Salvador

The bus journey from Recife to Salvador on Sunday night didn't quite go according to plan. Everything was OK until around 5:30 on Monday morning, when the driver stopped the bus in the middle of the road and switched the engine off, and we just sat there for a long time. At first I couldn't see what was going on, because there was a long queue of traffic ahead of us, and the driver wasn't letting anyone get off the bus. I could see smoke in the distance, so I thought that perhaps there'd been an accident that was blocking the road. However, after about an hour the driver opened the bus doors, and I walked down to the source of the smoke, and this is what I saw:

After adding some punctuation, the banner on the left reads 'Exigimos nossos direitos de ir e vir. Asfalto já BR-400', which means 'We demand our rights to come and go. Asphalt now (for) BR-400'. Basically they were protesting about the lack of paving of the BR-400 highway, which one of the other passengers explained to me was one of these roads down below the main highway, which they were also blockading. For some reason they'd decided to take out their frustration by inconveniencing us and anyone else who happened to be travelling along that stretch of road on that Monday morning.

The protesters seemed to be having a great time, playing loud music and letting off the occasional firework, and meanwhile the queues of vehicles were growing ever longer in both directions. After several hours the police turned up, and at about 10:30am they finally managed to get the protesters to clear one of the hard shoulders, allowing traffic to pass. I don't know if the protest was successful, but I'm sure that at least some asphalt will have to be provided now, if only to fix the damage they did to the road by lighting fires on it.

The delay added five hours to what was already scheduled to be a 14-hour bus journey, and in the end I didn't arrive at my hostel in Salvador until 3pm, which was 23 hours after I left Olinda. I'd only allowed myself two days to see Salvador, so having lost most of Monday I now didn't have much time at all.

So I went straight out to see the sights of the Pelourinho, which is Salvador's historic centre. Salvador is the biggest centre of Afro-Brazilian culture in the country, with over 80% of the population descended from African slaves. The African influence is apparent everywhere in the Pelourinho, in the street food, the women in traditional African dress, the African music, and the performances of capoeira. The capoeira was particularly impressive - I didn't really understand what it was before, but I do now, and these guys were quite amazing gymnasts.

Walking around the Pelourinho I saw the usual assortment of colonial churches, such as the Cathedral, Igreja de São Francisco, and the similarly named Igreja da Ordem Terceira de São Francisco. I was able to go inside the last of these, and the church was looking very smart, as it was obviously being prepared for a wedding. There was a museum attached, many of whose rooms were decorated with Portuguese azulejo tiles like these ones. I also saw lots of other examples of colonial architecture, for example here, here and below.

In the evening I went for a meal and a few beers with Bert, who's a Belgian guy that I'd met in the dorm in my hostel. Salvador is Bert's final destination of a six-month trip around South America that's been very similar to mine, and he's also the first person I've met who's been to Paraguay, which is where I'm planning to go after Brazil. He told me that from what he'd seen of Paraguay, it's hardly worth going there. This isn't exactly surprising news, and I'll still go there despite what he says (I need to go in that direction anyway if I'm going to visit Iguazu Falls), but now I think I'll spend some extra time in Brazil, and cut my time in Paraguay down to the minimum.

Today I saw a bit more of the Pelourinho, although it's Independence Day today in Brazil, which meant that a lot of things were closed, so it wasn't the ideal day to be doing that. I also went for a ride on the Elevador Lacerda, which is an art deco lift linking the Pelourinho, which is located on a cliff above the sea, with the Cidade Baixa (Low City), which contains the city's commercial centre and port.

Tuesday evening is the big party night of the week in the Pelourinho, so a lot of live music has been going on this evening, and I went to take a look at a free concert that was being held in the Terreiro de Jesus, which is one of the Pelourinho's main squares. I didn't stay for long, partly because it's been raining almost non-stop this evening, but also because Salvador is one of the most dangerous cities in Brazil, and I didn't feel very safe. In fact Bert told me that a man tried to rob him this evening, so it quite clearly isn't safe here at all.

Tomorrow morning I'm catching a flight to Rio. I'd hoped to do this whole trip without flying, but in this case there was hardly any price difference between going by plane and going by bus, and when you consider that the flight takes two hours, but the bus takes between 24 and 28 hours, it wasn't a hard decision to make.

Olinda & Recife

Twelve hours along the coast by bus from Fortaleza is Recife. I arrived in Recife on Friday morning, and immediately caught a local bus out to Olinda, which is Recife's much smaller and more peaceful sister city. Olinda is a colonial town with picturesque streets and grand churches, and I've spent a couple of afternoons wandering around seeing the sights, and trying to avoid the annoying guides who keep offering me guided tours and won't take no for an answer.

