This morning we left the ginormous “Tropical” Hotel and set out for a sight seeing tour around Manaus in 2 busses. The city is quite beautiful but it struggles a lot with the humidity. The signs of mold and the grey, sprung walls reminded me a lot of Venice, actually.
We saw the brand new and never-again used Giant football stadion that was built for the world cup in 2014 and since then has not been re-used, because no one wants to play football in this heat in the middle of a giant forest.
We also visited a market for artisanal, that was quite nice
We passed markets full of fish and tons of fruit:
And as a wise old brazilian proverb says: “O melhor do Brasil é o Brasileiro”
“Se o Brasileiro quisesse, ele já teria dominando o mundo”
We also visited the city theatre:
I hope this Architect lost his job
We had lunch in a shopping center
Then, we boarded the busses again and left the city on a 2 hour drive on the only concrete road in a radius of 3000 Km to ...somewhere.
We arrived at a small hotel, with bungalows all over the campus and got our roomkeys. After we had organized our things and put on long Trousers, shirts with long sleeves or jackets, socks over the trousers and closed shoes, because shortly after our arrival, we went nightwalking in the Rainforest. Sadly, I did not take any pictures because it was very wet and I didn t want m phone to die but Carly took 1 picture of a waterfall. Anyways.
We arrived at the beginning of the track when there still was some daylight left and entered the darkening forest. Our guide told us to always check before putting our hands somewhere, as there are many animals that could bite or sting you if you accidentally touched them. also, poisonous plants. He showed us the 24-hour-ant, which, if it bites you, inflicts horrible burning pain on you for a whole 24 hours. they live underground between the roots of young trees, and to lure them out one only has to shake the tree...which he did...and these really big black ants crawled all over that tree.
It was difficult for me to keep p with the group since I was always afraid of slipping and falling on the muddy, steep path full of roots and slimy rotting leaves, but I somehow made it, even when it got so dark we had to use our flashlights.
We finally got to a waterfall and a small brook that flowed out of a cave.
This photo was taken from inside the cave. We had to walk through the ankle deep water to get inside the cave, and after that, the whole trail inside of it consisted of water. There were bats in that cave system, and they made it smell pretty bad...
We also saw weird crab-spiders with super long legs/antaennas, that operate blindly and go just by heat and movement sensores in their legs. They eat crickets and are being eaten by the bats.
Out of the cave, we continued walking in the brook which grew continuously deeper until the water reached up almost to my knees. But since by then it had started to rain, it did not matter that my legs got wet because everything got wet.
We reached another waterfall and bathed in it in the dark, as the rain was falling, which was crazy and amazing and really, really cold all at the same time. On the way back to the bus we were asked to switch out our flashlights for a bit and walk through the forest in darkness, not seeing where we set our feet or where the obstacles were, clinging onto each others hands like drowning people. Some of the group ran head first into trees or low hanging branches. Some tripped and fell or slipped on the muddy ground. When we could switch our lights back on, we had barely made 100 metres in 10 minutes.
We got into the bus but drove standing, so we wouldn t make the seats wet. back at the hotel we washed our shoes out at the showers at the pool, then jumped into the pool with all our clothes still on.
We had dinner and after that we watched a folklore dance show that told the story of a slave who kills the most beautiful cow in his masters herd to cut out its tounge and serve it to his pregnant wife who has strange cravings. The master of course wants to punish him for that, so the slave goes to seek out a shaman and begs him to revive the cow. It actually works out.
the cow costume was great too:
Then there were some more dances, the last one calling all of us on stage to dance together.
After the show, we had to decide which boats we wanted to be in for rest of the trip, and to make it “fair” the solution was to make a quiz out of it. A question was asked and the first one to deliver the right answer could go up to the table with the lists of the 3 boats and write their name in one of them. Unfortunately, it wasn t all that fair since none of the taiwanese people actually spoke portuguese and so they didn t even understand the questions, much less answer them correctly, so at the end of the quiz the whole bunch of taiwaneses ended up on the one boat that still had free spaces (my boat)...so yeah. a lot of mandarin during that trip. I chose to be on the Jacaré, together with Carly, Wouter, Mahika, Kathrine and Ingrid, which turned out to be the best decision ever, because that one was the new boat they had just built and that was way better than the other two. I was also the first one to put my name on the list of that boat, because I was the 4th person to give the rigt answer to a question (which animal is depicted on the 50 R$ bill? - a Jaguar)
We finally went to bed and I slept really well that night.
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