Heart of the Amazon

My whole Brazilian adventure wasn't spent in Rio de Janeiro. A four hour flight, and Robin and I were in Manaus, the "Heart of the Amazon." You can really only get there by boat or plane.

 Look how close it is to the equator!

Robin said Mann-is, I said Man-ow, and we both learned it's Ma-nouse (rhymes with mouse). It's original spelling of Manaos makes more sense.

Either way, it's the biggest city in the Amazon region. In the center of the rubber trade, it became the "Paris of the Tropics" with the rubber barons bringing their European influence and modeling the city after Paris (though while we were there the resemblance with the great French city missed us, of course neither of us have ever been to Paris).

 

Being in the Amazon at the end of April put us towards the end of the wet season. For the first day we were there, it was wet. While a few people had umbrellas the locals seemed to take two approaches towards dealing with the rain: 1) just walk through it in no hurry, with a "you're going to get wet anyways" attitude, 2) find a roof or ledge to stand under to wait it out. Which was an interesting approach, as it rained for hours.

Being the "heart of the Amazon" also made Manaus a "tourist" town. You could have fooled me, though they seemed to speak more English than in Rio. We didn't have much time there (and a good half of a day was trying to find a random ATM that worked with my Australian or US card, and after spending and hour on the phone with my banks, there apparently no rhyme or reason to why one works and 20 don't, but I digress). Sitting in the main square passing time, we didn't see many camera toting tourists. There's also not an awful lot to do in Manaus. There's a huge opera house (yes we went on a tour to kill an hour), a market, a port, and a wildlife research facility (that we didn't get to due to the unforeseen time needed to solve the ATM mystery).

The Amazon Theater was built in 1896 during the rubber boom. Apparently Brazilians at that time were anti-anything Brazilian so everything from the wood in the floors to the glass chandeliers was shipped over from Europe and everywhere that was not Brazil. Seems a little strange to me. Not to mention, there is a large out of place dome on the top, decorated with ceramic tiles (not from Brazil) in the colors of the Brazilian flag.

Our possibly not quite so knowledgeable tour guide (he wasn't sure when the next opera was) said they sell tickets to the opera for $5 to keep it so everyone can attend the opera. But unfortunately there was no opera on while we were there. At least not from what we could find out. They don't even have a website with their season schedule!

 The masks of great artists (there were only 2 Brazilian artists represented near the door to the theater).

  

A view from the balcony of the theater of the random old high rises and the last mahogany tree in Manaus (that tall one).

 Then there was the port of Manaus where everyone arrived on their little boats to get food, big screen TVs and milk.

Manaus is also known as the gateway to the Amazon. Can you guess what we were doing there...?