The main streets were extremely crowded. I have never seen as many buses as I did in Brazilian cities, and there were thousands and thousands of taxis. I had seen no street people in Manaus but sadly there were a few, as well as a couple of beggars, near my hotel. One was a woman who didn’t look to be quite all there mentally but none of them was old. Street living is not an occupation conducive to longevity, I guess. The beggar to whom I invariably gave money was plonked right in the middle of the busy footpath of the main street, where people had to walk around him. He had no arms or legs, just a trunk with stumps on it, but he sat in the hot sun and smiled at the passers-by.
One day I solved two mysteries that had puzzled me – bingo halls and polished coconut shells. The former were actually places to play the pokies, but had large ‘Bingo’ signs outside. I investigated one and didn’t have a clue what I was doing but the machine spat ten dollars at me, so I didn’t complain. And the polished coconut shell halves that I had seen stacked on counters at small cafes or street food stalls, I discovered, were for soup. One evening I saw a woman deposit a few plastic chairs on the footpath, set up a tiny stall and start serving soup into these coconut shells. Nobody seemed to mind the sudden appearance of this obstacle, they just walked around the chairs. Multitudes of other tiny stalls sold similar items – belts, hair ornaments, wallets and so on. Some people merely stood on the footpath and held out items for sale.
I saw the marvellous church of Our Lady of Nazare. Built by rubber barons, it bristles with Victorian statues, Carrara marble and gold. The real church for masses of Brazilians is still the church of the spirits. The Africans who were imported as slaves by the Portuguese brought their gods with them and many times all they did was re-name their deity with a Christian name. The old voodoo religion, now called candombie, persists.
Having several weeks to fill in before my flight home, I decided that I’d love to see the mighty Amazon meet the Atlantic. I could do this by taking a boat out to spend a few days on the island of Marajo. As big as Switzerland, Marajo lies in the wide mouth of the Amazon and has forests, grassy plains, river beaches and big herds of water buffalo. The smart, new boat-terminal building seemed the logical place to start enquiring for a boat ticket to Marajo. It wasn’t. I was given directions to the place that was alleged to be the one. Hours later, cheesed off from hiking about in the heat, I came back to where I had started and was given direction elsewhere. Then they said that this office would now be closed for siesta. Typical. These boat offices shut at eleven for lunch and then go on to siesta. A good life already, but that’s not enough for them. They don’t open again in the evening, as respectable people who have had a siesta should do. They only open from three till five. I considered this pretty stupid – not for the office workers, perhaps, but certainly from a poor traveller’s point of view.
There was nothing else to do except imitate the supine staff, so I had lunch and a lie down before setting off again. This time I looked up my guide book. It swore that the boat office was ‘at the junction’ of the two streets it named but omitted to mention that from there you had to walk at least two kilometres. After asking for help many times I finally found the place, a big tin wharfside shed that housed several small ticket booths. From one of them, with my less-than-adequate Portuguese, I managed to extract a ticket for a boat to Surre, the only town on Marajo, in two days’ time.
The next day I used seven buses – and only once wound up on the wrong one. I found a bus going to the main bus station and asked the driver to tell me when we came to it. In the very modern bus depot, which was more like a train station thanks to its flight of stairs down to the departure bays, a helpful man struggled with my hybrid Spanish/Portuguese and I booked a seat on a bus to Rio de Janeiro in a week’s time. The journey would take fifty-two hours. ‘A good bus with a toilet,’ he promised. ‘Hopefully,’ I said. At first I had asked for a seat at the back of the bus but the ticket-seller indicated that this wasn’t such a good idea. ‘Pooh,’ he said holding his nose. ‘Toilet there.’ After fifty-two hours I guess they
would
get a bit whiffy.
