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The festival ended
and the real challenge began - getting out of Parantins while ten thousand other
people tried to do the same. Without roads or planes (all flights well booked),
riverboats remained as the only transport option. The boats crammed the docks,
an armada of belching engines, peeling paint, and sweating hulls - at least one
hundred triple decker monstrosities formed the bulk of a ragtag fleet along with
smaller wooden heaps and dugout canoes that swarmed around bigger boats like Amazon
dragonflies. We picked out our boat among the crowd because it was the first one
that we saw heading our way: downstream (most boats were returning upstream to
Manaus, the nearest major town). Like fans rushing to beat the parking lot carnage
after a stadium event, our boat left at 4 AM, immediately after the night's festivities
ended. Revelers walked from the festival to the boat, strung up their hammocks,
and collapsed as the boat pulled away. | |||
Hammock
etiquette: one rule - so long as you're not completely in someone else's lap,
you can string your hammock as closely as possible to another person | |||
| |||
Ten hours after leaving
Parantins, we drifted into another Amazonian town called Santarem. We'll have
to catch another boat to continue downstream, unfortunately, the next one out
of town leaves in two days. Until then we can sleep in our hammocks on our old
boat for free. Like many towns along the Amazon, Santarem owes the reason for
its existence to the rule: wherever a tributary flows into the Amazon, a town
seems to spring up at the confluence of the two waters. Santarem is a bigger town
than Parantins - it has a nice waterfront walk lined by a covered market of bananas,
brazil nuts, peppers, mangoes, soybeans, and fish. | |||