Loafing down mighty Amazonas

Hostels are islands in a new world where young travelers discover mostly with some pride their passport nationality - "Where are you from?" .. "Germany" .. "Dann können wir ja Deutsch sprechen .." - and onwards, gather around the breakfast table to share their basically similar travel experiences and facebook pics of 'must-do' hotspots along mainstream adventure tour routes - "oh yes, and we had such a great sunset" ...

Also a lonely wolf can't escape to lift the secret of his whereabout, as it is the entrance ticket to sometimes useful information on a trip without much effort in detailed route planning: "Well, I have an Austrian passport" .. "Dann können wir ja Deutsch sprechen .."

Anyhow, half the way down the Amazonas I politely won't kill conversations around a breakfast table serving hot coffee and fresh tropical fruits but simply focus on getting my fair share of the juicy pinapples, mangos and mellons and pretending some kind of early-morning-mode of listening-only: "Yes, we already did the Amazon .. (introducing me with a few quick finger moves to a boat, its cabins and some selfies in a hammock) .. but after the first day it became a bit boring, you know, all you see is dense green forest, no animals and so, .. and sometimes the boat stops to take some local people on board ..".

 

Objection! Travelling, or more 'precisely': loafing down the mighty Amazonas, is everything but boring - it's about people's daily life bond to the river. The noisy sound of the horn released by the captain initiates a busy ritual of departure and boarding of people, their belongings, livestock and any other imaginable kind of cargo. And 'having conversations' during 3 days and nights between and over 'sardine-style' line-up of hammocks - notably with very few international 'vacational tourists' - offers you authentic stories of people, their particular purpose for this journey, and their communities.

 

More than a week down the Amazonas - interestingly several times changing the name due to the numerous feeding rivers - created a strange expectation: the endless rainforest passing in slow-motion (whereas it's me, or better said the riverboat that's moving), while steadily approaching the day of arrival in the 'capital of the jungle', Manaus.

As mentioned at the beginning, I did not spend much time on a detailed travel plan: Lisbon - São Paulo, the idea of a clockwise round-trip through South America, and as one kind of highlight loafing down the Amazonas - if possible, to experience the Carneval in Manaus.

And here I am .. finding myself in a sudden erruption of thousands of people from the Amazonas in colorful costumes dancing through all the night to the rhythms of samba ..