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Finally, this is Manaus, a modern city of over a million people in the middle of nowhere!
Frankly, I was glad that I had fulfilled my dream of sailing down the Amazon but I was also pleased to get here at last.
The rubber boom in Iquitos was nothing compared to what it was here. This handsome building was built in 1906 by the British to serve as customs house from prefabricated blocks imported from the UK. It now houses the Port Captain's offices.
I stayed at the Rio Branco Hotel on the right at the end of this street where I had a room with fan and private bathroom for 10 $US.
Here are Kim and Malin, the Swedish couple from Malmeu who read all the way from Tabatinga to Manaus! We got together for dinner a couple of times before they left overland for Boa Vista in the north and from there, Venezuela on their way back home.
Notice how the clever Brazilians beat the heat by insulating the beer bottle with a plastic foam beer box! I know a lot of hot places that could benefit from this brilliant idea. Hopefully that's what the global market is all about and soon no hot places will have to go without polystyrene beer boxes!
By the time the Don Manoel got here the lower deck was crammed full with every variety of banana and plantain grown in Brazil. It was all headed for the Manaus banana market of which only a part is shown here.
There are few roads and practically everything comes by boat so the market is naturally right in front of the riverfront Escadria dos Remédios where boats of every description tie up.
The Manaus municipal market was remarkable for the great variety of fish it offered ranging from sardines to six foot piracuru. My favorites in the local restaurants were piracuru, tucanare and tambaqui.
Of course no market is complete without a meat section and this is what it looked like.
This cast iron pavilion of the municipal market (one of two), was built a century ago when the rubber boom was in full swing. At that time Manaus sought to be elegant by imitating European architecture so its market had to look like the Parisian "Les Halles".
The crown jewel of rubber boom Manaus was this Italian renaissance Teatro Amazonas designed by Doménico de Angelis in 1896. At that time Manaus had only a fraction of the population it has now and the construction of such a theater to flatter the egos of a small number of rubber barons was seen as a nouveau riche extravagance in Europe. It did however put the name of the city in everyone's conversation and gave it a reputation of great opulence.
The Palácio da Justiça was built next to the Teatro Amazonas in the same period and with the same spirit.
There was no way I could learn to speak Portuguese in two weeks but I searched all over town for a school where I hoped to learn enough of the Portuguese pronunciation to be able to understand the grist of a TV program. I found a lot of schools teaching English to Brazilians but none teaching Brazilian to anglophones. Finally I got in touch with a professor who held classes for future English teachers. I met the class at the municipal library not far from here and offered to trade practice of the English language for training in the Portuguese way of pronunciation.
The Relógio Municipal is a downtown land mark in front of the Catedral Nossa Senhora da Conceição which I could not photograph for lack of sufficient perspective.
My proposal to the English class worked and I had several training sessions with one of the students, Edilene Menezes who was not only a good teacher but also good company. We visited the Museo do Indio together and she offered to show me her birthplace, the Caboclo village of Manacapuru.
It was amazing to me to find this busy intersection of Eduardo Ribeiro with Sete de Setembro in the middle of the jungle hundreds of kilometers from anything that could be called a city. It can be explained largely by the Distrito Industrial Castelo Branco where scores of international firms use the cheap local labour to manufacture a wide range of products under duty free conditions.
