A miserable place

I don’t know why I didn’t like Fortaleza but I had an utterly depressing time here. It must be the combination of everything in the place where nothing really went OK and that I had to walk around in constant pain. I arrived on a Friday, which in Fortaleza wasn’t really a Friday. It was some local holiday and everything was closed. Except from a few restaurants and I couldn’t do anything but hang around and read. On the following Saturday, things were open from 9-12 (although I normally linger around in the gusthouses to far beyond 9 so I missed most of it) and after that things started to shut down. At 13 more shops closed and the few that still serviced shut down at 14. If there was anything open after 14, it was probably within the categories: souvenir shop, restaurant or internet cafe.

I tried the beaches. I had a painful rash so I could wear nothing else than jeans with shoes but it didn’t really matter; the beaches were not very nice. There were rumours of nicer beaches but for those, one would need to travel 7-10 km outside the centre. Normally, that would be a walkable distance but not with leg sunburn. There were few buses in operation on weekends and I had not access to a car. The Saturday therefore resulted in a very similar experience as the Friday, with the only exception that I actually managed to accomplish something: I had some passport photos printed at an Expert branch (which I was going to use for the Suriname visa later on) just before they closed at mid-day. Yey!

I was thinking; “if Friday and Saturdays are like this; how is then the Sunday”? The Sunday is normally the day that I hate. I found it best to not find out and took the opportunity to use Sunday for travelling. I chose a long journey, that would arrive on Monday morning (to be sure that I really missed all of the Sunday) to Belem, in the Brazilian Amazon. I was earlier thinking to sail down to Belem from Manaus (which I wrote about), but now arrived from a completely different direction.

Recife and Olinda

Amazing that I am still in the same country. Recife is everything that the forest doesn’t represent. Modern highrises and some of the world’s best urban beaches were waiting for me on the Brazilian east coast. I preferred to house myself close to the beach, south of the city centre, and stayed here for three days before going further.

Day I:

I started the day by updating myself with the latest news as the hostel had internet. I had lunch at the nearby supermarket and checked out the beach. It started to get very hot around mid-day so I went into the historic centre to have one of my standard walkabouts, in which I try to cover all the city’s main sights. I like to walk. Several hours later, I realised there was nothing more on the program today because unlike travelling overnight in bus, a night flight (with changes and waiting time!) is different as it is almost impossible to sleep more than 1-2 hours. You get very sleepy in the evening. No wonder it was a cheap flight.

Day II:

While Recife is a major commercial and financial centre, it doesn’t really interest itself in tourism and has little to offer in terms of cultural experiences compared to similar sized cities. After all, it has almost three million inhabitants. Instead of ploughing the streets of Recife further, I took a bus 20 km north to its sister city Olinda (pop. 300.000), which is the cultural counterpart of Recife. Here one finds pastel-coloured houses, scores of churches, street musicians, plenty of guesthouses and bohemian quarters. A plain touristic city. The only mishap was when I were going back to the beach in the afternoon; I took the wrong bus which terminated somewhere far away in a small suburb outside Olinda and after going 20 minutes through small labyrinthic streets. I didn’t know how to get back but took first best bus that left the terminus and jumped off when it passed a bigger avenue. Luckily, I found a bus there to the beach.

Day III:

Last day in Recife. I realised that for being so long in South America, I was still white as a snowfall. It was obviously due to the jungle and the need to all the time cover up to protect against mosquitoes and other evil things that lurks about. It was therefore natural to have another last visit to the nearby beach. Unfortunately I must have used too little sunscreen (although I use factor 30) because it all resulted in a painful sunburn. I didn’t notice the extent of it today, obviously, but it was to culminate over the coming 3-4 days. At dusk, I travelled to the bus station to catch my night bus to Fortaleza.

