Preparation, Preparation, PreparationThe Final CountdownEl Mercado Mira FloresLa SelvaChipaotaThe First Leg: Chasuta to YurimaguasPacaya Samiria ReserveThe way to Iquitosto LeticiaThe Slow Boat to ManausDifficult Questions
 | RainforestPartnership |  | 2009 Trans-Amazon Expedition |  | The Slow Boat to Manaus |
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Nov 29 2009, 09:39 PM
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Manaus, Brazil
The day finally arrived when we packed up our bags, loaded onto the boat and strung up our hammocks. There was a line running out the door two hours before they started boarding the boat, everyone waiting to get a prime spot. The trip was going to take three days, and everyone on the boat who paid regular passage got three meals a day and place to string up a hammock. When they opened the doors to board, people streamed onto the boat and within an hour the decks were a sea of multi-colored fabric. All of a sudden where there was once an empty deck there was now an impromptu village with winding paths in and out of bags, hammocks, fruit and all other sorts of cargo as people settled in, crammed shoulder to shoulder for the three day ride to Manaus.
This haphazard mass of people grew quickly into a floating community. We were on the outskirts of the foreign nationals neighborhood where all the travelers had clustered together to guard eachothers´ belongings.To my right was Tim, and to my left was Omar, a young guy from Cali, Columbia who had lived in New Jersey for a couple of years and was going from Manaus to Rio de Janeiro to ¨check out the beaches and all the fine girls in bikinis.¨ Further down the line was a lesbian couple from England who had taken a leave from their jobs as school teachers to travel for six months. To their right was a quiet, pensive Frenchman with glasses and sad blue eyes. He quit is job as an engineer and shoved off to South America because ¨one day [he] woke up and asked what does any of this mean?¨ He sat in his hammock and sketched, looking out over the tops of the city of hammock and sighing, then laying down his pencil to flip through the pages of Camus´ La Chute. There was the Chilean couple who shared pineapple with the group everyday and brought bottles of Chilean wine to drink on the way down and the brothers from Patagonia with dread locks and ¨Patagonia Sin Represa¨ buttons on their packs. There was a group of hard drinking young guys from Tabatinga going to take their tests to become firemen and all sorts of other people coming or going, crossing paths in that floating colonoy in the middle of the Amazon. There were eighty people on our deck and one dining room with fifteen seats. At meal time everyone line up and filed in fifteen at a time, ate as quickly as they could and left, so that the people behind them could come in and sit down. There were no tickets or assigned seating, no name cards or tablecloths, just a line of hungry people and big bowls of rice and beans. We talked and read all day, passing the time with people who started as strangers and left as friends and the three days on the boat passed in no time. We cruised into port and passed the Meeting of the Waters in Manaus, where the Solimoes and Negra meet and where, for the Brazilians, the Amazon officially starts. We had made to Manaus, and it couldn´t have been in better company.
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