I went to see several of the churches including Igreja da Sé (which is Olinda's cathedral), Mosteiro de São Bento, the derelict Igreja do Carmo, and Igreja da Misericórdia, together with its nuns. Igreja da Sé is located at the top of Alto da Sé, which is a hill that offers a good view of the old part of Olinda, with the sea behind it. Looking towards the south-west, you also get a great view of Recife's skyline in the distance.

Olinda is full of cobbled streets and colourful houses, some more colourful than others. The town is also known for its Carnaval, during which giant dolls are paraded through the streets. While the dolls aren't being paraded, a lot of them are kept on display, and you see figures like these throughout the town.

On Saturday morning I went into Recife, the main reason being that I'd completely run out of books, and I'd read in Lonely Planet that there was a big bookstore in Recife called Livraria Cultura, which had an impressive range of foreign-language titles. And this time Lonely Planet wasn't wrong, because Livraria Cultura did have a good selection of English-language books, and I bought a couple that should keep me going for a week or two at least.

While I was in Recife I took the opportunity to see the sights, such as the Paço Alfândega (originally a convent, then a customs house, and now a smart shopping centre) and the colourful houses on Rua Bom Jesus (Good Jesus Road). I wasn't particularly impressed by Recife - the centre is dominated by ugly 1960's tower blocks, while the old part of town, Recife Antigo, is small, and most of the buildings range in condition from merely crumbling to completely derelict. However, there is work going on to renovate some of the historic buildings (see the photo below), so maybe Recife will look a lot smarter in a few years' time.

You may have noticed in a couple of the Olinda photos that there are signs advertising something called MIMO. That stands for Mostra Internacional de Música em Olinda (International Exhibition of Music in Olinda), and this has been going on while I've been here. There are several musical performances every day, as well as showings of films. I skipped the films because I thought I probably wouldn't understand them, but I did go to one of the concerts in Igreja da Sé yesterday afternoon. It was given by the Symphony Orchestra of the Federal University of the Rio Grande do Norte, and they were really good, but the concert was spoiled for me by the noise of the fans that had been set up along one side of the church. They were obviously meant to keep us cool, which they did, but they also drowned out the music except during the loudest parts of the concert.

I considered going to Porto de Galinhas today with a couple of people I met in my hostel, but I decided against it as it would have involved spending several hours sitting on a bus just to go and sit on a beach, even if it is considered to be the best beach in Brazil. Instead I spent the morning writing this blog post, and now I'm going to relax and enjoy the sun until late afternoon, when I have to head back into Recife to catch my bus to Salvador.

Fortaleza

Fortaleza is all about beaches, and although it's a big city, it doesn't have a lot else of interest, so this blog post is going to be fairly brief! Yesterday, which was my first full day here, I went to take a look at the modern, and very concrete, cathedral, as well as the nearby central market, with its weird winding walkways.

I also visited the Dragão do Mar, which is a cultural centre with museums, galleries, walkways, restaurants and bars, and even a planetarium. Its biggest draw is the Museu de Arte Contemporânea (Museum of Contemporary Art), which I also went to. It was split over two floors - upstairs they had what I thought were a few fairly pointless video installations, but downstairs was a lot more interesting, with paintings by some big names like Picasso, Miró and Matisse.

I've been to take a look at a few of Fortaleza's beaches, even though I think I've already established that I don't like beaches. The nearest beach to where I'm staying is Iracema beach, which as you can see was deserted when I was there. This morning I went to Meireles beach (below), which is a couple of kilometres east of Iracema, and is where most of the big luxury hotels are situated, so it was correspondingly busier.

These beaches are right in the city centre, and littered with rubbish in some places, so they didn't seem particularly pleasant. I think Fortaleza does have some really good beaches, but to get to those you have to go further out of town.

I carried on past Meireles beach to the harbour and then to the fish market, where you can buy fish and then take it to be prepared at a nearby stall for a few extra reales. I considered buying a few prawns or even a lobster, but then I remembered that I'd paid the price for eating shellfish just before a long bus journey when I was in Peru, so I decided against it. It was near here that I witnessed a policeman beating up a young homeless man - I have no idea whether he'd done anything to deserve it, but it did seem unnecessarily brutal.