A monologue

I was in Manaus. And I was thinking:

“I have travelled a great distance on the rivers, all the way from Pucallpa on the edge of the Andes in Peru, all the Ucayali river until it merges with the Amazon, all the way to Iquitos and all the way to the Brazilian border and even almost a week further down via  Benjamin Constant and Fonte Boa to Manaus, in the middle of the Brazilian Amazon. Here, the river has come together with several others and is really wide. It is in fact so wide that large Atlantic cruisers easily can sail up it and Manaus is therefore an international harbour, some 1500 km from the sea.”

A great thought, isn’t it? It goes on:

“I could now continue on the river. It’s only five more days in hammock-boat down to Belem, on the Atlantic delta. It would certainly be cool to have travelled ALL the Amazon river. Yes, let’s do that, let’s go to Belem!”

After making a few plans, I started to think about the consequences:

“I don’t really WANT to go down to Belem, do I? I definitely don’t want to sleep five nights in another crowded hammock-boat. Hmm, what will I see along the way? The river is so wide now and sailing downstream, they always go in the middle to catch the fastest current. I would need binoculars to even see the trees. Can I buy binoculars in Manaus maybe? But wait, TREES! I definitely don’t want to see another tree! And I really really don’t want to see anymore of the river. Neither shower in brown water; this far downstream it may be really polluted and what if someone has taken a pee in my shower-water? And the lunch with rice and beans and chicken - oh please no, no more rice and beans!”

And I came to the final conclusion:

“Screw it all. For what I know they could burn this terrible shit down and make plantations. Been there, seen it. Now I need the beach!”

I went online and bought a last-minute flight ticket to Recife, on the Brazilian east coast.

Manaus

If you look on the map, it doesn’t seem that you can get deeper into the Amazon than Manaus. In practice, however, Manaus is not really such an isolated jungle-city as the unacquainted would expect. The places I passed during the last week, however, are much more off-route and Manaus benefits from many transportation routes. There is a road connection to Venezuela and the wide Amazon rivers allows large ships to sail up to Manaus’ international harbour, both cargo ships and massive Atlantic cruisers filled with tourists, in addition to the large international airport.

The city itself is tranquil although famous for scams directed towards tourists as the market has become very competitive. I stayed away from jungle tours here to avoid all that mess and also, there are few places directly around Manaus that can actually offer an authentic experience of the rain forest. An expedition reaching non-exploited areas where few tourists go requires an expedition of 5-7 days. Anything closer than 3-4 days is not really worth visiting and I had neither the money nor the time.

The Amazon theatre is a famous landmark of Manaus, which may well have been inspired from some European architecture. I don’t really know but it looks like it.

The harbor where super-cruisers were docked.

As everywhere else I go, I arrive when everything is closed. Central Manaus.

First class hammock-style

NOW we are talking. A Brazilian hammock-boat is very much different. These guys know how to travel in hammocks. For starters, they charge much more. I first thought they wanted to scam me as a stupid tourist when they asked more than three times the price I paid for a similar length trip in Peru. I dropped out of the queue temporarily to “think” and saw that they asked the next guy (a Brazilian) the same, and he paid(!). “Well this seems to be the going price”, I thought. “A bit expensive but what choice do I have? Swim?” I bought the ticket and expected a grand ship where they serve dry-martini.

It wasn’t quite that grand but certainly you travel in much more comfort here than in Peru. First it didn’t look too good as the hammock-deck was practically the same, with the only difference that there was a little more space. They didn’t pack it so close as in Peru either and they had even marked on the floor where you can put the hammocks and not, in order to keep walkways free and make it possible to move around.

After it had filled up and just before departure, some guys entered and didn’t seem to find a place for their hammocks. They were Peruvian for sure as one decided to hang his hammock vertical just in front of mine. I thought: “Damn it, why did he need to block MY space when there are so many other ones he could put it in front of”. But luckily, only five minutes after the captain walked past and said that it wasn’t allowed and that he had to move his hammock. Yey!

