Moving on: Santarem to Manaus!

I've usually been telling you where I am when I'm writing, but I'm going to be telling you what I'm LISTENING TO as well today, as I'm absolutely loving it......

This blog is writing about stuff that happened in early to mid May. I'm actually writing it on 22nd June  [you will notice it's being posted out at the beginning of August but maybe we'll gloss over that for now], on the slow boat RONDONIA between Manaus and Belem, and listening to ISLE OF KLEZBOS:  Bonia Shur's Nigun & Cartagena Chosidl  from their cd Yiddish Silver Screen, available on Bandcamp to listen to and to buy of course. Cartagena Chosidl is a little bit topical - they invented a Klezmer tune with a Colombian beat - here it is for your delectation. I heard their bandleader and drummer Eve Secular talking about this on the 6th June 2024 episode of Klezmer Podcast this month and have been listening wall to wall ever since.  

(Other music recs in the Klezmer world I got into this month... I was listening to Fran and Flora's fabulous new CD Precious Collection featured on Music Planet when I was on my way to Altamira (as featured in the last blog) - sadly the episode is no longer available on the BBC, but it was  mindblowing listening to it through the Starlink connection on the overnight bus, and you can hear it (and buy it) on Bandcamp here. )

I was feeling down about being so 'far behind' with the blog writing, but my lovely current travelling companion, Agnieszka (who I first met on the Nomad Cruise coming here last December and who I've been travelling with for the last few weeks) tells me that it's great to look back and get perspective,  

On to the travelling..... 

So in the last entry I came back from Altamira.... and it was time to go on to Manaus.  The lovely Artemizia, friend of my Brazilian friend in Lancaster, who was my host for the week in Santarem, helped me to buy my boat ticket. I’d planned to just walk down to the port and wander round to see how to do it. Like it said in all the instructional blogs... but it’s so much easier with someone who knows what they’re doing! We just drove to the port, walked up to a booth, and paid.... 

Irritatingly the lady at the booth didn’t tell me that if i bought a ticket for a boat half a day earlier I would manage to get a once in a lifetime rehearsal for the BIGGEST FESTIVAL IN BRAZIL AFTER CARNIVAL  – the festival in the tiny town of Parentins. The main festival is at the end of June and I happened to be passing at the exact time of one of the all-night rehearsals....   Hmm.  I found that out from my helpful Manaus Couchsurfing group.  I checked the time of my boat and it seemed that it would be arriving at 4 am and staying in port for a while, so I thought that maybe I was going to be able to get to a bit of the show. 

 I had a couple of days more in Santarem and – glory of glories – I managed during that time to get my CPF.   This is a mysterious number that all Brazilians have, without which you can’t get a sim card, buy ANYTHING off the internet, or pretty much function, officially.  I’m very excited about my CPF!   (I have no idea what it stands for but it might as well be Can’t Purchase F*** without it.... ).  What is it, by the way, that Brazilians, and also Peruvians, know about SIM cards that we don’t know in the UK? In Peru you need to have a fingerprint id to buy a sim card.... in Brazil you need your CPF, or occasionally they’ll allow you to buy one with a passport.  I’m sure you can just walk in off the street and buy a SIM in the uk.... (which reminds me, short break while I call EE to try to set up my phone to use with unlimited internet in the US and Canada from next month!.... update: that didn't work... i am now in the US and had to buy a SIM from A T&T and sure enough they didn't need my passport or fingerprint)

We had a quick trip back to Alter do Chao with Artemizia and her family – her mum is amazing, she’s 87, has great difficulty walking, but when she was young she was a swimming champion, and when she gets in the water she is like a MERMAID.  I know I’m a sort of example, travelling at 69, but  what a beautiful and inspiring example Artemizia’s mum is!

We had a night out at a Japanese restaurant with Artemizia and her lovely kids - Japanese food is a big thing in Brazil.   The family will be coming to Lancaster next February (holiday time in Brazil) and I look forward to meeting up with them when they're visiting  our lovely mutual friend Juliana.  

