Day One.
Arrival in Manaus was by turns surreal, exciting, and at times perhaps a little frightening. It is a city of contrasts; shining modern buildings flanked by squal roofs of swiftly-rusting corrugated metal, walls covered with graffiti like a strange lichen in clumps of artwork and sprawling lines of tags, but most of all an abundance of human detritus. The sidewalks ran the gamut from broken chunks of pitted cement to carefully laid tile and cobblestones, and stray dogs and rail-bird thin cats walked the streets or perched atop crates of produce not unlike the bodega cats of New York City. Worn down from our fifteen hours of airports and airplanes, a drive to JFK from deep south Jersey, and a night spent packing, we greeted our hotel with a mixture of exhaustion and relief -- but we were not resting yet.
Our guides, who would become some of the brightest highlights of the trip, greeted us: Rafael, Marcus, and Tayke. They took us through the city near our hotel after we had deposited our luggage and spoke about its history: the world’s arrival in Brazil in pursuit of white gold -- rubber -- and the way Ribeira built up the infrastructure of Manaus while exploring that resource’s potential. Carriage wheels were coated in rubber to muffle them, and the bricks in the streets around the opera house had it mixed into their slurry to dampen the sounds of hoofbeats and cart-wheels for patrons, amenities built as lures for the wealthy and the Rubber-Barons to come and settle in the heart of Amazonas. The patterns of stonework in Saint Sebastian Square mirrored the styles of Portuguese sidewalks, a stream that wound through the city was filled in and paved, and the harbor finished and a monument commemorating it in classic European style: a woman with a single bared breast and a torch held high and posed so that her robes seemed to have been flung wide to the wind, cherubic infants with the world beneath their hand, the bows of ships protruding beneath the names of the continents and in the styles of those lands with their own infants straddling their bowsprits or figureheads holding trade goods of their lands. The wealthy came. Their influence reflected still in the buildings’ high roofs and the family crests worked into the stone of the windows around the square. But not every project was finished as Brazil’s fortunes ebbed and flowed -- most notably the church of Saint Sebastian, the last building of its time, boasted only one tower rather than the planned two.
Today, the grand opera house and ornate statuary looked down on men hawking water to the group of American students or begging money, but the grandeur remains. We met our bus on the street that was once a stream, and were taken to our next stop: Museu Amazonia, or simply Musa.
Musa is 100 hectares of rainforest, set aside and protected from the urban sprawl of the city and devoted specifically to education about the local environment. As we walked in, we were greeted by the rainforest quite abruptly living up to its name; we made it under the shelter of the gazebo just in time for a downpour that lasted no more than fifteen minutes and gave us time to examine the exhibits within, including a native fish trap and beautifully carved wooden seats and animals. Once it had abated, we were led along the Musa’s paths, through ponds with lily pads so large that they looked as though they would support a small child (Rafael told us a legend about their origins, a fairy tale where a young girl fell in love with the moon and drowned, so the moon made the lilies in her memory to bloom at night like the stars with which he shared the sky). A snake house and an outdoor enclosure kept boas and vipers and rattlesnakes, and a series of tanks housed some of the Amazon’s indigenous fish like the Tambaqui and the Arowanna, both of which we later learned were particularly tasty. We were led to the top of an observation tower used by scientists, above the canopy of the rainforest -- it was a climb, but the view was more than worth it.
Breathtaking is perhaps the only word that can describe it; the macaws and the falcon we saw, all the songbirds flitting between clumps of leaves and branches below us when we looked down from the dizzying height, the rainbows reflecting through the evapotranspiration of the forest making its own clouds, and the setting sun that lit the evening like a picture from a post card or a picture book of strange places. Whether on the forest floor with its beguiling mixture of sun and shadows that caressed the skin in the humid air or above the canopy where the breezes played with your hair and cooled the sweat on your skin, the Musa fulfilled its purpose of showcasing the forest in miniature.
