email, I had a boat to find. Turns out the fire station was a little
far, but the walk was great. It took me outside the mayhem a bit,
down a slightly shaded boulevard and a curved market street. I
bought a heavy tapioca pancake flavored with coconut and wrapped in
big leaves, which I picked at as I walked and ate more of than I
meant to.
The streets got quieter and it looked like I might be on a dead end
when I saw the fire station. Across the street I could see an
offshoot of the Amazon, some broken down looking boats tied up--some
grounded--and a few guys sitting in the shade near a propane
station. "Have you seen a boat with foreigners?" I asked. They
hadn't. I walked back to the road and continued down to its end
where more boats sat in the mud and a small bar was set up on the
street. No boat here either. And there wasn't really any good way
to follow the river, I had to just backtrack to the next cross
street, go up a block, and walk down to the next dead end. After a
couple iterations of this in the hot sun, I decided to check one more
street and then go home. At the end of this next street floated the
boat I was looking for.
There were about 12 folks on the boat; kids (three Germans a dutch
and a Swede) from the hostel in Manaus and family and friends of the
Brazlians who owned the boat. We ate grilled fish, jumped off the
boat into the water, and then drank caipirinhas (sugar+lime+cachassa)
and danced around on the deck for the next five or six hours,
surrounded by muddy water, river boats, trees, and houses on
stilts. At one point it started pouring rain even though 3/4 of the
sky was clear blue. That was wonderful.
One of the Germans was really good at flips and dramatic dives. The
other German was really good at doing this funny Brazilian dude dance
(half dance half stance, actually) in a speedo while water poured
down from an outdoor shower on the deck. The Germans were both about
20 and had spent the past 10 months in Rio fulfilling a civil service
requirement, so they'd developed Brazilian extensions to their
personalities, which was fun to see. There was a young Brazilian guy
Lucivan (sp?) who was just a total treasure, trying to talk to
everybody in whatever language they spoke, none of which he knew.
Everybody was just being silly.
We slept in hammocks through the evening, until about midnight, and
then hit the same techno party as the night before. That night the
music was a lot better, and I ended up staying out until 8. During
the day we'd made a plan to go swimming out by the river, so I was
psychologically prepared and surprisingly un-hungover when somebody
woke me up an hour later.