Catching another bus, I set out for Icari, a village famed for its pottery, on the outskirts of Belem. The journey took a very long hour. Although I did see the odd horse-drawn cart and quite a few donkeys, we didn’t travel out into the countryside but through interminable suburbs of ugly, squat buildings. When we finally reached the bus terminus, I asked the driver for directions to Icari. He said that I should have got off earlier. The driver of another bus, which was about to return to Belem, kindly waited until I had finished the drink I’d bought at a dump of a nearby roadside stall and off I went again. About ten kilometres later he put me off. Standing in the dirt road, I thought, Crikey, this is a village? ‘Don’t miss it. It’s wonderful,’ the guide book’s authors had said. I thought that they needed to examine their values – not to mention their eyes. It might have been wonderful if you were mad keen on pottery, lots of it and mostly the same, but I’m not. I don’t care for it at all. I came to see the interesting village in the countryside that I had visualised. Instead I stood in a hot, dusty street lined with rows of dreary shacks, which were fronted by open drains full of sewerage.
I waited for the next bus alongside an evil-smelling butcher’s ‘shop’, an open-air roadside stand with slabs of meat arrayed on a grotty bench. It was a long wait in the heat, and my mood wasn’t helped by the devoted attention of hordes of flies. When a bus came I jumped on it – I didn’t care where it was going. As luck had it, it went to the bus depot from where I caught another bus right to the door of my hotel. Fantastic.
Never daunted, lunch and a siesta later, I set off again on a bus, this time with the museum in my sights. Belem’s botanical gardens, museum and zoo are combined in a wonderful park. I felt as though I was in the real jungle again. Beautiful, big trees and overhanging creepers completely shaded the paths I walked along in this magical green world that was dotted with picturesque old buildings and quaint stone edifices. The botanical gardens are built around a couple of huge trees that must be hundreds, maybe thousands, of years old. Bigger than any I saw out in the jungle, they were so enormous I found it hard to grasp their size. There were also many flowering trees and a blue creeper, like wisteria, that I had seen growing elsewhere. Quite a few bushes and trees had blue flowers and another had great pink blossoms. And there were many specimens of the tree that I saw everywhere in the streets and parks and was just now coming into beautiful blossom. I call it the ‘golden shower tree’ because all its yellow blooms hang down in a cascade like rain.
The live exhibits were housed among the trees and garden in natural surroundings. My favourites were a couple of massive anacondas, one beautiful spotted jaguar and another sleekly sinuous and as black as the night, who padded sinisterly about his enclosure. Gorgeous black monkeys swung languidly from branch to branch in their tree-filled enclosure and the biggest bird I’ve ever seen perched on a log. Much bigger than a wedge-tailed eagle, it looked like a huge, black-and-white owl. There were also ravishing pink flamingoes and gigantic, rainbow-hued macaws. I was taken aback by the intensity of their glorious colours – screaming blues, aquas and reds. There was a good aquarium with many flowing fish in well-lit glass cases. The museum looked interesting too, but there were no English subtitles so I couldn’t work out what most of it was all about. I could have spent much more time in this enjoyable place but, although there were plenty of seats along the shaded paths, the afternoon became hot and steamy and my feet wore out.
As soon as I made it back to the hotel I had a cold shower. I never thought I’d see the time when a cold shower would be the delight of my day but it was great to wash off the grime.
Later I forayed out to the Belem opera house, the Teatro la Paz. It was nowhere near the treasure that Manaus’s was – the paintings and decoration were not as spectacular – but it was still lovely and it
was
bigger. One sweeping, curved staircase was made entirely of white Carrara marble and another was wood and brass. The ballroom, entrance hall and upstairs foyer each featured three chandeliers, the central chandelier in each room being a mass of thousands of crystal drops and prisms. If it had fallen on you, you would never have got up again or lived to complain about it, but you surely would have gone out with a jangle. In this theatre I was allowed to stand on the stage and, looking out over the seating, I could appreciate that it must be something else to perform here. The rows of plush seats, the gilded decorations and the grand, three-tiered boxes made quite an impression.
Leaving the opera house I continued walking and, miracles do happen, actually found something I had been looking for. But I don’t know why the locals were so proud of their shopping centre. It was as dreary as any of these monstrosities anywhere.
Later, sitting in the airline office watching the crowds walk past, I realised that apart from the hotel waiter, I hadn’t seen many old people in Brazil. Statistics tell you about the massive number of youngsters in this country, but where do they keep their oldies? I did see a couple in the park on Sunday – maybe they only bring them out then. Was something sinister going on, or was it simply that people wore out fast in the heat?