So the journey started. On the Brazilian boat toilets were kept clean, bathroom lights worked and showers were separate, in real shower cabins. There were nice wash-basins and a tank with free drinking water and sometimes a free coffee-dispenser. For meals, there was a special dining room and food was a buffet-like eat-all-that-you-can setup (still rice and beans however!). Breakfast had unlimited sandwiches with coffee, a nice change from the soup.

On upstairs deck, there was a big open space, a TV, a bar (serving mostly hamburgers and beers) with loud music and space to sit, chat, watch the forest, get a tan, dance or whatever you like to do by yourself in the middle of nowhere. It was in fact such a difference from Henry (see earlier posts) that I thought I could have sent my parents with this ship. Almost.

In other words, a first class hammock-style trip. 

Leticia and the tri-border

I was in three countries in one day. This may not sound very impressive but in South America, where nations are large and transportation slow, there are not many places where this is possible. Well, to make it better, I was actually in three countries in three hours.
Leticia is a Colombian city on the tri-border with Peru and Brazil and you can easily reach it from Iquitos with a two-day journey in Hammock-boat. After stamping out with the police in the village Santa Rosa on the Peruvian side, I took a little motorboat across the river to this remote Colombian city. It is not a very large city but larger than any place you will see for several days down the river. From Leticia, it’s possible to walk across to Tabatinga, the Brazilian settlement on the other side of the border. The most civilised place (and preferred by travellers) is however Leticia, where I too finally decided to stay after having had a quick peak on the miserable Brazilian side.
It wasn’t for long however; the hammock-boat to Manaus (5 days 4 nights) left only three times per week and as the tri-border didn’t quite fit my taste of entertainment (and I didn’t want to hang around for the next departure), I took the one leaving next day.

Iquitos

Iquitos is an isolated place, deep in the Amazon jungle, although a farily sizeable town along the river. Iquitos currently holds the world record in largest city that cannot be reached by road. You can fly in or sail on the river boats (which needs a bit more time and patience).

In Iquitos I stayed almost a week, enjoying what the jungle and city has to offer. There are many tours to the forest and on the river (I preferred to stay away from the river for now!) and there are some nice places in and outside town to visit.

We went to Belen one day, which is a poor neighbourhood in Iquitos along the river where people either live in floating houses or in houses 4-5 metres above the ground. The difference in water-level between the seasons can be very large, which suggests that you should use as long legs as possible for your house if you plan to build it in this part of town (if it doesn’t float that is, in which case you don’t need to bother with legs). The fact that it is a slum for poor people makes it slightly more risky than other parts but we had checked the safety conditions before we entered and it said “relatively safe during daylight”. Unfortunately we didn’t really know where to walk and where to start or stop so we got slightly lost in there; only to be told off by some city-employed security personnel patrolling the area saying that we surely deserved to be robbed strolling around here alone. They escorted us out. I think they exaggerated.

Quistacocha is a zoological park a few kilometres outside town and features some interesting animals, amongst other things some breathtaking Anacondas. After having passed the gate it was a challenge to get rid of all the children offering to guide us around. The most keen one walked after us or 10-15 minutes or so telling us some made-up stories about the first animal displays and emphasizing how large the park is and how much we need a guide before finally understanding the sentence: “no quiero guia” – I don’t want a guide. Down at the river, they had created an artificial sand-beach in the middle of the jungle. Not the sight I had expected to see but on the other hand, if they have a jungle-golf course (the only one in the Amazon), I can’t see what would be wrong with a beach. You shouldn’t be narrow-minded.

Iquitos also has a cheap cinema, where you can watch Percy Jackson and the Olympians for less than two dollars (weekdays only!). On weekends, the price goes up to the unaffordable $2.50. I had a slightly more authentic cinema-experience another night when I went to see the locally produced movie called “El Último Piso” (The top floor). This movie was about a disused highrise building overlooking the main square in Iquitos and told the story behind a legendary “ghost”, which I assume is rumoured to haunt the top floor of this building, and hence gave inspiration for a movie. I had passed this building several times per day and never really noticed its existence as it’s a mere ruin and very ugly but nevertheless, the next day I had to take lots of photos of it from several angles. If it’s been on TV (or as here: the cinema), it’s famous. This golden rule I learned in England.

