Tag: South America Adventure

The adventure in South America began in Buenos Aires in large part to include a visit to the Iquazu Falls and ending some 8,000 nautical miles (9,446 ‘land’ miles) in Miami.  Along the way we stopped in 21 ports of call and explored 5 different countries. 

We also traveled on waters of distinctive coloration.  Southern seas near Uruguay and Argentina were a dark sapphire. As we headed north, port towns like Rio de Janeiro reflected a green tint to the sapphire. As we entered the estuary of the Amazon, bronze brown waters greeted us.  Up river in Parintins, the blog showed you the Meeting of the Waters, forest dark stream flowing alongside earth brown river.

As we continued on north, sunny clear days reflected the true turquoise of the Caribbean. There were highlights and missed opportunities but all in all it was a spectacular adventure and quite enjoyable.

Our last two stops were in Bridgetown, Barbados an St. John’s, Antiqua.  These are clearly resort ports where cruise ships come on a regular basis disgorging 1,000s of tourists along the way and the Ports clearly are focused on this tourist trade.  However, both islands have lovely beaches and some interesting historical links.

Bridgetown is the capital and largest city of Barbados. The present-day location of the city was established by English settlers in 1628. Bridgetown is a major West Indies tourist destination, and the city acts as an important financial, convention center, and cruise ship port of call in the Caribbean region. 

Although the island was totally abandoned or uninhabited when the British arrived, one of the few traces of indigenous pre-existence on the island was a primitive bridge constructed over the Careenage area’s swamp at the center of Bridgetown. It was thought that this bridge was created by a people indigenous to the Caribbean known as the Tainos. 

Bridgetown is the only city outside the present United States that George Washington visited. (George Washington House, the house where he stayed, is included within the boundaries of the Garrison Historic Area.) Two of Washington’s ancestors, Jonathon and Gerrard Hawtaine, were early planters on the island. Their grandmother was Mary Washington of Sulgrave, Northamptonshire, England. In 2011, historic buildings in Bridgetown were designated as a protected area by UNESCO.

Our visit to Bridgetown did not include a tour so we just went ashore and checked out the various shops.

The settlement of St. John’s has been the administrative center of Antigua and Barbuda since the islands were first colonized in 1632, and it became the seat of government when the nation achieved independence in 1981.  

 St. John’s is one of the most developed and cosmopolitan municipalities in the Lesser Antilles. The city is famous for its shopping malls as well as boutiques throughout the city, selling designer jewelry and haute-couture clothing.  St. John’s attracts tourists from the resorts on the island and from the cruise ships which dock in its harbor at Heritage Quay and Redcliffe Quay several times a week.

After St. John’s we had 2 full days Cruising the Atlantic Ocean before arriving in Miami.  During the final days there were a number of activities and opportunities to enjoy the ship. 

This concludes the South American Adventure.  Our next scheduled trip is to Europe starting in October.  This will include a cruise in the Eastern Mediterranean, a couple weeks of wandering on our own around Italy, a week-long tour with a Renaissance art historian “In the Footsteps of Michelangelo and Caravaggio” through Florence, Rome and Naples and a Christmas Market River Cruise on the Rhine from Cologne to Basil.  Lots more adventures coming soon!

Over the course of our travels along the Amazon, we crossed the Equator 3 times!  This necessitated the initiation of the line-crossing ceremony.

The line-crossing ceremony is an initiation rite that commemorates a person’s first crossing of the Equator.  The tradition may have originated with ceremonies when passing headlands, and become a “folly” sanctioned as a boost to morale, or have been created as a test for seasoned sailors to ensure their new shipmates were capable of handling long, rough voyages. Equator-crossing ceremonies, typically featuring King Neptune, are common in the Navy and are also sometimes carried out for passengers’ entertainment on civilian ocean liners and cruise ships. 

Throughout history, line-crossing ceremonies have sometimes become dangerous hazing rituals. Most modern navies have instituted regulations that prohibit physical attacks on sailors undergoing the line-crossing ceremony.

In the 18th century and earlier, the line-crossing ceremony was quite a brutal event, often involving beating pollywogs (the name for those who have not crossed the equator) with boards and wet ropes and sometimes throwing the victims over the side of the ship, dragging the pollywog through the surf from the stern. In more than one instance, sailors were reported to have been killed while participating in a line-crossing ceremony.

Baptism on the line, also called equatorial baptism, is an alternative initiation ritual sometimes performed as a ship crosses the Equator, involving water baptism of passengers or crew who have never crossed the Equator before.  The ceremony is sometimes explained as being an initiation into the court of King Neptune.  This was more like the ceremony performed on Marina.