And then it was time to get on the boat again, for two more days cut off from the world lying in a hammock staring at the Amazon. I really love these times.  

This was a lovely three-level boat, I had a cabin again with a toilet and fridge, and a hammock, and no cares in the world, except to hope that we’d be in Parentins the next day early enough to get a bit of festival... which DIDN’T HAPPEN L  here’s a pic of the banana vans loading up... 

and here's a video of us arriving at 8 a.m., in time to miss everything and see the happy festival-goers coming up to the boat, dressed appropriately in their RED or BLUE clothes themed for the two opposing sides in the festival retelling of the Bumba Meu Boi story.  

  You’ll see lots of port workers dressed in half blue half red clothes, and also the wonderful phenomenon of people selling food to passengers using long poles to pass up drinks (in the plastic half-bottles at the top of the poles) or bags of food (hung on the hooks on the poles) in return for money that you put in the bottles, and they send back change!

ARRIVING IN MANAUS

I’ve stayed with Couchsurfers and Friends and SERVAS hosts and AirBNBs but decided to go for a hostel in Manaus so that I had a bit more flexibility, because I was going to be meeting various different people and wanted to run around going to different museums etc, and if you’re staying with people you get less independence (but much more connection, as I’ve written before – so it’s ALWAYS worth it). 

I went out with a lovely Couchsurfer the first night in the main square in Manaus 

who recommended a rainforest tour for me to go on the following week (more of that later)

The next morning I was very happy to meet NELLY MARUBO 

– she’s an Indigenous leader who I met through Pete’s friend, Salvador based anthropologist Cecilia McCallum, who had brought her to the UK with two other Indigenous leaders to talk about the climate crisis in summer 2022.  I had gone to meet her in London with Sian, Dom Phillips’ sister,  and we had a really good connection then – despite only being able to communicate using Google Translate and a bit of my Spanish and her Portuguese.... She agreed to be the Keynote Speaker at the conference I organised in November 2022 in honour of Dom and Bruno  and it was talking to her that led me to go on to do my online masters module last year which led to my published article  about the importance of indigenous languages in the climate crisis.   The exciting part of meeting Nelly this time was that WE COULD SPEAK TO EACH OTHER IN PORTUGUESE!  All those Portuguese lessons in Salvador and conversation classes before I set off from the UK  and learning verb constructions had paid off – it was such a brilliant thing, to meet someone who you’d had difficulty talking to two years earlier, and just being able to chat normally!  We both kept doing double takes and realising what a big thing it was! 

We went for a coffee (with her niece who was staying with her) and then she took me to a local Indigenous restaurant 

– where we ordered ANTS  along with our other food; the fish was amazing but none of us could quite manage the ants

When I was there I also had a consultation in their   health clinic about a very painful bite which had been bothering me for a couple of weeks.  They had an explanatory poster up about how the place had been founded by the first local indigenous man to qualify with a doctorate in anthropology (the same qualification that Nelly Marubo has). 

This man, Joao Paulo Lima Barretto, had set up the centre after his niece had gone to the hospital after a snake bite, and the local medical team had said she needed to have her foot  amputated; he and the girl's father were vehemently opposed to having the amputation done, and consulted with local shamans who agreed that the foot wasn't necrotising....    This incident is described on the poster, and in more detail in this article from 2022, which I've just read almost in tears: 

"The head of the medical team, without much discussion, addressed my father in an angry and arrogant tone: “why do you think we shouldn’t amputate your granddaughter’s foot?” My father, not having a mastery of Portuguese, responded that, from his point of view as a kumu, Luciane’s foot was not in the process of necrotizing, but that the purple color of the foot was a reaction of the blood to snake-venom. The doctor, who appeared visibly irritated, interrupted my father in the middle of speaking, and banging on the table, said: “I studied 8 years to have the authority to decide what’s best for a patient, and you (with all due respect) didn’t go through a single day in medicine.” After which, he left the room and took the medical team with him."   

