The entire city of Manaus smelled like it was on fire. The air was thick with a haze and my phone warned me of dangerous air quality. Nearby fires (illegal or otherwise) have been plaguing this area, particularly during this year’s dry season. After a mediocre breakfast buffet at the Blue Tree Inn, we caught an Uber back to the Manaus airport. As we will be flying on a smaller ATR turboprop, checking in our bags was basically mandatory.
For the first time on our adventures, we have confirmed seats for this flight and I chose 5C/D on the Azul app which actually worked for once. After that, we headed off through security, and made a quick stop at a priority pass lounge where we grabbed some waters, and I ate a cake. By the time we walked the length of the surprisingly long terminal building, our Azul flight was boarding. While our ultimate stop is Tefé, the plane makes a stop in Tabatinga, which made it a little confusing when all the signage had the plane going to Tabatinga. It does go direct to Tefé on certain days, but those days don’t align with the Uakari Lodge’s very structured schedule. Perhaps they should get on the same page.
Two flights sitting on an ATR all morning is a bit of a hassle. However, I shall now explain why we are doing this. Manaus is like the Amazon’s hub. 99.9% of visitors to the Amazon book some sort of tour from there. Based on the appearance of the folks at the Blue Tree, that is what everyone staying there was fixing to do. There must be dozens if not hundreds of different companies that will take you from Manaus into the Amazon and yet all of them do pretty much the exact same things with the same gimmicks. You can find any number of YouTube videos online showing all the influencers doing this. If you’ve learned anything from Bricole over the course of our travels, it’s that we don’t like a crowd and Nicole found the Uakari lodge — deep in the Amazon and hopefully away from the hundreds of tourist boats and tour companies that operate out of Manaus.
Not really knowing where Tabatinga was, the first of our two legs was a bit confusing. Apparently there is another time zone change, so what we thought would have been a 90 minute flight was actually 2.5 hours. I was indeed confused after I finished 1h40min movie and we showed no signs of descending. Shortly after departing Manaus, the two men in front of us reclined their seats and perhaps started farting uncontrollably and/or crapping their pants. But between the gas attacks, the view out the window didn’t really seem to change. We saw snaking rivers and jungle canopy and I only saw one small grouping of buildings on a riverbank for about two hours straight. No telephone wires, no boat traffic, nothing but jungle as far as the eye could see.
I knew the Amazon was vast, but flying above it really gives one an appreciation for the scale and the isolation. We finally touched down in Tabatinga and my phone welcomed me to Peru while Nicole’s welcomed her to Colombia. The border town is in fact on the edge of Brazil, but located close to the other two. We sat on the plane for about 30 minutes until a new batch of passengers boarded. The pants crappers appear to have got off in Tapatinga because the next leg to Tefé seemed to be more breathable.
After deplaning, we soon had our bags and were driven about ten minutes through the town of Tefé to a port area that looked a bit worse for wear. Then it was about a 90 minute boat ride that eventually took us on the Amazon itself. There were various structures such as schools, churches, and homes along the river for the first half or so, but then it really thinned out as we worked our way onto other rivers and tributaries—eventually arriving at the Uakari Lodge.
After the multiple flights, the transfers, and the boat ride, we had hoped to get settled for a bit, but the lodge put us straight to work. We were asked to drop our bags off and change into appropriate gear for our first interpretive hike. We bathed in deet and within 15 minutes, we were back at the dock and boarding a boat to the opposite riverbank for our hike. We could hear things like parrots or howler monkeys, and caught glimpses of squirrel monkeys between branches, but my wildlife pictures are nonexistent here so far. I have a lot of pictures of . . .trees. The canopy is pretty thick here, so the heat from the sun isn’t actually too bad, but it makes photography a challenge. I kept switching between my wide angle lens for forest views and my telephoto lens in case we saw an animal. The end result seems to be that all of my photos are bad.
There are about 8 others staying at the lodge, but some may have booked different types of tours. There is a Brazilian couple from Rio, two elder Spaniards that look like Salt (everyone’s favorite senior travel couple), a Frenchman from Tahiti and his silent partner, and of course – Bricole. The interpretive hike was done in Portuguese and English to try and cover most of the bases. It was a slow hike in the squishy soil with some explanations on medicinal purposes of trees for people who have lived in the Amazon. At one point one of the guides took his machete to hack off part of the tree to show that it had water. I drank a little bit. Nicole did not.
Finally we headed back to the lodge for our first little break of the day. As it is an ecolodge, there is limited everything. Solar power means rationing of electricity. WiFi surprisingly exists but not in our room. The water is brown not unlike the Amazon River and the only cooling one can expect is from a few fans that also have to be rationed. It seems that this will be more of an experience than a prime place for wildlife viewing.
We certainly hear a lot of animals. We hear the splash of massive fish jumping out of the water to catch insects, birds chirping, and monkeys call to each other from a distance. But actually seeing these things is a different story. The canopy hides things well. The Amazon has often been called a counterfeit paradise (by mostly European explorers) — as it is simultaneously teeming with life yet also full of hundreds of ways to kill you or at least make your life miserable. We had dinner back at the lodge after settling in. Darkness came quick and the sounds of the jungle permeated the night. Tomorrow we have an early start to our day. It would have been nice to ease into our day, but the Uakari Lodge is very serious. Time to charge up the devices before they kill the lights.
passports & pepto bismol 