The night before I left Sao Gabriel, for the two day return journey down the Rio Negro to Manaus, I worked on my laptop on the roof of the hotel, the only place where I could get an internet connection.
I returned to the house down the road, where the owner grills skewers of meat over embers- something typical of the Amazon. That day, there had been a delivery of fish.
It went well with a sauce, especially brought over from the other side of the river, which had large ant heads in it. When you crunched on them, they tasted of lemongrass.
On the morning of departure, there was a bus to get to the dock below the rapids, which picked up Amerindian families from points in town and on farmsteads along the way.
Everyone looked out when we arrived at the dock.
As we waited for the owner to arrive and for us to depart, there was a man fishing from a canoe.
And a father and daughter on a motorised boat.
This passenger was drunk at 9 am, and after harassing passengers, put his hammock up which duly collapsed with him inside it, to the amusement of all. Eventually he went to sleep and we all had a couple of hours' break from drunken slurs.
We passed Amerindian houses on the banks of the river. Here was a father and children.
My next door neighbours included two children.
A teenager.
And his feet.
Towards the end of the first day, we passed the inselbergs which I had spotted on the way up, at that time amongst clouds in a watercolour scene. Local people hold these outcrops as mythological.
Apparently this one has never been climbed. One can see why.
Heading back to the village.
Sunset.
Boy in hammock.
Barge carrying sand.
Friendly passengers, both evangelists. He had worked in the construction industry all over Brazil, as well as in Iraq, Italy and Angola, before retiring in Barcelos on the Rio Negro. She was from the northeast of Brazil and was a saleswoman of herbal remedies, plying her trade up and down the Amazon.
Brazil losing to France in a friendly match.
Village doctor and refigeration technician, both working along the Rio Negro.
Off the boat and back in Manaus. Brazil nuts for sale at the side of the road.
