Amazon - Day 2

We were awoken by the 3 million parrots that live in the trees directly outside of our room at a ridiculously early time, but with the excitement of our first morning in the Amazon we didn’t mind. This was the extra day that we added so we didn’t have anything planned so after breakfast we set off looking for something to do. We visited a couple of travel agencies to see if there were any trips we could do but everything was full up. We popped in to a craft shop to have a look and found out it also doubled as a travel agency, again there was nothing available for today but the man we spoke to was very nice, he said we don’t need an organised tour and suggested we get a cab down to La Feira which is the port of Tabatinga, From there we can get a boat to Benjamin Constant where he recommended a visit to the Indigenous museum, a ride on a motor taxi and a visit to the Cabannas restaurant. We took his advice and did just that!

The taxi ride to Tabatinga only takes 5 minutes and is along one road, Tabatinga is actually on the edge of Leticia and as we later found out is actually in Brazil, that explains why they were speaking Portuguese and wanted payment in Reals!

We waited for the fast boat and that only took about 30 minutes to get to Benjamin Constant. Once there we had a look around the local market and asked where the museum was, it was only a 10 minute walk so we headed off on foot. The museum was somewhat of a disappointment, it was basically a house with 4 rooms filled with indigenous things. We walked around the “museum” as slowly as possible followed the guide/curator/owner who did his best to describe everything to us in his best Portuguese but Marcela couldn’t even tell if he was speaking an indigenous language or Portuguese! Just to add to the surreal experience he insisted on taking all the exhibits out / off of the displays and demonstrating then to us, probably not the best way to preserve your people’s history! Although saying that a lot of the exhibits looked very similar to those available in the gift shop!

Next up was lunch, we got a couple of “motor taxis” to the restaurant which we’d now found out wasn’t our friend in the shop’s strange turn of phrase but what they called motorbike taxis, this is the only was to get around Benjamin Constant and you even see people perched on the back of these with their weekly shopping. It was a 10 minute ride to the restaurant and on arrival we were extremely pleased not to have dismissed our friend’s second piece of advice. The restaurant is set next to a lake where you can fish for your own lunch. We took the easier option of drinking beer and having someone else catch our lunch for us. The food was a buffet type affair and not great, but that really didn’t matter.

We headed back to the port and caught a boat back to Tabatinga. Dinner and a few Ronnies (Rum and Coke’s) later and we were asleep.