Manchester to Manaus

18/08/2016: We've been on holiday for two weeks now and I just took my first walk alone. There was no olive oil in the hostel kitchen, so off I trotted to the supermarket. We're using Argentinian pesos now instead of Brazilian reales and, although I can pronounce this currency (the other one is something like hay-ais, but not quite), I have no idea how to calculate prices. I just paid 75 pesos for olive oil; time will tell if I did a good thing or a bad thing.

It's nice to be in Argentina. It's strange how just by being able to speak the language I feel a whole lot more comfortable and safe enough to take a walk alone in the evening. I think Brazil has a worse reputation than Argentina in general, but when a "worse reputation" can result in your hostelmate having a gun pointed at them through the window of their Uber, you wonder what a normal reputation can bring.

But I guess I'll get to the details of that later. I suppose I should start at the beginning, otherwise I'll go off on so many tangents that this account will read less like a travel diary and more like a Spirograph of observations from an easily distracted holiday duck bouncing from novelty to unknown like a ping pong ball in a match between Sweden and Korea.

It took us 50 hours to get from Manchester to Manaus. Our first stop was extremely pleasant as we essentially went home, to Madrid, to have brekkie with Fannegan and then nap in her house until it was time to take the one-hour flight to Lisbon, which is where we spent the night, on the wrong side of security.

"I love The Portuguese," I declared, "they're so polite and their English is so good." This was after a security guard had assured us we could leave the security area and get back in, no hassle! I stand by my declaration of his being polite and his having good English: he was and he did. What I didn't realize was that he told us something which wasn't true and his polite and articulate mistake meant we were stuck outside and spent the night trying to sleep on the floor and hanging out in a tent erected by a couple of passing American thespians. By the time we got back through security, at 4:00, the temptation of Starbucks and pastels de Belem (cream pies) was lost on us and we fell asleep on a bench.

The hop from Lisbon to Belem was the first comfortable nap we'd had in a while (even better than Fannegan's house, she knows why), and when we landed we could see the jungle from the airport windows. We arrived in Manaus at about 20:00 local time and on the taxi drive to the centre I made the extremely deep observation that South America (this is my first time) looks like the US (or Miami) but Africafied. Everything has that spread-out feeling like the States, where nothing has had to be pushed together because there's no lack of space, and there are big cars, old buses, tall jungly trees and roadside stalls. All of this reminded me of the neighborhood I'd stayed in when I was in Miami. But then the dust at the side of the road was red, the buses were not just old, they were decrepit, and the roadside stalls would never have passed a safety inspection from the Miami food department.

Our first port of call after more sleeps was the Teatro Amazonas (Amazon Opera House) famed for its appearance in the much-loved (by Pól) 1982 Herzog Classic Fitzcarraldo. It was constructed, we learned, at the height of the rubber boom, when Manaus was one of the richest cities in the world (very late 19th century). Everything about it is European: the architect (Italy), the tiles on the dome (Alsace), the many composers whose names adorn the columns in the interior (bar two Brazilians), except its location. When the rubber bubble burst (thanks to some fuckwit smuggling the seeds out and growing rubber trees in Sri Lanka and Africa), the opera house was abandoned, along with the rest of Manaus, to get back to belonging to South America. Next to the cracked pavements and the dangerously hanging power cables of the surrounding neighbourhood, the building is well maintained, open to the public for tours and a worth a visit, in my opinion. It's a beautiful building and lovely pink memento of a time when this part of the jungle was called the Paris of the Tropics (sounds fancy).

The Amazon Opera House.

Riverboats and their rivermen.

As we'd planned to "take a boat down the river to Santarém", and told enough people about it that we couldn't just chicken out when we got to the port and read in the guidebook to beware because "some of the rivermen carry guns", we bought a pair of tickets, bought a pair of hammocks, bought a pair of tomatoes (picnic dinner) and headed over to our boat. It was called San Bartolomeo, had three decks and a half and looked like a Mississippi riverboat, but without a whirly paddle at the back. We were the first people to hang our hammocks (of course the locals can sleep in their homes the night before a trip, but we were saving money on a night's accommodation), and after the Deet man had done his thing and a thousand insect bodies had been swept from the floor, we hung our hammocks from the handy hammock hooks, ate our tomatoes and bread, and went to hammock.

Pól saw the sunrise, I missed it. But when I woke up the sky was still pink and although the port was super busy with boats being loaded, our deck was still empty. By midday and sailing time however, the entire space was filled with hundreds of people and their hammocks, their suitcases underneath, their children running between them. We had neighbours on both sides, and then new neighbours squeezed in between us and then more came, and more. I helped a French guy tie a knot in his ropes and hang his hammock in a totally useless way. I'd been on the boat all night and felt like I knew this hammock life malarkey. He soon corrected my mistake, but was nice enough to introduce himself and his travelmate to us, and be our friends for the next few days.

And so we were off to Santarém: two new friends made, the boat kitchen located, and not a gun-carrying riverman in sight. It was all going swimmingly, until I realized I'd forgotten the code to my combination padlock.