Our Journal

24 August Manaus

We kept hearing there are almost two million people in Manaus but it still seems like a quiet river port.  A block from our hotel there’s a 19^th century opera house left over from the rubber boom.  A tour agency, two cafes for tourists, a doctor’s office, residences, some abandoned looking buildings, and Jet Set X-rated cinema border the plaza.  There are free concerts nightly of Jazz, classical, and bosanova.  Free movies are projected on a screen nearby.  During the day, guitar lessons are held in the shade of a tree.  From the plaza to the river docks there are blocks of shops and kiosks lining the sidewalks.  By nightfall this area looks dangerous.  Walking around the plaza we heard what could have been gunshots and police where quick to get us out of there.  But overall, Manaus doesn’t have the feel of a dangerous port city.  High schools let out classes at 10:30 at night and students walk the streets without problems.  Staying in the town center we quickly saw that people are used to gringos touring through town.  Ladies of the night sit in cafes near the hotels and bore holes in us as we walk by.  A Sunday morning jog to a domed church took me through a neighborhood where 50 or so men where flying kites, many in speedos. 

Our first night we saw James’ bike in the lobby of a hotel so we invited him out for a beer (the guy we had bet at the border).  While sitting in an Italian restaurant a woman turned around and started talking to us.  She gave us a list of places to go in the city and then she wrote her number down as well.  Over the next thirty minutes we realized she was also in the business and had given her number to several others in the restaurant as well.  We ate, found another bar a few blocks away, and walked in to find two smiling British sisters on their way up the river to Peru.  We gave up on meeting locals and grilled the kiwi (James) about whether it would really be possible to run from Rivendale to Rohan and if he had ever been to the Shire.  It was a Monday night and the owner informed us that nothing really happens at night during the week.  I explained we weren’t looking for prostitutes and wanted to know where normal people went to hang out with other normal people.  He directed us to another part of town 20 minutes away to try another night.  The next night we went to see an orchestra play at the opera house.  A boyish conductor who talked as much as he conducted led a descent orchestra through some of classical music’s top 40.  The audience seemed to be half tourists who couldn’t help but gawk at the ornate interior right down to big metal canisters under each chair used to fill with ice back before air conditioning.  Afterward we took a long cab ride out to Punta Negra where we where supposed to find where locals hang out.  We sat down at a crowded café on the river and ordered but our sandwiches where difficult to stomach as we looked around at the crowd – 50 year old German men pawing all over way too young hookers.  We left Hans, Udo, and Wolfgang to their decadence and got right back in a cab back to the center.

Meanwhile in our daytime lives we were watching a lot of Olympics.  Brazilian coverage was amazing, three channels covering every Brazilian competing.  The announcer went into verbal ecstasy every time a Brazilian point was scored.  We were also trying to organize a trip out to a floating hotel in a more isolated part of the Amazon at Tefe, an hour flight away.  But, when we went to pay for our tickets we found the flight wasn’t possible so we decided to move on to Santarem by boat.  We scouted out boats to transport the bikes down river.  At one dock they wanted to take them down two stories of narrow stairs and over a one person plank just to get them on the dock.  We decided on waiting three days for a boat leaving from another dock where we could drive right up to the boat. 

One night we sat with James over a beer at a street café by our hotel.  Three girls sent a note over with the waiter asking why we were such shy boys.  We took that as our cue to walk over to the main plaza to hear some free live music.  We ran into three Harvard Law grads who had just taken the bar and where touring around Brazil trying to distract themselves before getting their results.  They took off as one of the guy's girlfriend was a little to insto the distracted thing talking to us and the cafes were closing, but we weren’t ready to go home.  Someone told us to try a place around the corner so we went looking and found a houselike bar.  This looked cool so we walked in and I immediately asked three girls to dance.  They looked at me like I was crazy so we moved further in to find a lively place with old and young dancing all over.  We ordered some beers which a guy brought over and he toasted with us.  Soon after we all three realized that this was no bar, we had just crashed some woman’s 50^th birthday party.  We stayed a while since our “waiter” seemed very happy to have us, but a couple of dirty looks from other family members convinced us to ease our way out.

Next day, more Olympics, and then we walked around the center shopping for clothing items I had lost back in the flying box incident.  I carried my camera and shot from the hip trying to get people’s pictures without them knowing (see photo album).  While I looked for shorts in a big shopping store, Matt did a study of how accustomed these people are to escalators and concluded that they are not so comfortable with moving stairs.  Out of 100 subjects, 3%, one being German, rode without holding the hand rail and a large number did some kind of stutter stepping getting on and off.  Would someone please repeat this study in a U.S. mall so we can post the results?

Saturday night James came over and we decided to go to a giant dance hall where they had live music.  At any given moment there were more people dancing than sitting.  The dancing was incredible, even by Barranquilla standards.  They dance a lot of forro that has a samba like step but then twirl like in salsa.  Way too difficult for us, but they also played a lot of cumbia and salsa.  After a few hours of dancing in the heat (no shortage of dance partners here and no one seemed to be on the clock), I was drenched and everyone was beat so we went for late night food and then home.  The next day we went to the mall to look for a Brazilian road map.  All malls are the same and it was an eerie effect being in the middle of the Amazon walking past shops that could be anywhere in the world.  Although, the Brazilian military did have a display of weaponry and armor that we were allowed to try on.  We saw “Eu Robo”, or “I Robot” and head back to the hotel.

We were all pretty tired but James insisted we have a drink at a street bar near our hotel.  We sat down at a table next to some inebriated guys squeezing the last hours out of the weekend.  A little while later they stumbled off down the street.  Just after we heard a screech of tires right in front of us and a smash and looked up to see one of the drunks being thrown through the air.  We ran down the street but I stopped short thinking that no one could survive that kind of blow and not feeling the need to look at death.  Matt ran out and started checking pulse points and breathing.  The man was face down and blood was starting to flow towards the gutter.  Matt had to stop a couple of people from moving the body.  People quickly gathered and there was a kind of chaos of people walking straight up to the body.  One of the other drunks had run over and laid a blow on the back of the driver’s head.  Another began wailing and sobbing and they had to be held back.  The police showed up and we quickly backed off fearing being a foreigner at an accident sight may be a bad idea and hoping that the authorities would monitor the man.  Unfortunately, from a distance we could see the police just sort of stood around.  An ambulance showed up ten minutes later but if the man had been alive when we arrived, he was dead by then.  The tire marks stretched halfway down the street, clearly going to fast, but I imagine the man simply stumbled in front of the car without looking.  We paid and walked back to the hotel looking intently both ways before crossing.  I couldn’t sleep that night wondering what we could have done differently.

um abracao, Chris

contact us:  chris@isabm.com   matt@isabm.com