(Bahserikowi Center of Indigenous Medicine in Amazonia: Concepts and Practices of Indigenous Health João Paulo Lima Barreto1 Translated by Adam Louis-Klein, Oscillations 2022.

(eventually the young girl was taken out of this hospital and went to another where there was agreement to work together with the team of shamans; her foot was NOT amputated, and she is recovered with almost full movement of her foot and leg.). 

We also went to MUSA, the Museum of the Amazon on the outskirts, which is a kind of ‘annotated forest’ with amazing photos and standing exhibitions of spiders and other foresty things, and an observation tower...

(if you didn't wear 'closed shoes' then you had to hire sexy black wellies)

When in Manus you have to go to the OPERA - a full blown amazing building built at the height of the rubber boom to emulate the best operas of the biggest cities of Europe.  

I went with Felix, who I’d met on the boat  from Santarem to Manaus.  As oddly as having a full scale european opera in an Amazonian rubber town, the concert was  the Amazonas Filarmonica  playing Mozert and Borodin - with a very impressive 13 year old solo violin too ... But outside, which was REALLY impressive and interesting, there was a fashion stall by an Indigenous designer, Sioduhi -  they had provided accessories  for the orchestra and had a show of clothes inspired by indigenous designs, using traditional weaving and dyeing techniques. His concept is 'Indigenous Futurism' and you can read about it here and here. I found there was also an article about him in my favourite amazonian news site Sumauma (which I am still sponsoring monthly with the money I used to spend on gym membership).  We talked to three of the women who were there modelling the clothes and looked at some of the magazines featuring Sioduhi's work - such interesting ideas.   

Felix does some fashion journalism so I was very happy to use that as a reason to get the women's contact details so that we could find out more. And I ended up going for a drink with them the following week, staying in touch, and beginning to encourage them to cook up an idea for an ecotourism project involving indigenous fashion, textiles and dyeing.   And it might well happen - maybe for October 2025, so people can come before COP30 in Belem five days downriver!  Follow @gliciacauper and @fash_rev_brasil, @sioduhi,  @fash_rev and @sioduhistudio  on instagram to make sure you keep in touch with their ideas. 

There's so much more I did in Manaus before going on to Tefe and then Peru via Colombia..  which we will have in the next post. 

including...

a couple of fascinating museums including the excellent rubber museum (weirdly, built on a site which was originally a film set!);  a three day 'jungle experience tour' (that just left me depressed, tbh, I will write more about this next time; with 'spoilers' that I have also had a perfect rainforest experience later on in Peru and a much better community led ecotourism experience out of Tefe too...);  attending an international online conference broadcast from Yale in honour of Dom and Bruno, at the house of Nelly Marubo, where we both knew several of the participants.... 

Then we have ...the amazing Mamiraua Sustainable Development Institute in Tefe to which I was lucky enough to be invited by a former Lancaster resident(!)... three weeks in Peru, which was fantastic APART FROM the effect that the Spanish had on my fledgling Portuguese ..... and back to Sao Luis for a mesmerising Sao Joao festival that utterly lived up to its hype of being the best Sao Joao in Brazil. I'm now in Canada and although I'm having new incredible visual experiences daily here, I'm utterly enjoying being absorbed in my photos and diaries and memories of my Brazil trip.  I am hoping to get quite a bit of time to write over the next 16 days on the 4,700 km bus and train journey from Vancouver to Montreal.... (we're stopping off in Kamloops, Canmore, Edmonton and Toronto)....  I've also just signed up for daily Portuguese language conversation classes again, the same ones I did before I left the UK (highly recommended for anyone with basic Portuguese, the link is here...)


Over and out for now! 


If you want up to the minute news, join my whatsapp travel group , the link is here or ask me to add you by emailing me on fionaistravelling@gmail.com [note the double L if you're from the US]. 

love, Fiona