Llama for Lunch (25 page)
The Meeting of the Waters was just as advertised, yellow on one side and black on the other, with no mixture of the two. It took an hour to get there on the
Claudia
, a canoe with an awning and an outboard. We passed much shipping on the way, including big tankers, container ships and small ferries. After the Meeting of the Waters, the
Claudia
took me on to an island national park where I cuddled an anaconda – and I have a photo to prove it. But the anaconda owner wouldn’t let me hold its head. I also came across a three-toed sloth whose baby clutched Mama endearingly. I even cuddled an alligator with a taped-mouth – the alligator’s not mine – and saw some wonderful bright macaws and more sloths. True to name, they hung about in attitudes of complete idleness, even munching their leaves slowly. Among all this lot toddled a fat, naked Indian baby chortling over his plastic rattle.
The boat detoured into a small tributary that was completely covered by a green umbrella of giant trees and vines. I glided in the
Claudia
along waterways that flowed through flooded trees in a cool green light, while over us floated the scent from the flowers of a tree whose yellow blossoms hung in bunches like wisteria and smelt like a subtle mixture of jasmine and honeysuckle. Yellow and black birds flitted among the white flowers of the water hyacinth.
Viewed from the river by daylight Manaus was huge and ugly. Wooden shanties and industrial horrors spread along the waterside for kilometres. The boat pulled up for petrol at a gas station floating on a steel platform. Nearby eight tugs were tied to another dock that was made from several anchored steel barges. Walking back to town I felt the floating dock moving under my feet as the traffic passed along it. Manaus was dead this Sunday afternoon. Nothing was open except one cafe, where I had a pizza for lunch.
Next morning my hotel provided breakfast on a teeny table in a room off the foyer. There were great crispy rolls but the coffee was that frightful heavily sugared muck. I said I couldn’t drink it, so the cheerful desk person obligingly brought me a cup from the competition two doors away, the hotel I’d left in a huff the day before.
Moving camp again, I walked to the new hotel with only one bag in case I’d got it wrong and they were selling the apartments, or something had been lost in my translation of their sign. This time the manager, who spoke English, was there. He told me that because the hotel was still being finished they were offering cheap accommodation to cover a few expenses. There was no TV or phone. This suited me. I couldn’t understand the TV and I had no one to phone locally. The hotel was so new it didn’t even have a name. The next day I decided that it had been named. Something new had been painted on the front wall. But this turned out to be a sign saying that some rooms also came complete with a kitchen.
It was great to stay in a room that no one else had used. The doors hadn’t had a second coat of paint yet and the electric plugs were not finished, but I had a good air-conditioner, a new bed and new sheets, towels and mattress. A glass door on one side led to a dear little balcony and big windows made the room light and bright, unlike some of the dungeons I’d been incarcerated in lately – and this room was even cheaper than they were. But although it was a big room with plenty of space, the skimpy bathroom was silly – it had no shower alcove or curtain and water splashed over everything, especially the loo, whose seat was always wet. High up in one wall there was an oblong window and, to my delight, I saw framed in it the gloriously pretty dome of the opera house, the spire of the ancient church next to it and the flashing red light on the radio tower. And through the other open windows I could hear the church clock striking.
The hotel was in President Varga Street. President Varga was a strongman who took over Brazil by a military coup in 1930. He was deposed in 1945 but got legally elected in 1951. After a long series of fights with the military, who opposed him, he shot himself and became a national hero.
The following day I thought it would be easy to take a bus back to my hotel from the market. I had seen them whizzing up the road past it and, thinking why not, jumped on one labelled Centro. I did not realise that these buses didn’t stop unless you rang the bell. I couldn’t see a bell anyway. It was way up on the ceiling. The bus rocketed past my stop and, by the time I knew it, I was kilometres away.
