz plastic bottles that cost the equivalent of $2 US. After my readings on the Amazon, I was appalled to be drinking from plastic water bottles.  So despite my reluctance to venture out in the thunder and lightning, Chris convinced me to walk a half a mile to the local indoor mall and try to find some drinking water. Luckily it didn’t start raining hard until just before we arrived at the mall (and I do enjoy a good thunderstorm, although I prefer watching them to walking in them).

 

We strolled around the 4-story mall and after bypassing the McDonalds, KFC, etc., we found a sit-down restaurant that served Brazilian food.  Luckily, they had one menu in English, and we decided to try the Caboclo Pirarucu which was grilled pirarucu fillet (Amazon river fish, said to be biggest fresh water fish in the world), topped with rice in tucupi (a yellow sauce extracted from wild manioc root in Brazil's Amazon jungle and jambu (a fruit originating from India but when introduced in Brazil, it gained a lot of prominence mainly in the North and Northeast regions due to its reddish fruits.), shrimp grilled in garlic and olive oil, fried pacová (a species of plant in the family Araceae, native to southeastern Brazil), bananas and finished with Brazil nuts.  We also ordered Cassava fries and some mini cod cakes.  Chris ordered a Bohemia (oldest beer in Brazil) while I had a margarita but also some of his beer. It was quite good.

Pirarucu

After lunch, I convinced Chris to return to the gelato stand we had passed on our way in...a nice finish to our lunch/dinner.

Walking home a very different way (Chris's suggestion) we stumbled (literally, given their “sidewalks” are nothing more than discarded pieces of concrete and cobble with wire strewn across them) across to a Carrefour (a Costco size store that everyone buys everything from) and after finding the single employee who could speak English (he spent a year in Indiana!) Chris was able to buy us some drinking water plus was also talked into buying two cans of Guarana Bare’ (their local Amazon plant stimulant) which we’ll try later today 

 

Returning to the hotel, I took a short nap while Chris watched a variety of Brazilian TV and a bit of BBC (of the >100 satellite TV channels available from our room, this was the only one in English, as even FOX, ESPN, and other well known networks were all broadcast in Portuguese).  Considering our significant sleep deprivation, we turned off our room lights by 8pm.

Tuesday, November 5

Our AC stopped working shortly after we went to bed but as the room had cooled significantly we slept fine. After at least 10 hours of sleep, I awoke about 8 AM.  The room was hot again but we experimented a bit and discovered that we needed to remove the key card, let the electricity go off and then start it again, this seems to be the trick or maybe they just turn it off at night...we are still experimenting.

This morning we have hung around the hotel spending some time in the lobby after breakfast.  A woman we had met in the elevator the other day, sat down to chat with us.  She is a geographer from Poland (Univ. Warsaw) and is here in Manaus to give a scientific talk at a small local research institute. She is part of a larger group of researchers studying zoonoses (diseases that pass across species, particularly from animals to humans).  

I have been working on my blog and Chris has explored some.  He headed up to the 18th floor to see the pool and take some pictures of the city.  Looking around, it is hard to imagine that we are in the middle of the Amazon Jungle.

I will spend the rest of the day reading and awaiting news of the election.  We meet up with our Road Scholar group tomorrow morning.