An Amazon for adventurers

Nir Etz-Hadar leaned over the deck rail, looking down on a wharf overrun with hemp bags, crates of Coca-Cola, oil barrels and Brazilians as I approached the riverboat Sao Francisco.

He grimaced and waved. “Expect the worst,” he called out.

I did. A week earlier, two Danes at my hotel in Manaus, a steaming city in the heart of the Brazilian jungle, had described the banana boat ride up the Amazon River as a trip they would “never do again.”

I climbed the narrow gangplank, scaled the ladder past the Gypsies in second class and met my new Israeli friend, Nir, in primeiro class: a vast floor of steel, skirted by tiny private cabins. Earlier that morning I had slipped aboard, gripping the ticket I had bought with my 30 words of Portuguese, and, on an empty deck, hung the new red hammock that would be my bed for the next three days. Now I faced a sea of yellow, blue and green hammocks strung from the rafters. I searched for the wretched thing.

There it was. A fat woman, already pretending to sleep in her own hammock, lay like a beached whale against mine. On the other side, someone else’s limp hammock hung an arm’s length away. I counted. In all, 80 hammocks were slotted like poker chips into about 150 square yards of deck space.

The cruise down the Amazon between Manaus, Brazil’s former rubber-trading capital, and the colonial city of Belém on the Atlantic Ocean is a 1,100-mile run on the world’s largest river in volume. Costing only $60 (meals included) for a three-day trip, thanks to Brazil’s plunging currency, it is a magnet for budget travelers who come to experience local life in the raw. That, unerringly, is what they get.

At 46, I am not the typical young adventure-seeker who chooses to take a public riverboat down the Amazon rather than luxuriating in one of the tourist cruisers at several times the price. But giving up an air-conditioned cabin and a soft bed for an opportunity to mix with local people struggling to get by in Brazil’s volatile economy seemed a small sacrifice.

I also had to travel cheaply, because I had given up my journalist’s job in London to make a seven-month journey from the top to the bottom of South America. I planned to start in Venezuela, cruise down the Amazon, then go south along the east coast to Tierra del Fuego at the bottom of Argentina. Though I started alone, I did not remain that way for long: Locals and other travelers were always quick to invite me to share a coffee and swap stories.

I arrived in Manaus, a city of 1.5 million that erupts from the rain forest like a heap of glass and concrete, after a meandering, three-week bus trip from Caracas, Venezuela.

At the peak of the rubber boom a century ago, Manaus was the Paris of Brazil, run by perhaps 100 magnates who forced the local Indians to work their estates and filled the shops with English china, French clothing and Belgian rugs.

The restored opera house, or Teatro Amazonas, built in 1896, stands as an aloof reminder of that lost grandeur amid chaotic fruit juice stands, electronics stores and souvenir shops. The theater’s gold ceramic-tiled dome and pink-and-white pillared exterior enclose sweeping Italian Renaissance balconies and a ceiling rosette painted to mimic the view you would get standing beneath the Eiffel Tower and looking up.

Each morning at my hotel, the modest Pensao Sulista, I waded through a breakfast of melon, bananas, bread and coffee. On a local tour I met Nir, a 29-year-old university graduate, and discovered that he too planned to take the 150-passenger riverboat that three times a week carries cargo and people down the Amazon.

Girding for the voyage

The boat departed Friday, so Nir and I scrambled to buy hammocks, fresh food and tickets. We could sleep in hammocks on the covered deck or take a cabin for $30 more apiece. I peeked into one of the cabins. It was cramped, with four bunks and no air-conditioning. We chose the open air.

By midafternoon the three decks of the Huckleberry Finn-style boat were filled with bodies.

At 6 p.m. the boat pulled out from the dock, blowing its horn like a bus.

By 6:20 p.m. it was dark, because Manaus is only three degrees south of the equator. By 8 p.m. the hammocks were full.

At 4 a.m. two roosters, in crates on the lower deck, were crying murder.

At 6 a.m. the breakfast gong rang, and we had coffee and buns lathered in margarine. Boxed in by bodies on every side, I think I got three hours of sleep.

I awoke to see the Amazon Basin, the source of a fifth of the world’s fresh water and oxygen, as a vast breadth of brown water lined with an unbroken canopy of leaves, veils of thick vines, patches of coconut palms and the wood huts of the Indians who live on the riverbanks.

The Sao Francisco is a 145-foot steel-hulled cruiser that offers the best and worst of life at its simplest. At times you could believe you were on a luxury holiday. Dusk was such a time: sitting in the stern on the top deck, looking down the dance floor to tables of dominoes players and a bar serving Antarctica beer and Simon and Garfunkel tunes, brain lulled by a warm wind and the gentle thump of the motor, a red sun draining the evening sky, and the muddy river curled in silver, with dark slices of rain forest sliding off the far banks. People pay good money for such a life.

