Our flight to Manaus was delayed ONCE AGAIN, but we arrived in one piece and caught a bus to the city centre. Whilst trying to figure out where to get off, we started chatting to a brazilian guy who spoke English, who helped us out and offered to help us find a hostel if we came to listen to his uncle tell us about a jungle tour, with no obligation to buy. We saw some pretty awful accomodation, before finally finding a fairly decent one in the form of Amazon Backpackers hostel, dumped our bags and traipsed off to listen about the tour. Armstrong (the guys uncle) was soooo welcoming and friendly, seemed to know what he was talking about and made us feel comfortable, describing exactly the kind of jungle adventure we had been hoping for. Lesson number 1: Don´t trust the first tour operator that you meet and search around.

Our jungle adventure began the next day as we jumped on a boat to see the meeting of the waters, a really strange phenomenon where the rio negro (black) and rio solimoes (brown) meet to form the rio amazonas, but don´t mix, running alongside each other for 11 km. It was amazing to see, very strange, but apparently due to different temperatures, densities and acidities of the two rivers. The boat then took 3 hours upriver to get to Acajatuba Lodge where we were staying for the first two nights, but time passed quickly as we chatted to Ben, Daniel, Iris, Martin and Jonny who were also on our tour. We passed some spectacular scenery and the river is unimaginably wide with some parts where you can´t even see the other bank and feel like you´re out at sea!

We arrived at the lodge and ate lunch, before jumping in a boat with the others and our tour guide Fabiana, to go piranha fishing! Daniel was the only one to catch anything, and Martin (over 70 and a complete legend!) was fearless enough to go swimming right where we were fishing the whole time! On the way we saw some small monkeys in trees, but they were too far away to photograph :-( . We returned for dinner, incidently the same as lunch, and heard from some of the other guests that the cuisine had made absolutely everyone get diarrhoea and was the same everyday, so not to expect too much! Lets just say that talking about your daily bowel movements with complete strangers is a norm amongst backpackers, and most people will give daily reports! That evening we went alligator spotting in an amazing part of the jungle, where the water was very shallow, we were surrounded by very tall trees and the sound of the rainforest was literally deafening. Every so often something would fly past you or jump in the water, which in the pitch black can be pretty frightening! The guides jumped out of the boat and left us for about and hour, before returning with two alligators, one 9 months old and the other 1 year. They released one and in doing so dropped the other one INTO the boat, and whilst everyone else just picked up their feet, Ben and Jonny started jumping about, with Jonny nearly capsizing the whole thing! That night we slept in the lodge, which itself is very basic, no electricity/generators, only candlelight once the sun has gone down, and of course toilets that flush directly into the river(!).

After breakfast the next morning (allegedly as many exotic fruits as you can eat, in reality banana´s and bread) we went on a four hour jungle trek, again led by Fabiana. We saw rubber and latex trees, the hugest ants you have ever seen in your life, swung off the vines of the Tarzan style trees and were educated about many of the exotic plants used as medicine for a number of ailments, including a very nasty tasting plant for malaria! Again, we didn´t see any of the animals (sloths, monkeys, macaaws etc) that Armstrong had promised us (noticing a pattern, anyone?). It was soooooo humid in the jungle and we were all hot, sweaty and hungy, so as you can imagine it was not the best time for the rudder on the motor of the boat to FALL OFF! We had to wait for another boat to come and swap motors with us in the middle of the open water, which would have been fine, had it not run out of oil about ten minutes further upstream! The guides had to siphon off the oil from the old motor and we thought we were home and dry again, until all of that oil ran out too! We ended up canoeing back to the lodge for about 2 hours, needless to say no one was particulary up for the canoeiing activity that was planned for that afternoon! In the end four of us canoed out to see the sunset, which was nice but obscured a bit by the clouds. That evening dinner was the same yet again and the night was spent listening to one of the guides play guitar, drinking caipirinhas and Rakhee even went alligator spotting a second time.

