Manaus

The oil refinery at Manaus

We arrived in Manaus at night cruising past the oil refinery and disembarked at a wharf where the river boats dock and got a cheap hotel in town.

Panorama of Manaus on our arrival

The river boat wharf by night and by day.

We had to make a strategic decision where to move next. We had been intending to continue on down to the mouths of the Amazon but the river had already became a major maritime route and was far from the remote jungles higher up that were central to our quest.

When I cam back to the wharf in the morning to check for outgoing boats there was none leaving for a few days for Belem at the mouth of the river, but there was a boat coincidentally the "Cristo Rey" echoing my own name which was going up the Rio Madiera to Porto Velho, which would bring us in striking distance of the Pantanal to the south which had promise of giving another view of biodiversity on the fringe.

The Cristo Rey was leaving for Porto Velho up the Madiera.

Looking out across the Rio Negro, from the harbour to the far horizon.
The Rio Negro is enormously wide as it reaches Manaus, as can be seen in the maps at the end of this posting.

Google Earth map of the confluence of the Rio Negro and Rio Solimoes to form the Rio Amazonas at Manaus
notice the vast width of the Rio Negro and it's dark colour from the clearer water.

We didn't get a chance to see the mixing of the muddy waters of the Amazon, or Solimoes as the Brazilians call it above Manaus, and the Rio Negro, so I have included a link to an internet image.

Internet image of the mixing of the waters outside Manaus

A little further up the Negro, you can see in the map above the vast tract of submerged forest constituting the Anavilhanas archipelago a stunning wildlife reserve with clear waters and great views of pink dolphins, and other teeming varieties of wildlife but somewhat expensive to access through package tours to tourist resorts around Novo Airão..

Internet image of the Anavilhanas archipelago, the world's largest inland archipelago.

Manaus is particularly famous for the Teatro Amazonas Opera House (Wikimedia commons)
built during the rubber boom.

Manaus, in contrast to Iquitos, is a rapidly growing modern metropolis
fed by good access by river, road and air from other parts of Brazil (Wikimedia commons)

A panorama and some views of the central shopping district as we passed through.

A Peruvian band playing ethnic rock in Manaus.

While we were there we visited the zoological gardens, which had many of the species we had seen earlier on our trip and a few we hadn't managed to get to see.

There were the same monkeys we had had great trouble getting near in Pacaya-Samiria ...




... and the otters that were being conserved at Pacaya-Samiria but we saw only in a poster ...

Amazonian manatees

Red rainbow macaws.

The tortoises we had found so elusive on the logs at Pacaya-Samiria.

There was also a definitive collection of the greatest insects of the Amazon.

A tree with the largest leaves with Julian our guide in front.

We also went to the nearby ecological institute and discussed their efforts to assess biodiversity attrition when forested land is cut into fragmented blocks.

From there we returned to the Cristo Rey and set off on a southward journey up the Rio Madiera into Southern Brazil.