Leticia to Manaus

The river boat at Leticia

The next leg to Manaus there seemed to be no speedboat connection from Leticia so we took another river boat the next day which after spending time loading and passing the Brazilian side town of Tabatinga, took off for the nearby port of Benjamin Constant.

Another smarter river boat alongside ours.

Leaving Leticia, Colombia.

Lunch on the boat.

Meals were nicely served on this boat but this resulted pretty quickly in my second bout of the desperate runs, having already had an episode on the Yacupato.

Deck panorama.

Is this a primate or what?

The mighty Amazonas.

The river was lined with large sawmills - more certification of rain forest destruction.









Benjamin Constant was a one main street tow, which stood mainly as the definition of where Brazilian jurisdiction begins.










At first things seemed to have been very easy, in fact there appeared to be no border crossing at all, but in the middle of the night, the boat stopped and was boarded by Brazilian customs who proceeded to spend a couple of hours virtually tearing the place apart. They even drilled holes in the wooden ship walls to see if there were drugs hidden behind, a most unlikely possibility suggesting this was more for a show of force and the appearance of surveillance than any real likelihood of a bust, particularly given the huge scale of professional drug trafficking in Brazil.

At night the boat was festooned with moths.

The boat passed a series of riverside towns.

Another meal on the boat.

el Capitan

Small scale fishermen provided a variety of river fish species.

The Amazon from Iquitos on was now a major navigable waterway for ocean-going ships.

Sunset Amazon panorama.

Torrential rain and lightning strikes and huge gusts of wind as a tropical storm blows in at midnight.

A small tornado on the sandbank

Finally on the third evening we came into the port of Manaus.