Unfortunately, the line-crossing ceremony could not be performed on the first crossing – the weather just didn’t cooperate.  So, on the return crossing, the party began.  The Cruise Director, Sammie, called the group to order while the band made a tour of the deck.  Once everyone was present, and King Neptune was in place along with his wife, the first pollywog was called forward.  First required to kiss the fish, then have ice dumped over their head they were pushed into the pool!  

Now I admit, I was tempted to follow suit but the crowd was big and getting to the ‘fish’ and getting the ice bath really didn’t seem like what I should be doing.  

When we returned to our cabin we found our certificates!

A couple of days later it was Easter Sunday and the crew had set up some lovely decorations and the Easter Brunch was a wonderful culinary extravaganza.

Our Amazon River adventure ended with visits to two final port stops –  Parintins and Santarem.  

Parintins is small, with a population of about 115,000 and is located on Tupinambarana Island.   Its primary claim to fame is the Folklore Festiva, a popular event each year in June and depicting Boi-Bumbá.  This is an interactive play which originated in the 18th century. It is a form of social criticism. Lower class Brazilians mock and criticize those of higher social status through a comedic Folklore story told in song and dance. Though not as well known internationally as Carnival and other Brazilian festivals, it is older and deeply rooted in the culture of Brazil.  Unfortunately, we didn’t know about this as there was a performance available on excursions which those who went said was very colorful.  

Parintins, like nearly all other Brazilian municipalities, was originally inhabited by indigenous peoples. Its discovery occurred in 1749 while going down the Amazon River, the explorer José Gonçalves da Fonseca, noticed an island located on the right bank of the big river Amazon. The foundation of the town began in 1796 established by José Pedro Cordovil, who came with his slaves to concentrate on fishing arapaima and agriculture.

While I went ashore, there wasn’t much to see around the cruise terminal area and the visit was quite short as a result.  Santarem, on the other hand, included a shore excursion – Highlights of Santarem.

Santarem, a city and municipality in the western part of the state of Pará and located at the confluence of the Tapajós and Amazon Rivers, was founded by Portuguese colonists in 1661.Before the Portuguese arrived, it was home to the Tapajós Indians, after whom the river was named.  Santarem is the second-most important city in the state and is the financial and economic center of western Pará. It is located some 500 miles from the two largest cities in the Brazilian Amazon: Manaus, upriver and Belém, located downriver at the junction of the Amazon River and the Atlantic Ocean.  With a population estimated at 305,000 people, Santarém is the third most populous city in the state of Pará. Bordered by both the Amazon and the Tapajós rivers that run in the front of the city, side by side, without mixing. The Amazon’s brown, milky water carries sediment from the Andes in the East, while the Tapajós’s water carries less sediment, is somewhat warmer and has a deep-blue tone. This phenomenon is called “the meeting of the waters” by locals. Until mid 21st century, the town was accessible only by water or air. A boating culture is still very much in evidence.

The first use of rubber was by the indigenous cultures of Mesoamerica. Rubber was used by the Maya and Aztec cultures – in addition to making balls for game, Aztecs used rubber for other purposes, such as making containers and to make textiles waterproof by impregnating them with the latex sap.

Charles Marie de La Condamine is credited with introducing samples of rubber to the Académie Royale des Sciences of France in 1736.  In 1751, he presented a paper by François Fresneau to the Académie (published in 1755) that described many of rubber’s properties. In England, Joseph Priestley, in 1770, observed that a piece of the material was extremely good for rubbing off pencil marks on paper, hence the name “rubber”. It slowly made its way around England. After many years of people fooling around with the rubber tree sap, Charles Goodyear developed vulcanization in 1839 making it much more useable for many products.

South America remained the main source of latex rubber used during much of the 19th century. The rubber trade was heavily controlled by business interests but no laws expressly prohibited the export of seeds or plants. In 1876, Henry Wickham smuggled 70,000 Amazonian rubber tree seeds from Brazil and delivered them to Kew Gardens, England. Only 2,400 of these germinated, however, the seedlings were then sent to Malaysia where they thrived in plantation form – thus breaking the monopoly held by Brazil for the rubber sap.

Our guide showed us how the tree is scored to release the sap and how it is harvested.  The trees will produce the sap for the better part of 35 years or so after which the production greatly falls off.  

After the rubber tree, our guide explained everything there is to know about the cassava plant whose poisonous roots are used to make manioc flour and, after processing, tapioca and flavoring. Once the plant has been harvested, it is cleaned and ground into small strands.  After all the moisture is squeezed out, the resulting material is dried and separated. One of the final products, from this, is tapioca!

