The Long, Slow Boat Ride up the Amazon

After five days of living it up in Belém, I made my way down to the small commercial cargo dock owned by Marques Pinto Navigação Ltda., and lugged myself and my backpacks over the shaky gangplank onto the N/M Santerém.

My home for the journey up the Amazon River.

This was the start of my five-and-a-half-day journey up the Amazon River.

I was aboard ship three hours before the scheduled sailing time. After spending five minutes or so getting my passenger information registered into the ship’s log, I was in my cabin, unloading my stuff onto the top bunk.

Yes: a cabin.

You see, I’d entertained, for months before ever arriving in Brazil, thoughts of sailing up the Amazon while swinging from a hammock – with my bags stored on the deck below, crammed in elbow-to-elbow with other passengers, all of us taking the cheapest way possible to get upriver from Belém to Manaus. But I chickened out. The constant worry over having my laptop and photographic equipment stolen won over any romantic notion I’d had of roughing it aboard an Amazonian riverboat.

The vast majority of the passengers I met were Brazilians travelling to various towns along the river. There were a lot of families, with children constantly running along the decks. There were the handful of foreign travellers: an older Swiss gentleman, a middle-aged German couple, a Brazilian-American mother and son team, and three backpackers – me; Joanna, an Argentine from Puerto Madryn; and Jean-Hebert, French, from Calais. The hammock-class section aboard ship filled up quickly. Cabin and suite space (obviously being the more expensive options) ended up half-empty, meaning that I got the entire cabin to myself for the trip, despite only paying for a single berth.

Hammock class can get pretty crowded.

I spent a lot of the time before departure watching the loading of cargo. Even the passenger-carrying riverboats plying the Belém – Manaus route are commercial transports first and foremost – the amount and type of goods are a major factor towards determining the length of any river journey. The N/M Santerém carried an eclectic mix: what must have been two or three tonnes of onions, metal fittings, electronic goods, bags of grain, bicycles and one motorcycle.

There was nothing really eye-opening until they started loading the empty coffins.

Are those coffins?

Yep. Coffins.

The riverboat finally left dock around 8:00pm, predictably, two hours behind schedule.

Once we were on the move, life was rather routine. This was no luxury cruise ship; you had to make your own entertainment. Fortunately, the extra reais I paid for my cabin not only bought me peace of mind over the security of my belongings, they also bought me a power outlet, where I could plug in my computer.

Everyday, I woke up around 8:00am. I would stay in my cabin for two hours, spending time on my computer (either playing computer games, or watching downloaded TV shows or movies, or doing photo work, or catching up on writing). I would then emerge and sit outside on deck, reading, chatting with fellow passengers, or just watching the banks of the Amazon go by. Lunch was generally served around noon. After lunch, I would read for another hour, and then take a two- to three-hour nap in my cabin. I’d wake up again, and go back out on deck until we ate dinner sometime between 5:30pm to 6:30pm. Then it was back out to the deck again. Once darkness fully descended, and I could no longer stand the swarms of insects attracted to the external lighting on the boat, I would retire to my cabin. After more computer time, I’d be asleep by midnight or so.

Working away in my cabin.

If it all sounds rather tedious, it was. When I was researching the Amazon River journey, both from reading guidebooks and other traveller’s accounts, all sources made it sound like the only way to stave off boredom was to start drinking from mid-afternoon on. Some of the travellers did exactly that. If I hadn’t had my computer and a reliable power source, I might have done the same. As it was, though, I didn’t touch a drop of alcohol for the entire journey.

The only things that broke the routine up were the towns we docked at along the way. If the stop over was long enough, we could go ashore and explore a bit before the boat sailed again. But even though we stopped off at six towns along the way, I only got off the boat twice, spending all of fifteen minutes in Almeirim, and an hour-and-a-half (despite having a seven hour stop-over) in Santerém.

My reluctance to spend more time ashore was due to the fact that I was utterly terrified of the boat sailing away without me.

With every step I took towards the city centre, and away from the boat, I had to resist the urge to turn around and run back to make sure they hadn't left without me.

