Into the Heart of the Amazon

My next stop were the 2 biggest cities on the North coast of Brasil namely Sao Lois and Belem. Projeto Revevir is a project aimed at restoring the colonial centre of the city. Beautiful facades, dominated by azulejos ( potugese painted tiles used to deal with the damp heat) and also pastel colours dominate the centre. As you can see not all facades are revived but still add to the charm of this architectural jem.

Belem is the gateway to the Amazon hence my next destination after Sao Lois. The market held in the city centre next to the port is a colourful attraction where you can shop for all sorts of fish, friut and artesan, eat from the hundred and one stands all under one roof, or just enjoy people watching. My lunch for the 2 days in Belem was the Dourada, a local catfish fresh from the amazon, yumiieeeee. It is also the best place to shop for açai, a local palm fruit only found in the Amazon, which makes the most tasty and healthy juice, see picture of man in white shirt selling açai.
.

And then the day finally came for us to get on our cruise ship to head into the Amazon in style... or maybe not.

We were advised to go early, early meaning at 6am, to put up our hammocks to get a good spot which would be our bed for the next 3 nights. So that´s what we did. Me not being a morning person didn´t help in the shock you get when you get on this old bare rusty boat, on the lower deck. I felt like we were going to be treated as cargo... and i wasn´t completely mistaken. We headed back to our dodgy hostel to get some more sleep and headed back to the boat round 5 pm where we met up with Ju again and boy was it cosy. There were more than a hundred hammocks lined one next to each other. So let´s just say we didn´t have any problems meeting our neighbours.

But so far so good. The fact that we were heading into the Amazon was enough to keep our spirits high. But not for long. At first we were fascinated by the immensity of the Amazon river and fascinated by the way dwellings line the river. People were paddling in minute canoes begging for stuff from the people on the boat and every so eften one brave enough would attempt to hook onto the boat, obviously still moving, to get on board and sell fruits from the Amazon or cheeses and then head back to their community.

.

Things started going wrong though. We immediately spotted a couple of families with over half a dozen kids which we thought was cute and all. As it turned out these families were brasilian gypsies on thier way to look for gold, literally. One closer to us was a family with 7 kids I think, the kids peed where they ate and soon the smell became unbearable. The father was more keen on his bloody birds which he had than any of his children. To make things worse the music on the top deck, which would have been the perfect place to chill otherwise, was extremely loud tacky brasilian music with a break into cheesy 80´s music every once in a while. But we did make it through our ordeal to get to Santarem. And it was all good cause the next spot was Alter do Chao which made it all worthwhile.