So having decided against spending too much time on the river by doing the slow boats up to Santareum, Nadia and I instead went on a 6 hour cruise. It took us along the river and had a place to stop for lunch where we could swim in the Amazon which was a highlight for us. The water was very warm though so not really what you would call refreshing, especially as it was so humid already.
Given that there was not much else to do on the boat and that we figured we deserved a bit of a relaxing time after our epic few days of bus journeys Nadia and I turned our day into a booze cruise which made it a very enjoyable and amusing. I was particularly impressed that we were downing the local beer of choice which is called Skol :-)
Once we returned to Belem we jumped on a night bus to a place called Sao Luis. We arrived at 8am and had every intention of staying there for a night to break up our trip towards Fortaleza but honestly, the place is a dive. It has a couple of nice buildings in the historic centre but otherwise it is just old, dirty and falling down...kind of like a lot of the people we encountered in the side streets. That said we decided to head off immediately and got a ticket for another night bus leaving at 5:30pm to Forteleza (18 hours - why do we keep doing this to ourselves!?)
Highlights of Sao Luis - Lovely woman at the HI hostel let us come in and shower and re-pack all our stuff and store our bags all for free!
Roll on the beaches! We are definitely ready for them now :-)
