The Amazon
April 18th – May 3rd, 2023
The port of Tabatinga, Brazil, which borders Leticia, Colombia. I flew to Leticia then boarded a boat here that took me 3 hrs upstream to a lodge on the Javari River.
A village along the Javari. If you zoom in on the sign, you'll see that Ms. Gonzalez thinks we should eat more beef. I think we can all get behind that.
I saw a lot of dolphins and monkeys during my week at the lodge, but they're almost impossible to capture on camera unless you're willing to sit in a kayak all day and get eaten alive by mosquitoes. So here's my most interesting shot of the jungle.
I rode a cargo boat like this one (I was on the Maria Monteiro II) after the lodge from Tabatinga to Manaus, Brazil.
There were a few private cabins on my boat, but I opted for a hammock like most of the other passengers. We made seven stops along the way, and at one point the decks got twice as crowded as in this picture.
The standard boat breakfast
Most of the cargo we carried was empty beer cans to be recycled in Manaus
Trying to survive the heat and bugs. Taken near the city of São Paulo de Olivença.
The night sky from the river
This is where the Black and Solimões Rivers meet and become the Amazon. Manaus is in the distance. Travel time from Tabatinga was four days.
Approaching Manaus. This city in the middle of the jungle doesn't look big, but 2.5 million people live here.
These are fillets of pirarcu, a fish native to the Amazon that breathes air 😳. Taken at the Manaus Municipal Market.
The Amazon Theatre in downtown Manaus
The theater is a relic of Brazil's rubber boom during the Industrial Revolution. Once the country's wealthiest city, Manaus fell into decline when the rubber tree seed was "smuggled" (as stated in some accounts) to Southeast Asia.