 It’s not very likely that “El Último Piso” will reach a cinema close to you but if it does, don’t watch it, Ever.

The success-story of Kick-Ass

After the first few rounds of the Premier League, when I was still in the office, my team Kick-Ass was third from the bottom in the Premier League Fantasy Football league (out of a total of 26 teams). This league consists of transport planners from different Scott Wilson offices around the UK. 


In the office I was sitting next to Kenny, a dedicated Fantasy Football Manager since years, and whose advice are taken with a great deal of respect (at least regarding football!). However, due to my team's catastrophic start (even after I played my Transfer Wild Card), I strongly suspect that Kenny had his own agenda planting bad advice to secure his place in the top.


In December, when I left the office, my team had advanced to a modest 18th place (mainly because the managers in the bottom didn't bother to make transfers, not because I was scoring loads of points).


Today however, three months later, Kick-Ass has done the impossible and gone from bottom to 3rd(!), advancing past many managers taking this game as serious as the earthquake on Haiti. This can only be explained by the fact that I, myself, have been managing the team without bad influence. Ironically, the teams Kenny himself are managing are the only ones placed higher. 

Kenny's headstart was enormous, however, and I may have left Scott Wilson too late (by the way, now you also know the real reason for leaving!) but time will show if Kick-Ass can advance any further in the TC (Transport Consultancy) League. If I only could get to second place, it would beat any Hollywood filmmaker's definition of the word 'comeback'.

Henry III – Sailing (Chapter three)

Note: Read chapters one and two first.

Watch your luggage!

Sailing with Henry III is an experience. Most time is passed sleeping or relaxing in the hammock. It is always a good idea to keep an eye out for your luggage, which usually is stoved beneath the Hammock. Some people travel with so much luggage and big boxes that they have to make a pile in the middle walkway, making it almost impossible to pass (if it already wasn’t!). I guy I talked to while catching some fresh air on deck after sunset just got his camera stolen in the lancha. He said petty thievery was the only risk on board. After departure, no-one would ever think of stealing a whole bag (would be difficult to get away with!) but there are obviously many children around who are taught to open bags and only pick valuables. After learning that, I hurried down to check my luggage again, paranoid as I am. But I made it the whole journey without losing anything. I tied all bags to the pole and with all zips secured with padlocks, children looking for an easy opportunity would find it difficult to get into my bags.

Trips to the kitchen

Breakfast, lunch and dinner was served on board, all cooked in the little kitchen at the back. When it was ready, a bell rang and all 200+ passengers lined up in a monstrous queue between the hammocks. Before joining the queue, you had to locate your ticket and a serving dish (I obviously didn’t have one but a guy on board very nicely sold me one for an inflated price), in which to collect your food. I was obviously so slow that I each time ended up in the back of the queue. After a couple of days I had learned which times to expect food and to be ready to RUN as soon as the bell rang. The lunch the last day, I was the 15^th person in the queue, which was extremely good by my standards. Any better is practically impossible as there are plenty of people who had their hammocks practically placed in the queue and in front of the kitchen.

Breakfast was always soup with a couple of sandwiches, dinner also a soup but lunch consisted of rice or pasta with some meat, normally chicken, which is the cheapest. If you go on this boat, it is necessary to bring some bisquits or snacks on board, or buy extra food from vendors at places where the boat stops, as the soups seldom were suffient for a big guy like me.

Trips to the bathroom

You would like to make most of your bathroom tasks in one trip to avoid making too many. Like trips to the kitchen, trips to the bathroom (not really a room but rather a row of wash basins) were ritual-like. Squeezing through hammocks, ducking for people sleeping and finally arriving at the back, where there were toilets/showers and wash basins with water from the river. Depending on where the boat was at the moment, the water which came up was either just brown of super-brown-blackish. You would avoid washing the toothbrush in this water if possible but it was fine for flushing the toilet. Once when I arrived there to clean my teeth, I forgot my bottled water so I had to return through the hammocks to get it. I never did that mistake again.

