Tabatinga To Manaus 3

By day 3 on the Manaus boat I was beginning to doubt that we might get there the next day. It seemed the boat was moving too slowly, we were tracking the route and there was a lot of river still before Manaus.

What we didn’t know is that the boat stops less on the second half of the journey, I guess because many of the places further downstream have their own services to Manaus. It did stop briefly in the river a couple of times just to let people off onto a smaller boat that was waiting.

The main event of the third day was a fairly thorough police check of the boat. I was fast asleep in my hammock when It happened, men had to line up on one side of the deck, women on the other. All baggage was also lined up in the middle so they could pass the sniffer dog by everything. We were stopped about an hour for this, it’s quite a routine thing on public transport here, I was told.

By day 4 people had been asking the crew when we were like to arrive and It all seemed good with the estimates for arrival in the evening. I really didn’t want to arrive in Manaus in the middle of the night. I enjoyed the experience of the first hammock boat but four days is long enough to go without a decent night”s sleep.

After what seemed like an eternal circuit on the approach to the city we finally docked on the Río Negro. An atmospheric walk up from the port to a hotel with a proper bed and a nearby bar with good live music and cold beer. I felt I deserved It.