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Heading south down the Rio Tapajos, between twelve and fourteen hours from Santarem depending on the time of year (the current is much stronger in the rainy season), you come to another face of the Amazon, the gold-rush town of ITAITUBA . The boat journey here is one of the main reasons for going - the broad mouth of the Tapajos, over 30km wide where it joins the Amazon just west of Santarem, soon narrows enough so you can appreciate the forest on either side. There is usually plenty of wildlife to be seen, including anteaters swimming across the river, dolphins and parrots galore. Gold prospecting and mining began in the headwaters of the Tapajos in the 1950s with a few skilled prospectors from former British Guyana. Itaituba remained no more than a tiny village, living more from trade in rubber and animal pelts than gold until the early 1970s when the Transamazon highway arrived and changed everything. The highway itself was only open for a few years; it was too expensive to maintain and was soon reclaimed by forest. Nevertheless, it was long enough to channel a new wave of migrants into the area, and when the price of gold started to rise after 1974 there was capital and labour available to start exploiting the mines in a big way. The city mushroomed, and its current population of 53,000 makes it by far the biggest town on the Tapajos, even in its current depressed state (the gold has been giving out and the price has fallen since the boom years of the mid-1980s). Many mine owners are forming partnerships with big Brazilian mining companies now that the easily available gold has been mined, and Itaituba will continue to be a mining town for the foreseeable future, albeit with fewer miners and nothing like as wild a nightlife as it used to have. The town seems unprepossessing at first, all of its buildings modern and most of them ugly, but there is a certain energy and frontier feel about the place. You'll soon start to see the gold-buying shops in the commercial area, dominating everything with their signs " Compra-se Oura " (we buy gold). Go inside and you can watch miners bringing in gold dust and fragments which are then burned (don't get too close, the smoke is mercury vapour), weighed and purchased with bundles of notes. Miners, despite their fearsome reputation, are quite friendly if you're polite, and are usually proud to show off their gold. Things are quieter now than they used to be but Itaituba is still the trading centre of the largest gold field in the Brazilian Amazon, supplying scores of mines ( garimpos) scattered in the forest to the south of town and usually only accessible by air.
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