Boat to Santarem, Day 10

A new day, a new experience/challenge. I was sad to leave Manaus and Antonio, who we saw again today. Stress was added when we were hauled round Manaus buying hammocks, fruit and water at maximum prices to rush to the boat. We ended up getting there only two hours before it left, and four or five is recommended. This meant no real hammock space. For the first ten/twenty minutes I wasn't fully enamoured by the thought of spending two nights here.However, in Brazil you are never alone or stressed for long. We were obvious enough desperate cases to be helped. Firstly we managed to get our hammocks up, cramped and virtually on the ceiling, and annoying the neighbours. Then we set about sorting Rob's bag, on which a zip had broken. All this while an old gent (Renato I think) was watching, and now he started helping us. We didn't manage to fit the zip properly but we felt like we had a friend, again the sense of isolation was allayed.

We moved on to the top deck to get some fresh ait and have a look around. Quickly realised that pretty terrible loud music would be a constant fixture. Almost immediately a fourty or so year old man called 'Adawry' started talking to us. A few hours later we'd shared a load of beer, I'd given my Villa shirt to his son, he'd given me his Flamengo shirt in return, we'd been introduced to his family, learnt as much Portuguese as he could teach us and settled down to spend the early evening with his newly converted Villa son. Managed to see the mixing/meeting of the waters as well. And another rich sunset.

After a bried soupish dinner we carried on knocking back beers. Now we're friends with a different big group of Spanish, Argentine and French students/travellers who are all scratching together their English whilst we embarrassingly fail to speak any foreign language. The worst thing is they all say they need to speak English, really in Brazil they shouldn't. Adawry's son Luca and even his seven year old daughter were both learning, whats wrong with us?

But for now we're bevying on a boat thats cruising through the Amazon with a benign wind cooling everyone. Been given loads of tips for different places by 'Cecilia', one of the Spanish girls. I think I'm starting to get the hang of this more; sure travelling is fluid and malleable - we have virtually no idea what we're doing for the next four or so weeks, but its the friendships and memories that are intransient.