Amazon River, Brazil, South America

I had a great first day in the Amazon rain forest today! I got picked up at my hotel at about 8am, and I was driver around the corner to the tour office. I left my bag there, and met a couple other people who are going on a similar tour with the same company. I thought that everyone I was going with would be on the same five day tour that I’m doing, but I was really wrong. Some people were going for four days, some for three, and a couple were just doing an overnight and going back to Manaus tomorrow. Seems crazy to me because it takes a while to get out into the jungle, so it deserves staying more than one night.

We took a van from the office to the river, and the guy from Bamba found a boat that would take us across the river. The boat took us out to the convergence of the Rio Negro and Rio Solimoes. These two combine to form the Amazon river. The cool thing is that at the convergence you can see the distinct difference of the two rivers. The Rio Negro is black water and travels a bit faster than the Rio Solimoes which is a much lighter brown color. It was strange to see the two different waterways running right next to each other but not really mixing.

We continued on to the other side of the river where we got another van and drove about 30 miles south. We got to the end of a dirt road and had to get on another boat, but this one was much smaller and much faster. We took the speedboat through the jungle until we got to jungle lodge we were staying at. When I showed up it all became clear how there were so many different people doing different tours. This is the lodge where people come and go every day and they can choose to go on some of the excursions from the lodge or not.

I met the owner, Gerry, and had lunch with some of the other people at the lodge. We had fish (of course) and rice. It wasn’t great, but also not terrible, so I’ll take that. I was waiting for Gerry to give me my single room in the lodge that I had paid for, and he came up and asked if I wanted to go out into the jungle tonight, instead of tomorrow night. I figured I had nothing to lose, so I went.

We left the lodge at 3pm with a group of seven other people and our guide Osmar. We took the boat for about 2.5 hours to get to the “camp”, but we were looking for stuff all along the way. Osmar was incredible good at spotting birds, monkeys, and even a couple of sloths. There weren’t as many animals roaming around as I thought there would be, but the boat was pretty loud and apparently that scares them away pretty quickly. It was amazing to me that they take these boats through the reeds and even over some small trees too. At some points it looked like we were off-roading with a boat. It was insane!

We got to the camp around 5:30pm and it’s not really much of a camp. There is a shelter, just with a roof, to put the hammocks under, and that was it. Osmar asked if any of us wanted to sleep out underneath the trees instead of under the roof. I figured that since we are in the rain forest, it was probably going to rain at some point, so I opted for going under the roof. I’m glad I did. We all set up our hammocks with mosquito nets on them, and then at about 6:15pm it started to rain. You could actually hear the rain coming through the forest in our direction. When it finally hit us it was like buckets were just being thrown down on us.

The few people who had opted to stay out under the trees had to grab their hammocks and move them under the shelter as well. And now they have wet hammocks to sleep on tonight (haha). Osmar went off and did his thing in the rain, not caring at all that he was completely soaked through to the bone. The rest of us had to just huddle inside the little shelter and watch Osmar start a fire in the rain (I still have no idea how he did that), and start to cook a couple of chickens.

He made absolutely everything for our dinner. He took two large sticks and split the ends so that he could put the chickens inside the split end and then hang the chicken over the fire. He then made our dinner plates out of some palm leaves, and made us forks out of little sticks that he cut with a swiss army knife. It was very impressive. He also made some rice to go with the chicken, and the food was amazing! The chicken took about two hours to cook over the fire, and it had a great smoked flavor.

We ate at about 8:30pm and the rain continued to fall the entire night. We all went to bed around 10pm and it was still pouring as hard as it had all night. I decided that I’m not going to spend a second night out here, because even though I’m glad I’m doing it now, I don’t need to do it again. I have a feeling that tomorrow night is going to be pretty much exactly the same as tonight, because out here in the middle of the jungle, there are only so many things you can do. It’s still be a very good experience though.