The ’nut’ of Brazil, the Brazil Nut was our next highlighted plant.  Brazil nut trees are large tree, reaching 164 feet tall with a trunk 3–7 feet in diameter. It is among the largest of trees in the Amazon rainforest. The fruit of the Brazil nut tree is a large capsule resembling a coconut (4-6 inches in diameter and weighing up to 4.5 pounds) which contains 8–24 wedge-shaped seeds (the “Brazil nuts”) that are 1.5–2 inches long and packed into the capsule like segments of an orange. The fruit takes 14 months to mature after pollination of the flowers. Using a machete, one of the locals broke open one of the nuts and shared the contents.

This stop was quite enjoyable and there was a lot to experience and learn.

Back on the bus, we drove by the Fish Market – held along the bay where locals were getting stocked up for the coming weekend (it was Good Friday after all) but we didn’t actually stop.  

A quick stop was made at the Cathedral of Our Lady Conceicao.  This is a modest church with quite a plain interior ,clean and well maintained and used. We left as a service began.

The final stop was the Old Town Hall Building (the Joao Fona Museum).  The exterior of the museum is a lovely shade of yellow and in good shape. The museum is on the smaller side but has several nice exhibits. It’s a small museum featuring an interesting collection of stone pieces from the Tapajoara culture that flourished locally more than 6000 years ago. This building dates from 1867 and has been a jail, a city hall, and a courthouse.

While the Highlights Tour was enjoyable, the first stop at the Demonstration Farm was clearly the highlight.  

We have been on a number of river cruises, admittedly in Europe, but this too has been a river cruise – after all, we went 900 miles up the Amazon River!  Going 900 miles was only about half way but the ship really couldn’t go any further.  Along the way we stopped at several ports but this will focus on Manaus – the City that Rubber Built.  It is the heart of the Amazonia and the cultural center of the upper Amazon region and an important river port with floating docks that can accommodate ocean going vessels including cruise ships. Surrounded by jungle, Manaus is the only major city in a 600-mile radius.

The city was founded in 1669 as the Fort of São José do Rio Negro at what is now the point where the Solimões and the Rio Negro rivers join becoming the Amazon River.  The city was formalized in 1848 with the final name of Manaus – named for the indigenous Manaós peoples who originally lived in the area.

Manaus was at the center of the Amazon region’s rubber boom during the late 19th century. For a time, it was “one of the gaudiest cities of the world”.  Historian Robin Furneaux wrote of this period, “No extravagance, however absurd, deterred” the rubber barons. “If one rubber baron bought a vast yacht, another would install a tame lion in his villa, and a third would water his horse on champagne.”   

Therefore, the baron’s idea was to build a theater, not a simple concert hall, but a majestic building that would bring Manaus closer to a European capital like Paris.  To carry out the work, not only professionals such as architects, builders, painters and sculptors were brought from Europe, but also various materials: Carrara marble, Murano chandeliers, pieces of worked iron from England and tiles from France. The construction started in 1881 and was completed in 1886.

During the rubber years, the monied class of the city built a grand opera house, with vast domes and gilded balconies using marble, glass, and crystal, imported from Europe. The construction of a theater became a requirement of that region, as it began to experience unprecedented economic and cultural growth due to the global interest in the sap of rubber trees in the Amazon rainforest. It was an elite theater for the wealthy society rubber had created.  

When the seeds of the rubber tree were smuggled out of the Amazon region and cultivated on plantations in Southeast Asia, Brazil and Peru lost their monopoly on the rubber production. The abrupt end of the rubber boom resulted in many people leaving its major cities, and Manaus fell into poverty and the opera house, called the Teatro Amazonas, was effectively closed for most of the 20th Century.  After a gap of almost 90 years, and a major restoration in 1997, the Opera House was re-opened and has continued to thrive.  Touring  the place, the opulence that was used for the building is apparent on every level.  

Manaus is a very large city but as with all large cities there are haves and have nots.  When we wandered around on shore, our first day in port, we walked through a number of small market areas and shops.  There was a surprising range of shops available –craft shops with thousands of handicraft items (beads being a big deal) to shoes, electronics, appliances and other commodities around.  There were also a number of open-air stalls with hand craft items available.

Meeting of the Waters – where the two rivers, Solimões and Rio Negro join, there is a distinct demarcation between the two.  The Rio Negro shows up as a clear black water while the Solimões is a muddy brown.  The flow (current) and the bio ph of the two rivers is distinctly different resulting in a clear separation between them as they flow together.  It takes several miles for them to finally mix – with the muddy brown becoming the characteristic of the Amazon River.  