One day I saw a sign on a shop advertising ‘tartlets’, and pondered whether they trained young tarts inside. If you judged purely by the manner of female dress, you’d say every second woman was a tart. The clothing here was even more risque than it had been in Manaus. You’d be arrested by the vice squad if you went out dressed like that in some places.
My trip to the island of Marejo started out innocuously. I taxied to the gate of the terminal, from where it was only a short walk into the departure shed and a doddle from there to the boat that was tied up at the wharf outside. The shed contained rows of long, wooden seats and in one corner a tiny cafe. The boat was scheduled to leave at twelve, but at that time passengers were still nonchalantly strolling down to it, so it was obviously not expected to depart punctually. The boat was a smaller version of the wooden riverboats fitted with rows of benches that could accommodate six passengers. The first row of seats were grabbed immediately, and I realised that this was because they were smack in front of the television set – not that you could hear it once the engine started. The day was overcast and the brown-grey water of the river was flat calm as we took off from the wharf. In the bow of the boat the crew’s lunch table was gracefully arranged between the two toilets. I sat near the back and can vouch for the fact that they get smelly after a while. Nothing new there.
Once we were under way, the security guard slung his hammock across the bow and went to sleep. A couple of passengers did the same. What a good idea.
For a while the trip was uneventful. At first we ran alongside the riverbank, then, skirting a couple of small islands in the middle of the river, came to what looked like the open sea but was really still the wide river mouth. The colour of the water changed to an impressive yellowish-green and after a short while a few white caps appeared. As the weather grew rougher the white caps metamorphosed into thumping great waves and the sea became very disorderly, lurching the boat about. The passengers shrieked and held on tightly to the sides of the benches. Water came pouring in over the sides of the boat while the crew rushed to pull down tarpaulins to stop it. Waves splashed over my bags so I moved them to a drier spot. Attempting to get out of range of the spraying water, I inched along the bench from my spot on its end, encroaching on a fellow who was siesta-ing on the rest of it. It was about this time that I realised that this boat had no lifeboats or jackets.
Despite the tarpaulins, water poured in the boat with each wave and soon the decks were awash. Later a Brazilian man asked me, ‘Were you worried?’ I said, ‘No,’ but I think he had been. Still, I was glad not to be further out at the pororoca, the spot where the Atlantic’s incoming tide crashes against the out-flowing river waters. Here the waves are five metres high and the noise they make sounds like a jet plane. Eight trillion gallons of fresh water a day pour into the Atlantic Ocean, many times the water needs of the entire United States. In discharge and drainage the Amazon easily surpasses all other rivers and equals the total of the world’s next eight largest.
After three-and-a-half hours we came in to port on the island and, once we were in sight of the shore, the water calmed. Everyone stampeded off the boat – so I did too. It had been raining and there were muddy puddles underfoot, but the ascent to the top of the high bank was facilitated by a duckwalk of planks. At the top I was surprised to find just a patch of uninviting mud. I thought I’d been supposed to arrive at the town of Surre.
A couple of young Brazilian men I had seen on the boat asked me if I wanted a car. No wonder I’d noticed them. They were both gorgeous blokes, and one was exceptionally beautiful. I said that I wanted to go to the hotel in Surre, so they took me in tow and shunted me into one of the beat-up old vans that were lurking about waiting for customers. Another woman joined us and we drove for a long time until it began to dawn on me that I hadn’t got off the boat anywhere near Surre. And finally it clicked that I had actually alighted on the other side of the island. I discovered later that the boat only went all the way to Surre on certain days. And this, naturally enough for a persistent victim of Murphy, was not one of those days.
On this day I had to go overland, making the total journey longer than five hours. Jolting along on a shocking dirt track we crossed the entire island, passing through dull country dotted with a few small primitive settlements, at one of which we cast off the other woman passenger. Then our progress was halted by a wide river. The luscious Brazilian boys, who had by now decided to adopt me, paid the van driver and refused to allow me to contribute.