This was not unfounded paranoia. During our first stop in Almeirim, we left a guy behind. Hell, I barely made it back aboard ship. When we first docked, we were told that this would be a forty-five minute stop. I left the ship and spent about twenty-five minutes exploring the shops and market around the main intersection of the tiny little town. When I walked back onto the dock, only thirty minutes after the ship had originally pulled up, I was greeted by the sight of the gangplank being hauled back onto the boat. In order to get back aboard, I had to jump onto the side of the boat and lower myself onto the cargo deck. About ten other people behind me had to make the jump too, but at least we all made it. That last guy wasn’t so lucky. By the time he got back onto the dock, the ship had already started engines, untied from the bollards, started upriver. We were about five meters away by the time he got to the edge of the edge of the dock, too far for him to jump.

Let me be absolutely clear. The crew didn’t leave him behind because they didn’t see him. The guy was on the dock, only five meters away, shouting and waving his arms. There was a member of the crew looking right at him. It would have taken all of five minutes to reverse course and just get close enough to the dock again so that he could jump aboard. Instead, the boat just kept on going, and all we could do was watch as the wildly gesticulating figure got smaller and smaller in the distance. (The guy did catch up to us in the next town – he’d apparently found and negotiated passage with a speedboat and overtook us on the river.)

I very nearly didn’t get off the boat at Santerém (the third largest city in the Amazon basin), and only did after speaking to two members of the crew, and the captain, to wrangle a departure time from them. We docked at 9:30am. Everybody told me that the riverboat wouldn’t sail until at least 2:00pm. I made it back aboard by 11:00am. We didn’t depart Santarém until 4:00pm.

There really wasn’t much else to the journey. Except that I’m now permanently cured of an extremely bad habit I had when communicating with people in a foreign language. Sometimes, during lengthy conversations in languages other than English, I’d get lazy while trying to parse foreign sentences and translating responses in my head, so I would sometimes just respond to questions or statements by smiling slightly and nodding my head, even if I had no earthly idea what the other person was talking about.

This had worked out for me before – at least, it had never gotten me in trouble. That is, it'd never gotten me into trouble until the two gay Brazilians, who boarded the boat in Santarém, propositioned me.

Run Away!

I was on deck after dinner one evening, writing in my journal, when a young Brazilian man sat down beside me and started engaging me in conversation. At first, it was really simple stuff: talking about what we’d had for dinner, where we were both from, where we were headed, family and the like. But as the conversation grew longer, and he started launching into rapid-fire Portuguese, I just started nodding and smiling. Now, I’m sure I didn’t hear the word homossexual anywhere during the conversation, but he quite possibly could have started talking about what men do with each other while I was sitting there just nodding like an idiot.

It was only after he called his friend (a middle-aged man who revoltingly had his shirt off, yet still looked like he was wearing a sweater) over and they started using hand gestures to indicate that they’d be willing to give me a blowjob for the low, low price of 50 centavos, did I stammer out a "não, não sou um homossexual" and get the hell out of there.

That turned out to be the third reason why I’m glad I paid for a cabin – a cabin, incidentally, with a secure, locking door. I spent the rest of the journey judiciously avoiding those two characters, and spending even more time hanging out with Joanna, the girl from Argentina.

Despite this little object lesson on what it must be like to live in prison, I think I was rather lucky with my trip up the Amazon. I got one of the good boats – it was clean and had air-conditioned sleeping spaces (even the hammock space was air-conditioned). The crew was relatively professional, and most of the passengers were friendly. To illustrate what might have happened had I not been so lucky, I have to relate a story about what happened to Jessica.

I met Jessica very briefly in Belém, and later when we’d both arrived in Manaus. Back in Belém, she was looking for a berth for herself and her three travelling mates on the same day that I departed. They weren’t able to book in time to make the sailing on my boat, but they caught another riverboat leaving the next day.

Their riverboat ran aground on the bank of the Amazon, a half a day downriver from Santarém. The boat was stuck for nine hours before it could be pulled back out onto the river to continue its journey. Why did it run into the bank? Because the captain was off taking a nap, and the two trainee crewmen manning the bridge were too busy fooling around with two female passengers to notice that the boat had drifted off-course and that they were headed straight for land.

You can’t make up stuff like that.

The N/M Santerém finally arrived in Manaus at 2:00am, one hundred and twenty-six hours after pulling away from the dock in Belém. Since it was in the middle of the night, the crew allowed all the passengers to stay onboard until the sun was up.

I finally got off the boat at 6:15am, tired and glad that I’d experienced an Amazon riverboat cruise. But, above all, I was very, very happy to be back onshore.

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