I am on fire, and it's the rainy season

In these shoes...!?

Off the boat and into a taxi to take us through one-horse Tabatinga, via the police station to check out of Brazil and over the border to airport immigration at Leticia, Columbia, to have our passports stamped IN!


It feels good to be back on the Spanish side. Our hostel, La Jangada is very nice, but the weather is so hot and humid I can hardly be bothered to do anything.


A wander around the pleasant small town, a cold beer or two in the company of Che/Castro lookalike man-about-town Guillermo Guerro and his Swiss sidekick Johannes, and we're back in the room for a cold shower or two.






We're sitting on the porch talking to Montreal Canadian Emmanuel (rap star Manu Militari) when the storm breaks - torrential rain, and the lightning causes power blackouts, but it clears the air nicely for the next day, though it's still raining, which is fine by me.



Also fine is that things are suddenly cheaper (thank goodness!) and we have a slapup feed at El Abuelo for two quid each.

A word on meals "for two" in South America - I'm not sure who they have in mind with their business plan, but my money is on Matty and Pete Broon.

The portions are massive! We had a gutbusting grill a couple of nights ago, and look at this lunch we had at a fish restaurant back in Florianopolis - we had to leave half of it...


Anyhow, a couple more beers, a night's kip and we catch the plane to Bogota...

More Tabatinga and Leticia pictures here...

Voyager III (You can't take a boat to Colombia*)

Fellow traveller.

From Manaus to Tabatinga by boat.

Six days on the Amazon river in an air-conditioned ensuite cabin.

Three square meals per day**, TV, bar, cafe, all found, £150 per person.

Voyager III embarked at noon from Manaus port on Wednesday 7 May, 2014.

Expected arrival in Tabatinga is early morning Tuesday, 13 May.

Local operator and clearly well-connected Armstrong (who else?) had given us a suspiciously good price, so it was with trepidation that we stepped aboard with him from a motor launch, via the starboard side rather than down the gangplank like everyone else. Clearly the tradesman's entrance...

We were shown to our cabin, with clean, basic bunk beds, small shower/toilet/sink combo, noisy but effective air con and flatscreen TV.

Armstrong instructed his mate to put up Kim's hammock on deck, bid us farewell and disappeared, then off we sailed.

The Amazon we experienced was massive, wide open, seemingly empty at first, but people and boats emerged, scattered here and there in a simple, quiet existence and we observed the full colour and scale of it all as Voyager motored slowly but relentlessly along.

Classroom and school boat.

We passed lonely shacks in the middle of nowhere, a village church with two houses, kids swimming in the river, waterlogged football 'pitches', men fishing from tiny canoes, a general store reachable by boat, schoolchildren brought together under a bandstand by the school boat, a 'street' was a dozen houses on stilts, each a hundred yards apart, ladies in motorboats hid from the rain under yesterday's parasols, everything stretched out along a 1,000-mile ribbon of vivid green trees and cloudy brown river.

When the sun shone we lazed on deck watching the action, drinking lager, fascinated by it all. When the rain poured all day, we retired to our hammocks to read, do the accounts, listen to music, sleep, do the diary, edit photos, type the blog... the options were endless.

One dilemma: whether to look for pink dolphins in the Amazon, or sit at the bar watching an old DVD of Kate Humble looking for pink dolphins in the Amazon. Surreal.

I opted to watch lovely Kate, while having a beer. A no-brainer really, let her do the hard work of dolphin hunting.

Food was good and tasty, if of limited choice, but plentiful and certainly healthier than anything we have eaten in South America.

Breakfast at 7am, lunch at 11am and dinner at 4.30pm in the small canteen.

Unlimited cold, filtered water was on tap, so we could have saved on the ten litres we brought aboard.

Dinner Ladies.

We had also brought aboard a precautionary stash of crisps, crackers, chocolate biscuits, porridge, fruit, jam, cheese squares, powdered juice drink and an emergency litre of rum, but found the bar/shop sold most of these (except rum, phew), plus ice cold lager and ice cream! (all 3 Reals each), so we were never going to starve.

Beer tokens.

Our fellow passengers were mostly Brazilian, or at least South American. Cute little girls, cheeky little boys, mums, dads (who spent most time up top by the telly, away from the hammock/creche area), older ladies, a nun - always in a crisp, clean habit - all clustered happily on the middle deck, surrounded by suitcases, bags, towels and toys.

Alexander, off to work in Tabatinga

The only other two 'Gringos' were Constantin and Christoper Ecclestone lookalike Sacha, a friendly and funny German journalist and photographer team, on assignment to document the local peoples' new experience of banking, as commerce spreads out along the Amazon.

The Germans

Constantin grills a fellow passenger

Back in our cabin after lights out (ie around sunset) I found a couple of new room mates scuttling around. Considerately, they stayed under the bed or down the shower plughole while we were in the room.

We also found the room to have an evil miasma from time to time and narrowed the reasons down to being directly below the mens' loos. Time for me to sleep in the hammock...

By Monday night we had reached our last stop, Benjamin Constant, only an hour from Tabatinga. So we stopped there. For eight hours... Ah well, it was an extra bonus night in the hammock.

Click here to see the gallery for our trip.


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* Well, you can take one as far as the border

** MENU (Every day)

Breakfast: Bread, butter, crackers, sweet chicory coffee, sometimes scrambled egg or boiled potato pieces

Lunch: Beef OR chicken, beans, maybe egg salad, blancmange, semolina

Dinner: Chicken OR beef, spaghetti, rice, red or green salad - an unexpected extra on Sunday was fried fish!