Tabatinga to Manaus, part 1

I had read and heard good things about the boat ride down the Rio Solimões from Tabatinga to Manaus, and I was not disappointed in the end. The first day started with a ride on the back of a motorbike over to Tabatinga from Leticia. Easy enough. Upon getting there I began looking for other English speaking travelers, as I was not looking forward to spending the boat ride not being able to communicate with anyone else, and had considered just paying the much higher price for a private cabin if there were not going to be other backpackers sleeping on the deck (in hammocks) to help watch our stuff.

I paid the 170 reals (about $100) for my ticket for the three day trip, and then quickly located a number of other travelers: two English couples, and three other individuals traveling alone. The other lone travelers were a 23 year-old French Canadian engineering student, a 25 year-old Israeli recently done with his military obligation, and a 40 year-old Hungarian who had lived, worked, and married in England and Brazil and spoke five languages, including Portuguese, which would be handy for all of us.

We had to go through a good bit of security in order to get on the boat, though most of it seemed to be for show, though you'd think they would take it seriously given the huge amount of cocaine that comes into Brazil from Colombia, the majority of which must come in by river. The drug sniffing dog appeared to be a little…well, unprofessional would be the word I suppose. The effort was there, but most of his effort was used running around happily amongst the bags, not so much in actually stopping to smell anything. At any rate, we all passed that test and others (the Israeli had his entire backpack dumped and searched and the pat down I received was by far the most physical attention I have gotten in awhile) and we were allowed on board. Once on board, I strung up my hammock with the three other lone travelers, the four of us trying not to let anyone get between us by not leaving too much space between our hammocks, while also not crowding ourselves too much. It took me a little while to get my knots the way I wanted, but surprisingly they ended up holding for all three days. (I’m an adherent to the ‘if you can’t tie a knot, tie a lot’ philosophy of knot tying.)

The boat departed around the advertised time of noon, and off we went. At first we were not too crowded on the deck and I was looking forward to a pleasant trip with plenty of space. However, the boat quickly made a couple of stops and the deck became full of hammocks strung all over the place. People began stringing their hammocks between ours, which was the moment when Viktor the Hungarian became very useful and I began learning some Portuguese as he asked and then directed them to put their hammocks elsewhere, at least on the outside of our group of four. We still ended up with hammocks all over, but we were able to keep together, and by stringing some hammocks higher than others we were able to keep some space between us, though only just enough.