Travel Blog Thursday
-Jan 2, 2014
Our first Amazon port of call: Santarem,
Brazil
Today we made our first port of call in Brazil
and we were asked to act as tour escorts. We met in the show lounge and helped
the excursion crew with getting the guests in their correct ground tours
groups.
The tour that we escorted was the city and cultural center
tour and included a variety of stops during the three plus hours that we were
gone. It was so hot and sticky with the high temperatures and equally high
humidity that it seemed like a lot longer tour on the non AC bus. The temps and
humidity were both approaching 90 here on the equator.
Our first stops on this tour included the cathedral and the
small history museum, neither extremely impressive. We did get to see the
meeting/wedding of the waters. The Amazon is a muddy color looking like coffee
with cream while the tributary is a clear bluer color. They run side by side
and don’t mix at all so it looks like two lanes on a highway running parallel
to each other.
The final stop on this excursion was the most interesting.
We went to a plantation where we were shown many of the locally grown fruits
and had the opportunity to sample them. We also were told about how Brazil nuts
are grown and harvested and they demonstrated how poisonous manioc is grown and
processed into edible flour and tapioca and how rubber trees are tapped. The
Amazon basin was a very important rubber producing region in the past and it
was the reason that many of these towns and cities began.
After returning from the tour, we quickly rushed into our
state room to take a cold shower but it was rather lukewarm in this area of
intense heat but it felt good to wash the sweat off and relax for the rest of
the afternoon and evening. We went to bed early, after our late dinner as we
were tired from our first day exploring in the Amazon. We had to set our clocks
back into Atlantic time so we got an extra hour of sleep.
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| How Brazilians travel distances on the Amazon |
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