]The next morning we were up and out on a boat at 5am to watch the sunrise, beautiful but again obscured by quite a lot of cloud. We returned to the lodge for breakfast and then went off to see an índigenous tribe´on one of the river banks. It was pretty rubbish because it was all for the tourists, they all wore western clothes, had electricity and there was nothing to see in the village. The kids were pretty cute however and we ended up just playing with them and waiting for the boat to return so we could eat lunch! After much waiting, we (us, Ben, Fabiana and an Italian called Emiliano) left on a canoe for a night camping in the jungle! This was the best night of the whole jungle experience! Fabiana was a one-man-band with his machete and literally constructed the whole camp out of the trees, leaves, sticks and branches in about 1 hour!  We made a frame to hang the tarpolin, strung up our hammocks, built a fire and Fabiana made a table, dishes and spoons out of leaves and some small branches.  We sat around the fire and roasted a chicken, cooked some rice, cassava and eggs, and it was literally the best meal of the whole jungle!  Whilst setting up we saw a tarantula which was pretty cool and actually quite big, so not sure how we managed to sleep.  Marisha slept like a baby, but Rakhee had the worst night ever!  Her hammock was at the edge of the camp strung between two thick branches (not trees) and kept slipping during the night.  It rained in the middle of the night and since she was not quite under the tarpolin, she got a bit wet!  She also saw something go flying through the camp, heard a baboon and felt something walk through our camp too.  The rain attracted a ton of mosquitos and to top it all off it was freezing cold!  Rakhee didn´t sleep a wink and was a zombie for the rest of the day.

In the morning we made breakfast, thank god for taking our own teabags as a cuppa in the morning makes everything in the jungle that little bit better!   We packed up camp and headed back out to the river to catch a boat back to the lodge for lunch.  After another day of just waiting around, we got in a boat with another guide, Marcus, to join Olivier and Benjamin (two french guys) and Isabelle (german londoner) for a night sleeping with the índigenous tribe´.  We arrived, spent yet more time waiting around, watched a rather poor ´tribal dance´ before finally getting to cook some dinner.  As we approached the table we realised there was a distinct lack of food, which meant that we all had only a bit of rice, a tiny piece of chicken, and for rakhee a tomato, some pumpkin and an egg.  Turns out our supplies were feeding the whole damn village, but more to the point they drank ALL our water, so that there was none left, and Marcus tried to pass this off as having been used up to cook the rice (somehow it is difficult to believe that 10L of water are needed to cook one small pot of rice!).  We were angry and starving and ended up paying R$15 for some small bottles of out of date mineral water, since according to Marcus the only other option was to drink the river water.  Despite this, we were all so accustomed to things going wrong that we just laughed and actually had quite a fun night sleeping in their ´house of the sun´, chatting and entertaining ourselves with the kids.  Rakhee had yet another bad night as her hammock fell right before we were about to sleep, and after re-hanging wasn´t all that much more comfortable than the night before.  Marisha didn´t have such a good night either, as the hammocks were strung so close together that Isabelle kicked her in the face in the middle of the night, whilst trying to get out to go to the loo!

The next day there was no food left for breakfast so we were tired, hungry and fed up.  We left the others to go off to another lodge and swim with pink dolphins, which was AMAZING and made all the waiting around that naturally preceeded this worth it!  They are such beautiful and friendly creatures and swimming with them is definitely an experience that we would recommend.  In case you´re wondering, it´s just the males that are pink and it is most likely to be a form of attracting females for mating. 

That evening after another long boat ride, we arrived back in Manaus and met up with Isabelle, Olivier and Benjamin and went to a MASSIVE, EXPENSIVE, ALL-YOU-CAN-EAT BUFFET, which as you can imagine, was much needed post jungle starvation!  In addition, we have never been so grateful for a SHOWER, having not showered in five days (yuck we know) and a bed that is not swinging from the trees!  The following day we had a ´guided tour of Manaus´, still part of our jungle package, but we could have done a better job ourselves with the lonely planet guide book!  Later that afternoon we did just that and saw some beautiful colonial buildings, before meeting up with Armstrong in a bar and making a HUGE complaint about everything that went wrong in the jungle.  He was actually quite understanding and seemed genuinely a bit5 shocked about some of the things that had happened, but mostly since we also had an airport transfer with him the next day (he was on the same flight to Rio as us), he knew he couldn´t escape us, and we ended up getting a small amount of our tour fee back that evening. 

With all the dramas of the week before, we spent our last night in Manaus chilling out with people from the hostel, ordered pizza and watched a somewhat disturbing movie (Human trafficking) before heading off to bed.  The next morning we got up and headed off to the airport with Armstrong to catch our flight to Rio....