Showers

I was thinking a couple of days about a challenging problem: “If you go and have a shower in the brown water, will you be more or less dirty when you come out?” I didn’t come up with anything useful but after two days in the hot Amazon, I was dying for the shower and had a go at it. Showers were in the same cabin as the toilet. The pipe used for toilet flush was just extended to the roof and a shower head was placed on the end. Clever (!) but unfortunately not very appealing. It was the only shower I had on board.

Four days without a shit

After going on board and inspecting the toilet, I think the body entered some kind of self-defence mode and stopped producing a certain type of waste in order to not have to use the facilities. It seemed to work just fine and I managed four days before I had to take out my toilet-paper.

Spare time

I had so much spare time on board and time for reading that I finished my book the third day (I was reading the criminal novel “Men who hate women”, by Stieg Larsson. Well recommended!) It left me with lots of, somewhat boring time, which I didn’t know what to do with. After a couple of days, swinging the hammock into the pole or into the person next to me, days could get slightly wearisome. I thought it was a bit overkill to display my laptop in this crowd so I left it hidden in my bag and played some games on my cellphone instead in between playing with the (at 95% of the time very annoying children), who all wanted to get close to this peculiar person, who looked a little different to all the others on board.

The nice stuff

But no, all was not a horrible, dirty, crowded and boring experience. This blog entry may seem a bit sarcastic but in fact it was a very nice and interesting experience travelling by lancha in the Amazon.  Everything is very green and for several days the boat just passes trees and unpopulated land. One or two times per day, it makes a stop at some little village with tree huts. The villages seemed to be a little bit more frequent closer to Iquitos but it was a welcomed break when lots of vendors entered the boat, offering their fresh grilled fish, rice dishes, churros, soft drinks or water. Also, the sunsets over the Amazon forest is a must-see and just becomes much better from a boat slowly gliding down the river. At nights, the full moon lit the river and the surrounding forest up to a dark glow; a gorgeous view which I definitely wouldn’t want to trade for an airline ticket.

Amongst the 200+ passengers on board, I was the only western ("lost-looking") tourist so I guess most people arrive to Iquitos by air. But what they miss!

Henry III: Departure (Chapter two)

Note: Read chapter one first.

Hammocks

The day of departure started with a detour to the market to buy a hammock. “If you haven’t got a hammock, you have to sleep on the floor”, they said. Sleeping on the floor didn’t sound quite as appealing so I purchased a hammock and a bit of rope in advance. I arrived early, at 11:00, to get a “good place”. The passenger deck was one big open space where people hanged their hammocks parallel in three rows along the length of the ship; left row, middle row and right row. I chose a space in the middle, as I reckoned it would not be as cold far from the windows, plus it had the advantage of an exit to both walkways on either side. Also, I had an electric socket on a pole next to me to charge batteries. However, as it filled up, people didn’t seem to find enough space in the three rows (even though all hammocks touched each other) so they started hanging them perpendicular in the two walkways, making it almost impossible to walk anywhere. This was going to be interesting.

Delays

Henry transports both passenger and cargo. Unfortunately passengers are also treated as cargo. The scheduled departure was 17:30 in the afternoon but they had not yet completed loading the ship. New departure time was 18:30 and later 20:00. As they still hadn’t finished, and it was dark, new departure time was set to be early morning, around 06:00. Everyone therefore had to sleep an extra night on the passenger deck. I woke up next morning and looked on my phone, it showed 07:00. “We have to be there now”, I thought and looked out of the window. Still docked in the harbour. Later a new departure time was announced to 11:00.

