The church carillon awakened us seconds before the alarm buzzed. We needed an early start to get to Amazon Antonio's lodge, 200 km from Manaus on the Urubu River.
It took us seven hours and three planes through two time zones to travel from Brasilia to Manaus. It is amazing how busy Brazil's airports in the wee hours of the morning. Some passengers believe the schedule is set up to avoid the thunderstorms, but it might just be a malicious streak by the airlines. Or maybe it is because we chose the cheapest flights. Whatever. The connections were pretty tight and we had to claim and recheck our bags at each stop. Surprisingly both we and our luggage arrived at the same time.
Manaus is a port city, nearly 1000 miles from the ocean. The Amazon is really an amazingly large body of water; the Amazon basin is twice as large as India and spans eight countries. At full flood the Amazon can be 40 km wide and dumps 300 million liters of water into the Atlantic Ocean every second. That's more than the world's next eight largest rivers combined.
Laundry, but not ours
Even sleep-deprived, we had things to do when we arrived. Laundry, in particular. For a city of 2 million there are precious few places where one can wash clothes, none are nearby and taxis are expensive. But now we have enough clean clothes to make it back to the US. Our second chore was to book an "authentic" Amazon experience. There are an incredible number of tour companies but actually the only choices you have are whether to take a boat trip or stay at a lodge for how many days and how much money you want to spend.
