The Real Jungle Boat Ride

Travel Blog   January 5, 2014

Manaus, Amazonas

The Real Jungle Boat Ride

Our ship arrived in Manaus harbor early in the morning, traveling all night since the city of Parintins.  The city   We have traveled 960 nautical miles up the Amazon system after entering the outer reaches of its waters in the Atlantic.  It is still about nine miles wide here and oceangoing ships have no trouble navigation its waters.

Canoe along the bayou

is located on the Rio Negro, the Amazon’s largest tributary and almost as big as the main river, itself.

Manaus is a city of about 1.5 million and is the largest city in the state of Amazonas, taking in about half the state’s population.  We were informed that if we traveled up the Amazon for two more days at a present speed that we would reach Peru!  Imagine taking an oceangoing ship from Los Angeles to Denver.

jungle canopy

All transportation in Amazonia is by either water or air, as no paved roads cross the area.  People who wish to travel between cities and villages need to travel via small diesel riverboats, resembling miniature versions of the steamboats that were found in American waters in the 1800’s, but without the paddle wheels.  Passengers on these boats sling their hammocks over hooks in the covered, open-sided boats as they move up and down the rivers for days on end at a leisurely 8 knots or so.

Our excursion today started on one of these boats that was chartered for a trip across the  Rio Negro to an area of the rain forest called Lake January.  Rio Negro starts in Colombia and Venezuela and joins the Amazon here. It gets its name from the black color of its water, which is caused by its high acid content.  One of the benefits of the acid contents is that mosquitoes, present nearly everyplace in the Amazon Basin, find it difficult to breed in Rio Negro.

We were amazed by the many isolated homes and villages that lay on the shores of the waterways.  We even spotted a yellow school boat, taking the place of a school bus for those children in grades K-8.

We soon a reached a shallower area, where we transferred from our riverboat to a series of aluminum canoes.  Each canoe held ten passengers, as well as one helmsman, who operated the 40 hp outboard motor that propelled the watercraft.  A canopy over the top of each canoe kept off the sun and the rain. We now snaked our way into narrow, shallow channels that would be called bayous in the United   Most of the residents in this area make their living by fishing.  Some have electricity to their homes.  Very few have to pay rent, utilities or property taxes.  We saw no window screens and precious few glass windows in the homes in the area.

Wooly mmonkey shows off.

States.

Sadly, we did see some vast areas of the rain forest that have been burned off or clearcut to be used as grazing land for corporate cattle raising operations.

The food and medicine of the river dwellers comes from the jungle or waterways.  Medical care is scarce and education beyond grade 8 is only provided to city dwellers.

Bird and fish life was everywhere.  Returning to area where we had left the riverboats, we crossed a very rickety boardwalk about 30 feet above the jungle floor to get a view of the forest from a mid-canopy level.  Giant lily pads (actually lotus leaves) grew in abundance at a pond at the boardwalk’s end.  We also viewed a giant tree that was over 600 years old.

On the return trip to our boats, we spotted quite a collection of capuchin monkeys, who were spending their midday chasing each other above, below and around us.  When another group  of eco-tourists headed our direction on the high boardwalk, we were fearful of whether the aging one by fours that served as handrails would give out and tumble us down to the forest floor.

Our return trip to Manaus across the Rio Negro was uneventful and we arrived back at Pacific Princess, hot sweaty and happy. This was the last full day for 500 of the passengers on our cruise ship, who would fly back to their homes around the world on Monday.  We said fond farewells to our six tablemates, who we have really enjoyed during our fourteen day cruise and prepared for a new group who would arrive in Manaus on Monday.

We both caught ourselves dozing off during the evening’s folklore program and hit our cabin barely awake.