Saturday – Parintins

The big attraction of the place is its annual ‘Boi Bumba’ festival, which takes place every June. Groups of dancers and musicians compete with each other to tell local folk stories, and each year the festival gets bigger, and the costumes and dances more extravagant. Visiting cruise ships are given a taste of the festival in an hour-lonng show; needless to say, it’s very popular, and the excursion to see it always gets sold out.

We saw it two years ago, and this year we decided we would simply go ashore independently and meander. We anchored off Parintins at about 11am, and tenders started ferrying passengers ashore soon afterwards. Unfortunately, due to a particularly strong current today, we could only use the two largest tender boats, which inevitably meant delays; consequently, our planned 6pm leaving time was put back to 7pm.

There isn’t a great deal to do in Parintins if you’re not attending the Boi Bumba show, but we managed to while away a couple of hours, walking around the town and looking in a few of the shops. I managed to replace a pair of sunglasses which I lost overboard in Santarem (I do seem to have a habit of doing that), and we bought some bottles of mineral water to take back to our cabin.

Two or three dolphins (grey and pink) were entertaining the passengers at the quayside, waiting for the tender to take us back to the ship, and judging by the hysterical giggling, several passengers had evidently been whiling away their couple of hours in the local bars.

We’re now heading towards Alter do Chao, our penultimate stop on this, Amazon, leg of our cruise….