Exploring the capital of Amazonas

Travel Blog   January 6-7, 2014

Manaus, Amazonas

Exploring the capital of Amazonas

Our next day in Manaus (Monday) was a busy one for the ship. All day long, guests were disembarking from

the first cruise on the Amazon on their way to their homes throughout the world. Many of them did not have flights until late at night but Princess Cruise Lines was nice enough to let them stay on board and not have to spend the day at the Manaus airport awaiting their flights. They let them have their meals and wait to leave anytime they needed to during the day or into the middle of night. There were about 100 of us remaining for the second cruise and we embarked about 500 new people who had flown in from their homes. All day, it was a revolving door with some leaving for the airport and others coming on board from the airport.

We decided to walk into town and see this city of one million plus people. The streets were teeming with people and there were shops and kiosks set up on every street. These were not for the tourists but were for the locals to buy everything they needed from fresh fish and produce to tools and toothbrushes! It was hard to walk downtown with so many people on the streets.

We made our way to the lovely marketplace which was built in the late 1800’s and styled after the Paris market. There we found a wonderful wood carving of the Amazon for the wall in our home in Lacey.

Next we walked about a mile to the famous Teatro Amazonas Opera House. It was also built in the late 1800’s for the wealthy rubber barons that were controlling the city. This opera house is exquisite and built with materials imported from all over the world and styled after the great theaters in Europe. This was the heyday of Manaus and the city was one of the richest and most modern in the world. It was one of the first to have electric street lighting and no money was spared to show the enormous wealth of the upper class citizens. The true 1% or the 1% of Brazil.

On Tuesday, after another night in Manaus, we were asked to escort guests on tour. Both of us were assigned the same tour but in different buses. We visited the opera house again and then the zoo which is run by the army for a training sight for them involved in work with native jungle animals. They have jaguars, anacondas, monkeys, pythons and a number of other animals and birds of the Amazon. Our tour group also visited the local Indian Museum. It was not as good a stop as the other two places as the objects collected were not displayed as well as they could have been but it was interesting to see some of the native pottery and weaving and poison blow guns.

We concluded the day with meeting a number of new guests while we were on duty at the port lecturer’s table and then went to dinner and met our new table mates. Four of the eight were new to the cruise and are Florida residents and are Jewish. All six of them seem very nice and it will be a pleasure to eat with them each night. We are especially pleased to be re-assigned the first dinner seating so we now eating at a reasonable time of 6 pm and not 8:15 as the last two weeks. We were able to go to the show at an earlier time and saw a good comedian who just joined the ship in Manaus.

Tomorrow we are off to Paratins again as we retrace our first cruise in reverse.