The month of March is the rainiest month of the year but our trip was blessed with good weather the entire time.  However, with the amount of rain that occurs, both locally and up river, the level of the water rises some 25 to 30 feet!  Homes along the way either are built on stilts or built to float.  Those that are floating use balsa wood logs as their foundation.  These logs, some 3 or 4 feet in diameter will last a very long time – some as long as 50 years.  So, as the water rises so does your house.  An added benefit of having a floating house is that if you don’t like your neighbors you can easily move!

As the area is located along the equator, the temperature doesn’t fluctuate very much.  There are only two seasons – hot and hotter.  

Additionally, there clearly is an abundance of growth – things grow very quickly and become huge.  An example is the giant Lilly Pads we came through along the way.  A surprise was seeing corn growing and to learn it is one of the major exports of the area.  Strange place for sure.

Of course, there was some shopping available after our tour.

Our visit to Manaus was for a couple of days and quite enjoyable.  

In the middle of the 16^th Century, a Spanish conquistador Francisco de Orellana became the first European to sail the Amazon River travelling most of its length.  Legend has it that he battled 

fierce female warriors “doing as much fighting as ten men”.  He named the river “Amazonas”, after the Greek myth of warrior women.  Our journey along the river will cover almost 900 miles, or about half the full length of this might river.  

Today this is one of the widest and deepest rivers in the world.  In some places, the river is almost 300 feet deep and 50 miles wide.  The River begins as hundreds of tiny streams high in the Andes Mountain.  Some streams start less than 100 hundred miles from the Pacific Ocean but due to the Andes Mountains, they are forced to flow East to the Atlantic.  Tributaries continually merge and form ever larger streams and rivers.

Our journey up the river passes by a handful of small villages and a couple of large cities.  Where there are small settlements, these are usually the result of indigenous peoples who have staked a claim and just not wanted to move away.  The large cities are the result of large tracks of land that have been cleared making it possible to have large buildings and industry.  However, it is critical to note that the River can easily rise over 30 feet in the rainy season thus causing flooding if the areas are not properly constructed.

We stopped in the village of Boca Da Valeria – it has a population of between 75 and 100 and of course we far exceeded the local population by showing up.

The meeting of two rivers – merging streams the Rio Solimões and the Rio Negro at Manaus is where the Amazon formally begins the journey to the Atlantic Ocean.  

Where these two rivers meet, there is a significant color difference between them and this color change is maintained for many miles before the two river flows combine.  This “meeting of the rivers” is a celebrated trip which we will be taking in several days.  

The river is so deep that some large ships travel quite far upriver.  Oceangoing ships regularly visit Manaus, nearly 1,000 miles upstream.  

Our ship will be docked in Manaus for a couple of days along with lots of container ships and other large ocean-going vessels.  A bunch of shallow draft floating hotels can reach as far upriver as Iquitos Peru – another 750 miles or more – which would be an interesting adventure for sure.  

As the Amazon nears the eastern coast, the river becomes a tangled network of tributaries.  Any delta that the Amazon River ever had no longer exists as the currents in the Atlantic keep the outflow moving.  Instead, the river enters the Atlantic in a broad estuary 150 miles wide.  The drainage basin has gradually sloping terrain – the river falls about 2 inches for every mile or so and there are ocean tides that effect the river and its banks very far upstream

The Amazon Rainforest has the highest biodiversity of any region in the world.  New species of plants and animals are continually being discovered.  Rainforest structure consists of various levels – emergent, canopy, understory, shrub and ground layers.  The canopy itself can be more than 100 – 130 feet above the forest floor.  Below the canopy ceiling there are often multiple levels.  

The lowest part of the canopy may be 5 to 20 feet above the floor.  Walking through a rain forest isn’t a problem – you’re not swinging a machete to clear a path, that would be in a jungle environment.  

The Rainforest is mostly clear at ground level and trees are buttressed by massive root system to stabilize it in the soft shallow forest soil.

The Amazon Rainforest is home to at least 427 mammal species, 1,300 bird species, 378 species of reptiles and more than 400 species of amphibians.  The number of insects is not known – way too many to count.  One in 10 known species in the world lives in the Amazon rainforest.  

Our adventure, along the Amazon River, is the better part of a full week with stops at major ports and small villages.  I must give credit to Capt. Tom Anderson for his various enrichment talks during the cruise. Much of the information, and pictures, about the Amazon came from his talks. There is really something to be said about a visit to this part of the world – it really does bring you close to nature