But soon reality swings back: Only money buys privilege. It was humbling to crouch under a 5-foot shower in the dubiously clean closet that passed for a bathroom and to gaze at the chicken, manioc root, beans and spaghetti at mealtimes, wondering whether this was the beginning of the end for your stomach.

On the first night, Amit Shaham, a 19-year-old Californian, caught up in the music and the bright night sky, bounced onto the deck to give a spontaneous samba lesson. Would she have done so on a luxury cruise? Maybe. But would I have met the English-soccer fan and maitre d’ of the boat, Armando, who lectured me in Portuguese on life after divorce? Or the naked kids, faces as wild as monkeys’? Or the spry old woman who faked near-death one moment to beg for money, then shouted down a man twice her size the next? For that matter, would I have made four instant friends when there proved to be only six foreigners among the 150 Brazilian passengers?

Not likely. It was a privilege to be among these delightful people, with their crazy music and bashful friendliness, on this tin pot in the Amazon. Everyone had time. Everything was warm, slow, gently inspiring.

We passed the hours playing cards, reading, talking, probably saying more than we should have in the intimacy of this floating village. Beer was popular, gossip even more so.

Meals were times to socialize, with the men sitting at one long table and the women at another. We dined in the cramped space between the hammocks and the kitchen. The food, alternately beef or chicken stew, was served on platters that came through a small window from the kitchen. The food wasn’t bad, if you tried not to imagine the conditions on the other side of that magic hole.

The captain was rarely seen. He sat in the forward cabin, behind a large steering wheel, while his crew lolled below deck, seemingly indifferent to the noxious smell and noise of the engine.

The four women I met -- American, Canadian, Israeli and Japanese, all in their 20s -- were there as charity workers. They hoped to convince a handful of Brazil’s 12 million abandoned children to give up glue sniffing and go to a local farm where they would be cared for. Already, two boat kids had come up to us asking for “cola, cola.” A Coke? I wish. Cola is Portuguese for “glue.”

By Day 2, Amit was ill. For two nights she lay sweating on the cool deck, while we worried. By Day 3, Chiharu, the Japanese sociology student, was missing her camera. It had been nipped in the night from a bundle beneath her hammock, only inches from the nose of Amit. My own backpack was locked and chained to a post.

Theft is one of the hazards of traveling on the cheap. Though I never worried for my safety among all these families and young couples, I knew my possessions could disappear the moment I turned my back.

The boat stopped briefly in the riverside town of Santarém, two days down the Amazon from Manaus. In the 1920s, Henry Ford built an “American” town near here to harvest rubber for tires. The bubble burst when Malaysia won leadership in the rubber trade and synthetics replaced rubber. Today the town is neglected.

As the boat unloaded goods, we strolled into Santarém, stopping for mangoes and coffee. The narrow streets were quiet. The only activity was the sleepy nodding of shopkeepers selling pottery made by the Tupaiu Indians and a swell of song from a church filled with parishioners dressed in Sunday best. We had only two hours and quickly walked back.

Arriving in Belém

A day later we turned into the Amazon Delta. For more than an hour, shallow canoes, many paddled by a mother and child, glided toward the Sao Francisco from the nearby shores. Some sold shrimp. Some had nothing. Sympathetic passengers threw plastic bags of food to them.

As we arrived at the Belém dock, weary but excited, my five friends and I looked at one another. All around us, people rushed to meet our fellow passengers. Unlike Manaus, Belém has maintained much of the grandeur it attained when it served variously as an export center for sugar, beef, cotton, rubber, jute, Brazil nuts and black pepper after it was founded in 1616.

In the Ver-o-Peso market we poked among stalls selling live rabbits; bags of oranges; black, yellow and red sausages; drinks made from fruits I’ve never heard of; and charms of the African-derived Umbanda religion. Ugly vultures sat amiably on posts at the nearby fishing harbor. Across the water, the terraced houses were a candy shelf of pastel blue, pink and green.

Here too the heat was oppressive. My guidebook said it rains like clockwork every afternoon. Not for us it didn’t.

We walked for hours along the mango tree-lined streets, stopping at the neoclassical Teatro da Paz, the Baroque Mercês Church and the Palácio Antonio Lemos art museum. In the latter, the two-toned striped wood floor, marble staircase, engraved furniture and vast rooms left no question about where the wealth of this country went.

Outside of Belém’s grand buildings, however, you cannot escape the flip side of this civilization of extremes. We saw a man begging on a busy sidewalk. He had no legs, no forearms. Someone dropped a coin. No one looked him in the eye.

The journey down the Amazon River took a little more than three days. Rarely have I, in so short a time, been immersed in such a mix of humility and peace. Looking back now, I can say without doubt that the Danes were wrong about the banana boat.

Shirley Skeel has worked for Bloomberg News service and other business and news publications in England and Australia.