I leave Fortaleza tonight, and the long bus journey I was referring to will get me to Recife in the morning, although I plan to stay in Olinda, which is Recife's smaller sister city.

Jericoacoara

It was a bit of a challenge to get to Jericoacoara from Barreirinhas. Jericoacoara is a small, isolated town on the coast, and it has no road access from the west, which means that the journey involves driving along a dirt track, over sand dunes, and even directly on the beach. If you've got an arm and a leg to spare, i.e. R$300 (£110), you can pay an agency in Barreirinhas to transfer you directly to Jericoacoara in a single day, but otherwise the journey takes two days, and involves changing vehicle no fewer than four times.

And that's what I did. From Barreirinhas I took a 4x4 vehicle to Paulino Neves, then another 4x4 to Tutóia, followed by a bus to Parnaíba. I stayed the night in Parnaíba, then the next morning I caught a bus to Camocim, and finally I took another 4x4 vehicle to Jericoacoara. Altogether, including the hotel room in Parnaíba, the trip cost roughly R$120 (£45), which wasn't a bad saving on the agency price. It was quite an interesting journey, although not particularly difficult because most of the modes of transport joined up fairly well. At one point our vehicle had to be punted across a small river, and below you can see the view as we approached Jericoacoara along mile after mile of deserted beach.

Jericoacoara is quite unlike anywhere I've been before. It has a permanent population of only around two thousand, yet there are over a hundred hotels and pousadas (guesthouses), so things are very much oriented towards tourism. The place has a very peaceful and relaxed feel, although it's also known for its nightlife, which I'm told doesn't get going until well after midnight. All of the streets are paved with sand, as you can see here and here - this makes life difficult for ordinary vehicles, so the kind of buggy you can see in this photo is the preferred mode of transport.

Jericoacoara is Brazil's top location for windsurfing, and it's also a big kitesurfing destination. When I arrived here I had plans to try out one or both of these sports, but I guess I got infected by the peacefulness of the place, because I ended up being very lazy and not doing very much at all. I think I needed a rest anyway, and it also didn't help that the pousada at which I'm staying serves the biggest and best breakfasts I've had in a long while (bread, ham, cheese, fruit, coffee, fruit juice and cake) - I didn't really feel like doing anything very active after eating that much food first thing in the morning.

However, I didn't laze around the entire time. On Saturday evening I climbed to the top of Sunset Dune to watch the sun set over the sea. There were hundreds of people there, and the Caipirinha seller was doing a roaring trade from his wheelbarrow. The sunset wasn't bad, but probably not worth me uploading a photo, although it did get a round of applause from the assembled crowd. I thought the sunset I saw from the beach on Monday evening was better.

On Sunday afternoon I went to see the Pedra Furada (Rock Arch), which is a natural arch formed by wind and sea erosion, and is the symbol of Jericoacoara. It's about an hour's walk north-east of Jericoacoara, partly along the beach and partly over a hill. Here and here you can see a couple of views of the coastline from the hill, and below is a photo of the Rock Arch.

On the way back I walked right up to the top of Serrote hill, where there's a lighthouse, which isn't particularly attractive but does have a 360° view across Jericoacoara.

On Monday afternoon I went for my one and only swim in the sea off Jericoacoara beach. I stayed for a short while afterwards to watch the capoeira class that was taking place on the beach (it looked pretty weird to me), but I didn't hang around much after that. To be honest I don't particularly enjoy sitting on beaches, which probably means I'm travelling in the wrong country, because this part of Brazil has some of South America's best beaches, and I don't think I'm likely to be going to any of them.

This afternoon I leave for Fortaleza, so I'll soon be back in civilisation, together with, of course, more beaches.

São Luís & Lençóis Maranhenses National Park

I only had a short stay in São Luís, so I'm combining it with a post about Lençóis Maranhenses National Park, which is where I went the day after I was in São Luís.

After a 12-hour bus journey that seemed to take me hardly any distance at all across Brazil, I arrived in São Luís on Wednesday morning. I travelled with Armando and Lucía, the Argentinian couple that I first met on the boat in Manaus, after we bumped into each other again at the hostel in Belém. Once we'd arrived in São Luís, we had quite an unpleasant time trying to find a hostel; our first choice was full, which meant that we spent the best part of an hour walking around in the blazing sun with our backpacks on, looking for somewhere else. Eventually we settled for Pousada Internacional, which was a cheap hostel in a good location, but was probably the most run-down place I've stayed at in my whole trip. Anyway I put up with it because I only planned to spend one night in São Luís.

