| Manaus in less than 12 hours |
[Apr. 14th, 2008|08:57 pm] |
We docked in Manaus (largest city in the Amazonas state, half of the state's 3 million inhabitants live here) 12 hours late, which meant that my tour operator didn't show up to meet me. I waited for 45 minutes, watching the number of taxis dwindle. It was dark, dock areas are normally seedy at night and I was a few km from my intended hostel so I sheepishly went back to the taxi drivers I had previously rejected (having told them I was meeting a friend and didn't need a taxi) and got a taxi to the address given in Lonely Planet. Lonely Planet, why would you lie? There was no tour operator there. My wonderful taxi driver didn't just drive away though, he carried my backpack while we asked everyone on the street if they knew where Gero's Tours were located. In the end, failing to find Gero, we walked to a low-budget hotel that I knew was on the same street. And ta-da, there was Gero's Tours. Of course, it was now 10pm and no-one was there. So I paid 60R$ for a room (twice my normal price). I would have tipped my taxi driver except I know he charged me twice as much as the locals, so he can take the tip out of the extra. It was not a good start to my time in Manaus, especially when I found out my room had just been painted (still wet and smelly with it) and the TV had 7 fuzzy portugues channels.
I had no water at this point and didn't want to wander the streets alone looking for a supermarket that would still be open so I decided to test my chlorine water-purifying tablets. Unfortunately, my mum bought them for me when I went to Thailand two years ago and I hadn't checked on the state of them since. They had formed a single mass with no indication of the original size of just one tablet. So I estimated. Wrongly. My water bottle still smells of chlorine, despite multiple neutralising-iodine tablets. But oh well.
Things looked up the next day as I found Gero just as he was setting up at 8am. He remembered that I had booked a tour, I asked if he had one leaving that morning since I'm on a tight schedule. He looked at his watch - "we have one leaving right now!" I checked out of my hotel, we jumped into his car and he drove like a maniac to the dock having called ahead to tell them to wait. He beeped twice at every car on the road. We made it and I piled in the boat with 5 backpackers - a couple from Israel, a couple from Switzerland and a lone Finnish guy. And off we went...
No photos, I hate the combination of photos and internet. |
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