My first trip to Brazil
“Hey, I’m going to Brazil for Carnaval, do you know anyone who would want to go?” I had asked her what was going on with her, and that was her reply. It was December 1974, and I was picking up a few groceries in the Ideal Market when I ran into this friendly acquaintance, not someone I saw often. But her question piqued my interest, hitting me at a time I was ready for a change though I hadn’t realized it until she suggested the possibility. Without thinking I replied, “Yeah, me!”
Thus began my journey from Boulder, Colorado to South America—and the first day of a future unlike any I had imagined. Our trip began in January with a hitchhike ride on a corporate jet out of Tennessee to Trinidad (she had connections), then to Venezuela, then on to Manaus in the Amazon basin of Brazil. And so it was that we arrived in what I expected to be a jungle that turned out to be a city with colonial architecture on a river so wide you couldn’t see the other side.
Our idea, as twenty-something Americans still wet behind the ears, was to travel down the Amazon by boat to where the river meets the ocean and figure out the rest from there. I was fluent in French and knew some Spanish and a few words I’d scrambled to learn in Portuguese. She was a typically monolingual American. We went to the ENASA boat ticket office, where we discovered there was only first and third class, and first class would blow our entire budget. We asked for third class tickets, please. Then ensued a frenzied exchange involving me gesticulating and trying words in various languages with my friend looking on with a puzzled expression. I finally bought the tickets, over the ticket agents’ non-verbal objections and warnings, and told my friend we had to go buy hammocks and arrive on the dock super early the next morning.
Finding out where to buy redes (hammocks) was an adventure in itself, and we managed to bargain our way to a reasonable price and found ourselves on the Amazon boat dock in the first light of morning with no one else around. Doubt and dread consumed us, given we had followed advice and arrived early, but as the hour of departure drew close the area quickly teemed with people waiting in line to board. The gate opened and chaos ensued, with third class passengers vying for the best places to hang their hammocks on the lower deck. We pushed and shoved and laughed as people claimed their places and observing them, we found hooks and hung the hammocks that would be our sleeping accommodations for the next three nights. Three hundred people on one deck.