I spent most of the day wandering around the historic centre of São Luís, which is one of the best preserved colonial cities in the whole of Brazil, and a UNESCO World Heritage Site. It has several grand civic buildings, including the Court of Justice and the Palácio dos Leões (Palace of the Lions), as well as a 17th century cathedral, below.

Here is a photo of one of the streets in the historic centre, and this is a typical house, with the Portuguese exterior tiling that you see throughout the centre. A lot of the colonial-era buildings are in a fairly crumbling state, for example here and here, but there's an ongoing restoration project in the city that means that these buildings will most likely be rescued.

The following morning Armando, Lucía and I left São Luís and travelled to Barreirinhas, which is the usual starting point for trips into Lençóis Maranhenses National Park. We arrived around lunchtime, and I'd planned to spend the rest of the day in Barreirinhas and then go on a 4x4 tour of the national park the following morning. However, as soon as I got off the bus I was accosted by an employee of a tour agency who told me that there were places available on a tour that afternoon, leaving in less than an hour's time. Since my first impressions of Barreirinhas weren't too good, I made a snap decision to change my plans and join the tour that afternoon, which meant that I'd be free to leave Barreirinhas the following morning. Armando and Lucía were organising a three-day hike into the park, and I would have liked to have joined them, but I decided that I didn't have enough time to do that. So once again we said our goodbyes, and I rushed off to get ready for the tour.

A short time later I was picked up from my hostel by a 4x4 vehicle, and there I met the other nine people in the group, all of whom were Brazilian. They were all chatting to each other so enthusiastically that I thought at first that everyone knew each other, but I worked out eventually that that wasn't the case - I guess they were just being typical friendly Brazilian people. After driving a short distance we had to wait our turn to cross a river on a car ferry, which was pushed across the river by a small motor boat. We then had an unbelievably bumpy ride to the edge of the park, which was as far as we could go in the 4x4, because motor vehicles aren't allowed to enter the park.

We then left our shoes in the vehicle and set off on (bare)foot for a four-hour walk around the national park. At first glance Lençóis Maranhenses looks like a desert, but officially it isn't (although I'd say it looks a lot more deserty than that desert I went to in Colombia). The reason it's not considered a desert is that it has a relatively high level of rainfall, and during the rainy season (March to September), which is obviously when I was there, the water collects in the valleys between the sand dunes, forming dozens of lakes, for example here, here and below.

We'd been told to wear swimming gear, so we were able to go for a swim in each of the lakes that we visited. None of the lakes was more than waist-deep, but some of them contained fish, which is pretty amazing when you consider that the lakes dry up almost completely during the dry season (apparently the explanation is that the fish eggs are brought by birds from the sea).

Unfortunately the only photo of me in Lençóis Maranhenses is a bit rubbish and out of focus, but here it is anyway. There are a few more photos of the national park in my August 2010 album. Our guide told us that the whole park has roughly the same area as the city of São Paulo, i.e. it's huge, so we were only able to see a tiny fraction of it in our half-day tour. We stayed until sunset, after which we got back in our vehicle and had another bumpy ride back to the river, where we found ourselves at the back of a long queue to use the car ferry. Fortunately there was a long row of shops and stalls there, all keen to sell us stuff.

After I returned to my hostel I was finally able to spend some time looking around Barreirinhas, and in fact it wasn't too bad after all. Just one street along from the main street there was a row of riverfront restaurants and bars, which was actually quite pleasant. But by that time I'd made my decision, and the following morning I left for Jericoacoara, which I'll tell you about next time.

Belém

I've got a bit of catching up to do with my blog, due to a lack of wi-fi again. I thought Brazil was meant to be the most developed country in South America, but so far the internet access has been worse than in Bolivia. Anyway, here's my report from Belém.

Belém was my second destination in Brazil, and it's another big city, almost the same size as Manaus and with a similar feel. I spent Sunday afternoon recovering from the boat journey, and on Monday I saw most of Belém's main sights, including, in no particular order, Praça Dom Pedro II, the Cathedral, the Theatro da Paz, and the 17th century Presépio Fort (below).

I also went to the Mercado Ver-o-Peso (the 'See-the-Weight' Market), both the fish area and the Amazonian herbal remedy area. I had lunch in the modern extension of the market, which houses dozens of stands selling cheap set lunches and fruit juices (and here it is as seen from above). I also went for a look around the Estação das Docas, which is a row of converted waterside warehouses, mainly occupied now by expensive restaurants. Surprise, surprise, I didn't eat there.