Ah well, I thought, it’s a central bus. It will go around the block and come back to this spot again. I sat there waiting for this to happen. I went all over the town, and out into the country. For seventy cents I had a sixty-dollar tour of Manaus. But I doubt that a tour would have provided the excitement of a local bus-driver’s antics. These certifiable lunatics scream around corners and roar up tiny lanes, bumping, swaying and flinging passengers off their seats.
Finally, after an interminable time, the bus came to a screeching halt at the terminus, where I laughingly told the conductor and driver that I was lost. Producing my map, I showed them where I wanted to go and they said the bus would return there in ten minutes. Bloody mad tourist, they were thinking, no doubt. I hate to disappoint people so I usually oblige with a superlative mad-tourist performance. When I climbed back on the bus I tried to pay again, but they would have none of that. In the end I rode this beastly bus for an hour and a half. They could have charged me rent.
In town again at last, the driver stopped the bus and, while the other passengers patiently waited, read my map and indicated that I should get off here and walk through to the next street. By this time my bladder was up to my eyebrows and I was heat stressed. I reached my room and collapsed on the bed.
In the evening I actually found a restaurant that my guide book had featured. A ruddy miracle – I didn’t usually find anything that the authors had written about. They would write that something was ‘near’ something else and leave you wondering where the something else was, or that it was ‘close to’ a square that was a hundred kilometres around. I was disgusted with them and vowed to sue them when I got back. What was truly infuriating was that they would give you the name of the best restaurant in the whole region and then make no mention of its whereabouts. What am I – psychic? They expected me, a new arrival in town, to find a place without directions. Sometimes they would say it was ‘around the corner’ from some other place. I would go far from this other place, getting madder and madder. Why not say it’s in a certain street? I’d be better off without these suggestions, thank you. Boo, hiss, guide book.
But I did find this fantastic restaurant that served wonderful meat. Although the meal was a set price for as much as you could eat, you didn’t help yourself – waiters ran around with the meat on hot trays, or trolleys, or skewered on hot pokers, and they chopped off bits for you. I counted fifteen staff. There was every kind and cut of meat imaginable – roast, barbecued, fried or grilled steak, beef, lamb, liver, kidneys, chicken. As well as this, ten dishes of rice and other goodies were put on your table and all kinds of salads were offered to you on trays. A nice waiter, who tried to teach me some Portuguese, was assigned to me. Just when I was getting used to the peculiarities of Spanish, now I had Portuguese to contend with. They don’t say ‘h’ but ‘r’ so Rio is Hio and ‘d’ is pronounced ‘j’.
In the shopping area near the river I found some incredible bargains, but walking about in the sweltering humidity was debilitating. Trying to return to the hotel by taking a short cut, yet again I got utterly lost. I ended up far from the city centre in a shanty town down by the river where there were no footpaths, just dirt and grass among shacks made from planks of wood sticking out of the mud on sticks. I thought they appeared to be about to fall down. Deciding that I didn’t like the look of this place, I hot-footed it out and walked more kilometres round in circles until I was back where I had started. This exertion was not advisable in the middle of a baking day and I returned to my hotel in a state of yuk. But a cold shower and the air-conditioner soon restored me.
The next day I took a short cut again and actually passed one place for the third time before I realised that I was going around in circles like you do when lost in the bush. The locals must have been wondering about me. Goodness, there she goes again, that woman with the pink umbrella – and again, and again. I’ll have to change my umbrella and get a disguise. Then I thought it seemed a good idea to take the bus back from the market now that I knew how to ring the bell. All went well until we came to the first major corner. Instead of going straight up the road to my hotel, the bus driver whizzed around the corner and zoomed off in the opposite direction. I said to the young conductress, ‘Will it come round again?’ ‘Oh yes,’ she said. Okay, I’d take a ride. I sure did. The bus did come around again – about an hour later.
A girl student sat next to me and she and the conductress tried to talk to me. They asked if I was an Americana. I said, ‘No. Australiana.’ They found this entertaining and seemed to think it was a great deal more interesting.
