At home and abroad

To prepare for our recent trip down the Amazon River across Brazil, I relied more heavily on blog reports than ever before. But I still had unanswered questions as we began. We learned a lot over the two weeks we were in and around the river. Here are some of the top answers we acquired.

1. What will the food be like?

We wound up taking three boats, and the food supply varied among them. For the first leg between Tabatinga and Alvaroes, our 1200-real ($320) cabin on the Monteiro II included two days of breakfasts, lunches, and dinners for both of us, plus purified water. The breakfasts were all carb — bananas, bread, cake, hominy, super-sweet coffee. Lunches and dinners were much tastier — a meat stew with noodles, pot roast, ground beef. It was simple but hearty food (accompanied by high-carb side dishes.)Meals were also provided along with our two-day cabin passage on the Fenix (on which we traveled from Tefe to Manaus.) Once again, the food was passable. One dinner consisted of the typical meat hash, very good grilled sausages, white rice, and spaghetti. (We skipped the unappealing vegetable salad.) Lunch the next day was fried chicken legs and wings and more of the sausage.

We took the Amazon Star from Manaus to Santarem to Belem, and our cabin booking on it did not include meals. Food was available for purchase in the galley, but few of the passengers were eating it. Most preferred to buy meals sold at some of our stops along the way. Although we ate the ship’s offerings our first night, it made us nervous. In Manaus we stocked up on picnic supplies, but we should have bought more. Our final night we bought mixto quentes (grilled ham and cheese sandwiches from the little top-deck snack shop). They tasted better than we expected.As for the purified water, we drank it for the first two days without incident, but after we both developed traveler’s diarrhea in Manaus, we began to question the sanitation. The water appeared to be coming straight from the river into the refrigerated holding tanks after passage only through a very small filter. We switched to bringing bottled water onboard and had no further intestinal trouble.

2. Will we drink too much alcohol?

Beer and other alcoholic beverages were less available than we expected. The Monteiro had none for sale (though passengers brought their own onboard). The snack shops on the Fenix and Amazon Star sold beer, and some passengers drank a lot of that. But we found the Brazilian beer to be uninspiring.

3. Will the ships carry lots creepy insects?

They might. The river does run smack through thick jungle. But we sure didn’t see many bugs. I spotted a couple of tiny spiders here and there, but neither of us ever saw or heard any mosquitos. The creepiest moment came when we pulled into Manaus around dawn and were hustling to disembark. Steve felt something crawling on him and brushed it away, with an shudder so visceral it was contagious. He saw a “large” spider disappearing into the gloom on the floor. I checked our belongings compulsively when we got to our hotel, but the arachnid didn’t appear to have hitched a ride with us into town.

4. Will there be mosquito nets?

We never found a hint that anyone on any of our three boats had ever heard of them. And there were none in any of the hotels we stayed at in the towns along the way. The one exception was the somewhat tattered netting over one of our two twin beds at the Casa do Caboclos in Mamiraua Sustainable Ecological Reserve. (Ironically, one of the vacationing biologists we met there said there’s no malaria in that immediate vicinity.)

5. Will we be attacked by river pirates?

Piracy on the river is apparently increasing. I had read several reports about it, and because so much of the river is so isolated, it’s not inconceivable. Still, on the large boats that we took, it seemed almost unimaginable. Any vessel big enough to attack a big ferry would be awfully easy for authorities to track down, or so we thought. And if ferry attacks were commonplace, a few machine guns would make the big boats easy to defend.

Furthermore, the police presence on the river was notable. Federal cops searched the boat before we left Tabatinga. And more federal officers boarded at two different towns along the way to search for drugs and then disembark.

6. Will I have many opportunities to practice my Portuguese?

Over and over, I felt grateful for every hour I worked to learn some Portuguese (starting about six months before our trip). It enabled me to ask simple questions — and roughly understand the answers. This was invaluable, as almost no one we met on any of the boats spoke English. (Even Spanish was scarce.) One exception was a friendly federal policemen who boarded the Amazon Star in Obidos and cornered us to chat about his upcoming vacation in the Southwest U.S. Steve also conversed with a truck driver who had learned passable English when he lived in London for 5 years. But not a single crew member on any of the ships spoke any English.

7. Will it be hot and steamy all the time?

Surprisingly not! Traveling in late May, we were almost never uncomfortably hot, and that’s only partly because our cabins were air-conditioned. Motoring down the water gave us a breeze that almost always made the days pleasant. Only when the boats docked (sometimes for more than an hour) did the temperature and humidity climb to oppressive levels.

8. Will the ships become disgusting after a day or two?

We were surprised and impressed by how hard the crew of the Monteiro worked to keep her shipshape. Workers were always sweeping up and mopping and cleaning. When I checked one of the hammock folks’ bathrooms, it seemed respectable even after two days of hard use. The other two boats were a bit less well-tended. Still, they seemed tidier than most long-distance trains we’ve traveled on.

9. Will there be WiFi onboard?

Ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha! In our dreams. The vast majority of the time we were on the river, there was no phone signal of any sort. Occasionally, approaching or docking at a town, a weak signal would show up on our phones. It invariably took an annoyingly long time to be able to start download data over the signal, and then we’d get headlines: Meghan Markle’s dad will not attend Royal Wedding!!! Trump claims he saved $999,800,000 on Jerusalem embassy! and if we were lucky, email. But then we’d be moving downstream, and the signal would soon evaporate.

10. Will we get bored?

No. The onboard entertainment that I described in my earlier post kept us endlessly engrossed. Beyond that, just being in a place so unusual — so normal on the ship but so alien for thousands of miles in every direction around us — never ceased to interest us. Depending on how the geographers measure it, the river is said to be about 4,130 miles long. We don’t know exactly how much of that is in Brazil, but we figure it’s at least 3,000 miles. We covered that distance at an average speed of 12-15 miles per hour. It takes a river of time. But we flowed with it.