I bought some brazil nuts from a street stall nearby, which seemed the obvious thing to do since I'm in Brazil. When I tried them for the first time they tasted unlike any brazil nuts I'd ever eaten - they were more like coconut than brazil nuts. But strangely when I ate some more only the following day they'd developed a really unpleasant aftertaste, and were inedible.

On Monday afternoon I went for a walk around Belém's commercial district, and I noticed a couple of things. Firstly, C&A is still going strong in Brazil, ten years after it went out of business in the UK (I saw several stores in Belém alone). Also, it was good to see a British landmark being celebrated over here - this is Belém's biggest chain of chemists, with a branch seemingly every few blocks. In the evening I went to the cinema to see Inception (in Portuguese it's called 'A Origem'), and what a great film. I wonder how they shot those zero-gravity scenes - I'm sure the internet will tell me.

On Tuesday I went to the Museo Emilio Goeldi, which is a zoo set in a city block-sized piece of rainforest in the centre of Belém. They had, among other things, a baby tapir, a jaguar, caimans and lots of turtles, but sadly no manatee, as you can see below.

And that's about all I have to say about Belém. The next blog post about São Luís should be coming along soon.

Manaus to Belém

I made it to Belém on Sunday after a four-day boat trip from Manaus. It was a day less than I was expecting (although it was quite long enough), so Lonely Planet was actually quite accurate with its 3½-day estimate. I began the trip with some companions, because three other people from my hostel were also taking the same boat, and we shared a lift down to the harbour. They were Lucía and Armando, a young couple from Buenos Aires, and Maria, from Spain. However, all three of them were planning to stop for a couple of days in Santarém, which is roughly halfway between Manaus and Belém, so they'd only be with me for the first half of the journey.

We arrived at Manaus harbour on Wednesday afternoon about three hours before departure, to find our boat moored at a different pier to the one we'd be taken to. The ticket seller, who was with us, assured us that the boat would soon come over to where we were waiting, which sure enough it did, and below you can see the N/M Santarém on its way to meet us. Lucía, Armando and Maria had been a bit more organised than me, and they'd arranged for their hammocks to be hung up in advance, guaranteeing a good spot on the boat. We found their hammocks on the upper deck near the front of the boat, which was the ideal location, because it was away from both the boat's engine and the toilets. Fortunately there was a spare spot next to their hammocks, so I was able to hang my hammock there.

The hammock area was a bit cosy, as you can see here and here (in the first photo my hammock is the mainly blue one in the centre, and in the second photo it's the one on the right). I didn't bring my tape measure with me, but I reckoned that the hammocks were spaced about 70cm apart, which isn't much wider than a regular-sized person, so you can imagine that once everyone was in their hammock there wasn't a lot of room to move.

We had a few hours to wait until we were due to set off, so I spent a bit of time exploring the boat, although that didn't take very long. The boat had three levels, plus a cargo hold below. The lower level contained hammock space, toilets and showers, as well as the kitchen and a dining room; the middle level had more hammock space, toilets and showers, another dining room, and about ten cabins for those who wanted to travel in a bit of comfort; and the upper level had more cabins and a bar, which blasted out non-stop loud music.

We set off from Manaus about an hour late, and I settled in for the long journey. For security reasons I didn't think it was a good idea to get my laptop out during the journey, so really the only things I had with me to pass the time were a couple of books to read (I'd been running a bit low on books, but luckily I'd managed to find a good book lying on a shelf in the hostel the previous day, and swapped it for one I'd already read). I also soon discovered that the food service wouldn't be starting until the following day, so for dinner it was tuna and biscuits, which I'd brought with me just in case this happened.

I got an early night, and I quickly discovered how difficult it was to sleep in a hammock in those cramped conditions. I really couldn't find a comfortable position to lie in. An added problem was that I'd hung my hammock directly below a light, which had been handy earlier in the evening because it had allowed me to read, but it wasn't so great when I was trying to sleep. As well as shining in my eyes, the light was also attracting insects, and they weren't just little bugs - these were massive winged Amazonian insects, which I could feel landing on my body and face every few minutes. Usually I'm not particularly squeamish about this sort of thing, but these were pretty horrendous creatures, and there was no way I could sleep under that kind of bombardment. My neighbour to my left, a Brazilian man, had the same problem, and at about 2am he managed to find a way to block out the light using torn-up pieces of a political pamphlet that had been handed out earlier in the day. That solved the insect problem, and I did manage to get at least a few hours' sleep that night.

