Manaus

I had very mixed feelings about returning to Manaus, 36 years after my first failed attempt at an Amazon boat ride to Belém. I hadn”t expected ever to return, had it not been for the FOSS4G announcement of Belém as the 2024 location. I hadn’t liked the city much the first time, although this had a lot to do with the local climate. Maybe I’m a bit more used to this now, after living so many years in Spain, but Manaus still felt like the hottest place I had been on the journey.

We got a new member of the team here, my partner Silvia flew in from Madrid just a few hours after the Tabatinga boat had docked. When she booked her flight back in August we had very little idea of when I was going to arrive in Manaus, in the end it worked out very well.

First priority was getting a hammock for Silvia and then finding out when we could leave, there was no boat heading to Belém for a few days, so plan B was to buy a ticket part of the way, to the city of Santarem where we would be able to connect with the Belém boat. With this done we had a day and a hall to relax in Manaus, there was more live music outdoors in the centre in the evening and some more beers in what was already our favorite Manaus bar.

We obviously had to do a bit of mapping in Manaus, and because we wanted to do a visit to the opera house on the second day we chose the square opposite for an OSM data refresh. The opera house is another legacy of the Amazonian rubber boom times, built for the élite in the city who wanted to live as if they were in Europe. These days it is more of a resource for everyone with a wider range of events.

The rest of the day was relaxing, having some drinks with people we had met on the previous boat and a reasonably early night as we had been told to get to the port by 6 the following morning. Time to move on again, and this time at last I was going to leave Manaus on a boat.