Uneasy crowd

At 11:30, people started to get upset and was banging the windows and walls shouting “it’s time” and “let’s go”. Interesting, I thought and smiled for myself while swinging my hammock, deeply buried in a book. More people now came on board, the ones arriving early for the next lancha, finding out that; “Oh, yesterdays lancha hasn’t left yet, let’s take this one so we get there quicker”. Now they started to hang their hammocks over the tables. There were really no space left, I thought.

Loading problems

I squeezed myself out between the hammocks to the front to watch the people loading the lancha. They were about to drive a big truck on board at the front. The dock was really basic and the captain had to change position of the lancha to load different things and in this moment he had sailed up with the front against the ground. The workers were placing parts of wood for the truck to drive on, only problem they were not placed very good, not even parallel. I could clearly see from above, even before they had started, what was going to happen. “Jesus, this is not going to work, stop it you idiots”. But they continued. A few seconds later the guy waved to the driver and he started to drive the lorry up the ramp and halfway up, the whole thing collapsed and the truck fell. With at least one metre to the ground the truck almost turned over on its side but they were lucky and the truck still seemed to work. With a tractor, they managed to drag the truck back up again, and after placing the wood a bit better, the second attempt was successful. Being on the lancha for 25 hours already, my nerves couldn’t take more of this stupidity and I went back in to my hammock. Shortly new departure time was announced for 16:00.

Departure

Considering that the next lancha (Henry IV) originally was set to departure at 17:30 today (and they hadn’t hardly started to load it yet) a lot of new passenger were flooding in, realising that if they were going to take Henry IV, they would have to wait on board until tomorrow (at least!). Packing the hammocks a bit tighter. Putting hammocks at the exits, blocking off almost everything. And a few hammocks in front of the toilets too.  I would like to see a health- and safety inspector from England having a go at this captain. But finally it actually departed. At 16:30. Happy times.

Henry III: Background (Chapter one)

Transportes Henry is a company running combined cargo- and passenger ships (lanchas) between Pucallpa and Iquitos. The trip takes around 4-5 days downstream and a couple of days more returning to Pucallpa upriver. The trip with Henry III was so far the most intriguing, most exciting but also the most boring experience so far during my trip. Here is the story about the Henry departure.

Henry the third

Henry III is the third lancha in the fleet. Totally, there are eight of them, each newer unit larger than the previous one. I suspect a growing demand has made the company extend their fleet by larger and larger boats. I didn’t myself see the Henry VIII but rumours say that this monstrous lancha  takes three times as much cargo as Henry III. And I thought Henry III was relatively large, seeing it in the dock next to Henry II. I guess when they build Henry XV, there will be a Titanic sized ship ploughing the waters of the Amazon. 

Pucallpa

I didn’t really know what to say and think about Pucallpa so I had a quick browse on Internet to see what other people thought. I found a blog describing it as some isolated “Hell on Earth”, which made me realise that indeed I have my own view about the city after all. Although it is a fairly large town, there is not much here to do or see and the centre may seem soulless at times but whatsoever, it is definitely not any hell on earth; far from it. On the contrary, Pucallpa is a tranquil place which I actually decided to like. It has a nice getaway spot (Yarinacocha) down at the lake where local fishers are active and where a row of floating restaurants serve up local dishes and where boat owners offer tours to touristic locations on the other side of the lake. Apart from that, and a small zoological park with a billion mosquitoes, one has to find the charm of Pucallpa behind a tired looking central plaza with the surrounding buzzing “small-townish” streets. The secret is probably to skip the handful foreign-owned restaurants and hotels and go local. Pucallpa has an interesting range of local culinary delicacies with plenty of strange forest animals (turtle, monkey, crocodile etc) on the plates.

The only thing I didn’t learn to like is the noisy “motocarros”, which comprises almost 100% of the traffic in the centre. The small three-wheeled motorbike taxis with a covered passenger seat in the back makes it difficult to hear what you are thinking while walking the streets, as they make much more noise than car traffic in a larger city. But I am sure there is a charm to all that too.