On my protracted ride, I had plenty of time to ponder why I like short cuts and why I persist in trying to use buses. I think it’s because I get such a kick out of it when I do get one right. Or is it because when you have enough time on your hands, getting lost really doesn’t matter? You meet a lot of people and see different places.
But this day’s odyssey went on a little too long. I went round and round the town and outskirts even further than I had before. I went out into the country where there were goats and shacks on hillsides. I went everywhere. And just when I thought I was never going to get off this bus, it pulled into its terminal, a shanty out in the boonies.
The young conductress spoke to an inspector-type man who looked grim. I grasped enough of the conversation to understand what she told him: ‘No, no, no. Not American. Australian.’ I don’t think he liked Americans. He wasn’t all that keen on me either. He probably thought I was stupid, whatever I was. But this was fair enough – sometimes I am.
The pair of them shooed me off the bus and said, ‘Wait five minutes.’ The girl then took me by the arm and put me on another bus, handing me over like a parcel to an older lady conductress. Brazilian buses have a little turnstile at the rear end where you get on and when you have paid you are permitted to pass through it to a seat. You get off at the front. When I tried to pay and go through the turnstile the conductress wouldn’t let me. She signalled for me to sit behind the turnstile where there were a couple of seats. The driver possessed the obligatory lead foot and back there I had nothing to hold on to. He shot around the first corner on two wheels and my umbrella went flying – and I nearly did too. Then he screeched to a halt in a cloud of dust and the conductress indicated that I should get off. Standing in the middle of a dirt road in the back of nowhere I thought, Charming, now I have been abandoned here for the vultures. Then I realised that the driver was tooting and waving at me to get back on the bus through the front door. I did so and then the penny dropped. They had done this so that I wouldn’t have to pay and they hadn’t wanted the inspector to witness it. It was very sweet of them. I sat on this next bus for what seemed forever, but it eventually returned to the main street and dropped me right outside my hotel. Fantastic. Four hours for a quick visit to the shops.
That night at a nearby cafe I had a delicious whole baked fish in scrumptious sauce and on the way back to the hotel I walked past the icecream parlour. Well, not quite all the way past. I had to go inside to inspect it. What a pig’s paradise. You buy icecream by weight, including trimmings. You choose a glass bowl, a dish made from edible stuff, a cone or a plastic cup and shovel into it as much of any of the dozens of flavoured icecream as you like – and then you add hundreds and thousands, chocolate sprinkles, flavoured topping, cream, wafer biscuits and jubes. Wonderful. I had a colossal pile of this stuff and it cost just two dollars. I deserved to be sick the next day.
That night I noticed that the dome of the opera house was unlit and the next day, when I finally visited it, I was told that the lights were only on when there was a performance. They would be on tonight as an orchestra was performing there. The opera house, Teatro Amazonas, is stupendous. I hadn’t realised until I stood gaping before it just how huge it was. Set high up off the street and approached by wide sweeping steps, it was completely surrounded by an imposing stone wall. Nothing like I had imagined it would be, it was still fabulous. The building was Greco-Roman in style, coloured dusky-pink and white, and crowned by a large dome that was entirely covered in a bright, many-hued mosaic.
If the exterior of the building was marvellous, its interior almost defied description. But I was not let loose in all this splendour alone. I had to be chaperoned by a young lady guide. White Carrara marble plinths and great beige-coloured Corinthian columns reached all the way to the ceiling. And that was just the entry hall, where I counted the lights in the three colossal metal chandeliers – forty in each and every one covered by a little glass shade. I entered the theatre by a flight of red-carpeted stairs and found seven hundred red-velvet upholstered chairs that flowed down a gradual slope to the stage and four tiers of ornate boxes with red-velvet and gilded metal fronts. The boxes got plusher the higher they went until the governor’s box, the last gasp in plush, was reached. This exquisite theatre, completed in 1910, was built for the private use of the one hundred local rubber barons – or did she say robber barons? – and their friends. This little lot, as you can imagine, were unbelievably wealthy. They imported mega stars like Jenny Lind to sing and the Ballet Russe to dance.
