Saturday – Manaus – Day Two
Today, I was escorting a tour, entitled ‘Manaus – Capital of Amazonas’. It was a city tour that I’ve done before, and was slightly disappointed not to have been given the all-day ‘Amazonian Experience’ to Lake January, but hey… you win some, you lose some. Actually, with the torrential rain we awoke to this morning, there was a small part of me that was rather relieved not to be heading off in a small boat across the river. Instead; I would be travelling in a luxury coach.
We left the quayside at just before 9am, and headed through the city towards a location a good thirty minutes drive away, to take a look at the football stadium, built for, and featured in, last year’s World Cup tournament. It rained hard the whole way, making Manaus look like a wet weekend in Scarborough.
The Football Stadium, despite its recent history, the fact that it had replaced an old stadium and been built specifically for last year’s competition, isn’t much to look at from the outside – quite plain, and rather featureless, in fact – and that’s all we saw of it. The bus slowed down as we passed it, turned around and pulled up alongside for a few minutes for people to take photographs. Unfortunately, at present, there are no groups of casual visitors allowed (something our guide hoped would change in the future). In the meantime, we would have to be satisfied with an outside view. Because of the rain and the traffic, we didn’t even get off the coach, and the smoked glass windows didn’t help when it came to taking photographs. At least we saw it, though; last year, they refused to take groups to see the stadium at all, on account (we think, though never absolutely confirmed) of it not having been finished.
After our brief visit to the Football Stadium, we headed back into the city centre to our next stop; the Opera House.
Despite the walk from the coach to the front of the Opera House being only short, it was a bit of a dash, since the rain chose that moment to increase its onslaught. Everyone donned waterproofs and moved as swiftly as possible; the pavement just by the coach sported a deep puddle, making those who only wore sandals feel glad that they weren’t wearing shoes and socks (those who were wearing shoes and socks must have wished they’d wore sandals). As we stood within the porched entrance to the Opera House, while our guide gave us an introduction to the building, the rain lashed down even harder, and a couple of loud cracks of thunder, right overhead, made everyone jump and cower slightly. The group seemed relieved when the guide finally led us inside.
We were lucky; an orchestra of student musicians was rehearsing in the theatre, giving us a chance to experience the magnificent acoustics at first hand. The Opera House is Manaus’s most famous landmark. It is a symbol of the immense wealth generated during the rubber boom of the 19th century, a boom responsible for turning Manaus from a small, insignificant town into a city of riches and excessive luxury. It is said that there was so much wealth in the city that laundry was sent to Paris for washing, and champagne flowed in the fountain of the Opera House on opening nights, earning Manaus the nickname ‘Paris of the Jungle’. Unfortunately, the rubber boom came to a thunderous crash after Henry Wickham, a British man, smuggled rubber tree seeds out of the country to be cultivated in the British Colonies… the bounder!
By the time we emerged back out into the open, the rain had subsided enough to allow the taking of photographs from outside.
Our next stop was the Rio Negro Palace. Originally built for a rich German rubber merchant; from 1917 onwards, it was known as the Governor’s Palace, and was the seat of the Amazon State Government. At first, our guide thought that we wouldn’t be able to take a look inside, because he thought it was closed. Luckily, he’d been mistaken, and we enjoyed a good 20-minute potter around its opulent, colonial-styled interior.
The last leg of our tour was to see the poorest section of the city, where stilt houses that look like they’ve been stacked unceremoniously on top of each other, resemble a rough shanty town. The good news is that, in recent times, new housing has been built specifically for those residents, and offered to them free, with the proviso that they don’t sell it on within the first 20 years. We finished by driving by the city’s massive (and impressive) fresh food market and stopping off at a market built for tourists (less impressive, and full of the usual touristy tat).
It’s been a wet couple of days, but our time in the Capital City of Amazonas draws to an end as it must, and from this evening, we head back eastwards, towards our final two stops on the great river, before heading back into the Atlantic and North, towards the Caribbean.
