Getting Around The Amazon
Most people who visit Brazil will, at some time or other, have dreamt about taking a boat up the Amazon . This is not hard to do, though it's not as comfortable or easy going as daydreams might have made it seem. Given the food on some boats, the trip can be tough on the stomach, and you'll need meditative patience to appreciate the subtle changes in the forest scene on the often-distant riverbanks. But with a bar on the top decks of most boats, most passengers, whether Zen adepts or not, make a great time of it. The classic journey is the five or six days from Belem , a friendly coastal city worth visiting in its own right, to Manaus in the heart of the jungle; and perhaps on from there on a wooden riverboat to Iquitos in Peru via Tabatinga on the Brazilian frontier. But sticking only to the main channel of the Amazon is not the way to see the jungle or its wildlife: for that you'll want to take trips on smaller boats up smaller streams, an option which is particularly rewarding in the west where the rivers aren't quite so wide. Thirty years ago river travel was virtually the only means of getting around the region, but in the 1960s the Transamazonica - Highway BR-230 - was constructed, cutting right across the south of Amazonia and linking the Atlantic coast (via the Belem-Brasilia highway) with the Peruvian border at Brazil's western extremity. It remains an extraordinary piece of engineering, but is now increasingly bedraggled. Lack of money to pay for the stupendous amount of maintenance the network needed has now made much of it impassable. West of Altamira it has practically ceased to exist, apart from the Porto Velho-Rio Branco run and odd stretches where local communities find the road useful and maintain it. The same fate has met other highways like the Santarem-Cuiaba and the Porto Velho-Manaus, on which great hopes were once pinned. With the exception of the Belem-Brasilia, Cuiaba-Rio Branco and brand-new Manaus-Boa Vista highway corridors, transport in the Amazon has sensibly reverted to rivers. Access to what remains of the Transamazonica from Belem or Brasilia is via Estreito, the settlement at the junction where the BR-230 turns west off the old north-south highway, the BR-153/BR-010. One thing to bear in mind while travelling is that there are three time zones in the Amazon region. Belem and eastern Para are on the same time as the rest of the coast, except from October to February when Bahia and the states of the Southeast and the South switch to summer time, leaving Belem an hour behind. At the Rio Xingu, about halfway west across Para, the clocks go back an hour to Manaus time. Tabatinga, Rio Branco and Acre, in the extreme west of the Amazon, are another hour behind again.
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