I was pretty tired on Thursday morning, but that was OK because there wasn't a lot to do other than lounge around in my hammock either dozing or reading my book. If I was feeling energetic I could walk up to the top deck to sit in a chair and read my book, but that was pretty much it. There wasn't a lot to see either, because we were sailing straight down the middle of a very wide river, and this was a typical view of the shore.

I tried the food for the first time that day, and it was mostly pretty good. I had fried eggs, ham, bread and coffee for breakfast, and for lunch they served a typical Brazilian 'prato feito' (set meal), which consisted of chicken, pasta, rice and black beans. However, I did have a very long wait for my lunch, because when the food arrived after an initial half-hour wait, everyone else rushed up to help themselves, whereas I sat in my seat and waited, deciding I didn't want to take part in such an undignified scrum. Stupid me, because of course some of the people were greedy gits and piled the food onto their plates, and about ten of us were left with no chicken, so I then had another half-hour wait while more chicken was prepared. Fortunately dinner (pretty similar to lunch, but with beef instead of chicken) was a bit more civilised.

I slept better on Thursday night, probably because I was so tired from the first night. I woke up early though, because at 5.30am on Friday morning we arrived in Santarém, and about half of the passengers on the boat started packing up their things and leaving. The boat was due to be in dock for much of the day, so Lucía, Armando and Maria slept on for another couple of hours, but then they too got ready to leave, so we said our goodbyes and I was on my own again. Suddenly I had a lot of space, although the place was left in a bit of a mess, as you can see below.

The mess was soon cleared up, and the space was soon taken up too, because before long people started boarding for the next part of the journey. An elderly lady installed herself directly next to me - I thought she seemed a bit frail to be sleeping in a hammock, but actually she managed perfectly well. I considered doing a bit of sightseeing in Santarém, but in the end I settled for just taking a short walk in the area immediately around where we'd docked, partly because I didn't want to take the risk of the boat leaving without me, but mainly because I wanted to protect both my belongings and my hammock spot (I thought someone might move my hammock in my absence). We eventually got on our way at 1.30pm, after eight hours docked at Santarém, and it was a pretty boring day until just before dusk, when we arrived at our next stop, Monte Alegre, and we got just a glimpse of life in a small Amazonian town.

Saturday was by far the most interesting day in terms of what we could see from the boat, because for most of the day we were moving down much narrower rivers than before, which meant that we were a lot closer to the shore. Dozens of people in small rowing boats approached us as we went along, and a lot of them were calling to us and waving with a funny two-handed up-and-down wave. It soon became clear that they were hoping for gifts, because some of the passengers on our boat started throwing objects wrapped in plastic bags into the water, and the people in the small boats rowed over to pick them up. I'm not sure what exactly was in the bags, but I think it was mainly food. A number of other people manoeuvred their boats alongside ours and hooked themselves on, at which point they were then able to board our boat and sell their goods (mainly prawns). The three young boys in this boat managed to latch on without using any kind of motor, which I thought was pretty skilful. We also saw some very isolated homes along the way.

On Saturday morning the elderly lady left, and I soon got a new neighbour, Joaquim, a French-Canadian guy who had joined the boat at Santarém, and who moved up to my deck after having had some of his belongings stolen from his bag while he was sleeping on the lower deck the previous night. It was a bit of a relief once again to have someone next to me that I could have a conversation with. That evening we also had probably the best sunset of the journey, which you can see below.

Shortly after sunset we made a quick stop at a small town whose name I don't know, and it was a bit too quick for one man, because he went ashore and then the boat left without him. Lots of people on the boat were shouting at the captain that someone had been left behind, but it was obvious the boat was never going to stop. I don't know if the man ever made it back on board.

On Sunday morning I was woken in the early hours when the boat started to rock from side to side, causing all of the hammocks to swing like crazy. There wasn't much chance of getting any more sleep when we all kept banging into each other, so it was an early start for everyone. We'd entered rough water, but it wasn't clear why, because the weather conditions were good - I guess it was because we were approaching the Atlantic, in which case perhaps that stretch of water is always rough. Fortunately after a few hours we turned into a smaller branch of the river as we approached Belém, and the remainder of the journey was a lot smoother.

Finally at about 10.30am we could see the skyline of Belém in the distance, and we knew that we were almost there. Half an hour later we were docked, and I was very relieved to be able to pack up my hammock and get off that boat for the final time. All in all, even though it was a pretty boring and unpleasant journey at times, it was definitely an interesting experience, but one that I won't be looking to repeat any time soon.