Arrival in Manaus was by turns surreal, exciting, and at times perhaps a little frightening. It is a city of contrasts; shining modern buildings flanked by squal roofs of swiftly-rusting corrugated metal, walls covered with graffiti like a strange lichen in clumps of artwork and sprawling lines of tags, but most of all an abundance of human detritus. The sidewalks ran the gamut from broken chunks of pitted cement to carefully laid tile and cobblestones, and stray dogs and rail-bird thin cats walked the streets or perched atop crates of produce not unlike the bodega cats of New York City. Worn down from our fifteen hours of airports and airplanes, a drive to JFK from deep south Jersey, and a night spent packing, we greeted our hotel with a mixture of exhaustion and relief -- but we were not resting yet.
Our guides, who would become some of the brightest highlights of the trip, greeted us: Rafael, Marcus, and Tayke. They took us through the city near our hotel after we had deposited our luggage and spoke about its history: the world’s arrival in Brazil in pursuit of white gold -- rubber -- and the way Ribeira built up the infrastructure of Manaus while exploring that resource’s potential. Carriage wheels were coated in rubber to muffle them, and the bricks in the streets around the opera house had it mixed into their slurry to dampen the sounds of hoofbeats and cart-wheels for patrons, amenities built as lures for the wealthy and the Rubber-Barons to come and settle in the heart of Amazonas. The patterns of stonework in Saint Sebastian Square mirrored the styles of Portuguese sidewalks, a stream that wound through the city was filled in and paved, and the harbor finished and a monument commemorating it in classic European style: a woman with a single bared breast and a torch held high and posed so that her robes seemed to have been flung wide to the wind, cherubic infants with the world beneath their hand, the bows of ships protruding beneath the names of the continents and in the styles of those lands with their own infants straddling their bowsprits or figureheads holding trade goods of their lands. The wealthy came. Their influence reflected still in the buildings’ high roofs and the family crests worked into the stone of the windows around the square. But not every project was finished as Brazil’s fortunes ebbed and flowed -- most notably the church of Saint Sebastian, the last building of its time, boasted only one tower rather than the planned two.
Today, the grand opera house and ornate statuary looked down on men hawking water to the group of American students or begging money, but the grandeur remains. We met our bus on the street that was once a stream, and were taken to our next stop: Museu Amazonia, or simply Musa.
Musa is 100 hectares of rainforest, set aside and protected from the urban sprawl of the city and devoted specifically to education about the local environment. As we walked in, we were greeted by the rainforest quite abruptly living up to its name; we made it under the shelter of the gazebo just in time for a downpour that lasted no more than fifteen minutes and gave us time to examine the exhibits within, including a native fish trap and beautifully carved wooden seats and animals. Once it had abated, we were led along the Musa’s paths, through ponds with lily pads so large that they looked as though they would support a small child (Rafael told us a legend about their origins, a fairy tale where a young girl fell in love with the moon and drowned, so the moon made the lilies in her memory to bloom at night like the stars with which he shared the sky). A snake house and an outdoor enclosure kept boas and vipers and rattlesnakes, and a series of tanks housed some of the Amazon’s indigenous fish like the Tambaqui and the Arowanna, both of which we later learned were particularly tasty. We were led to the top of an observation tower used by scientists, above the canopy of the rainforest -- it was a climb, but the view was more than worth it.
Breathtaking is perhaps the only word that can describe it; the macaws and the falcon we saw, all the songbirds flitting between clumps of leaves and branches below us when we looked down from the dizzying height, the rainbows reflecting through the evapotranspiration of the forest making its own clouds, and the setting sun that lit the evening like a picture from a post card or a picture book of strange places. Whether on the forest floor with its beguiling mixture of sun and shadows that caressed the skin in the humid air or above the canopy where the breezes played with your hair and cooled the sweat on your skin, the Musa fulfilled its purpose of showcasing the forest in miniature.