Manaus is another rubber-boom town, much the same as Belem, but it is the state capital of Amazonas; the largest state in Brazil. Bordering Venezuela, Columbia and Peru, Amazonas holds within it a large majority of the Amazon basin, and the river Amazon itself. Named by the Spanish adventurer/conquistador Francisco de Orellana in 1541 after the Amazons of Greek mythology due to multiple fights with the indigenous peoples (the women fought fiercely alongside the men) who attacked his first foray down the river. At least that is the official version. Apparently an indigenous word amasunu, means “sound of water rumbling”, so who really knows the etymology?
Manaus’ boom was over at the same time as Belem’s; after the British smuggled native rubber tree seeds out of Brazil and began their own plantations in Asia as competition. The last time the Manaus area saw any financial action from rubber was in WWII when the US paid the Brazilian government $US100 for every person that migrated to the region to rubber tap and aid the war effort. Nowadays it is industrialization that rakes in the money for this region. Industry brings with it corruption, pollution and land clearance. All unfortunate side effects of the Western population of this region, but much better than the alternative had the Brits NOT interceded. Forest clearance was at its peak during the rubber tapping era, and it was only because the local rubber monopoly was destroyed that the forest is still as pristine as it is today – not that that helped the rainforests of Malaysia, etc., though.
It wasn’t just the trees that the end of the rubber boom was good for either. Whilst some people grew rich and fat off of the rubber, many more people’s lives were destroyed in the first rubber boom from 1879-1912 and the WWII boom (1942 – 1945). The Brazilian government made promises to many people, particularly in the North East states of Brazil. Dreams of riches and cities paved with gold were sold to anyone desperate or foolish enough to buy them. Upon arrival, however, many of these people were enslaved, or at least enforced by the rubber barons and their hired thugs, to go into the jungles, often in the dark, and find the rubber trees to tap them of the latex. Thousands upon thousands of people disappeared never to be seen again. Many more returned and got sick and died, mostly from yellow fever and malaria.
Indians fared even worse. In some regions the enslaved Indians were up to 90% wiped out. Entire families, villages and tribes were forced to tap rubber and succumbed to brutality, disease or were killed in the jungle by scorpions, snakes, pumas and jaguars. This was occurring many years after slavery was abolished in 1888.
Nowadays it is not rubber barons who are the bad guy. Now, cattle ranchers, loggers and smugglers play the role to perfection. Native Indians, particularly ones who are un-contacted, are routinely attacked and killed by these thugs. In January 2012 an 8-year old girl from the Awá tribe was burnt to death by loggers as a warning to other natives to move off of their own land. The iron ore and timber are more valuable to these evil men than human life. However, rumors and hearsay abound in the jungle, and it I anyone’s guess what is actually going on. In 2007, FUNAI, the Brazilian government department entrusted with indigenous people’s rights, said that there was a confirmed 67 tribes who were un-contacted in the jungle of Brazil, but no-one knows for sure how many there are. My favorite is The Man In The Hole.
The Man In The Hole is the sole-surviving member of his tribe. He lives in the region of Tanarú in the state of Rondônia and has survived by avoiding all contact with white people. His tribe was brutally murdered by loggers who had moved onto the land illegally. FUNAI was powerless to save them.
Any attempt at contact with this guy is futile as he is now terrified of the white man. He fires yard-long arrows at anthropologists seeking contact with him. He was attacked again in 2009 by gunmen (believed to be the loggers), but he survived. He is called The Man In The Hole because he digs big pits to trap animals and also to hide in. I agree with Survival International who say that the disease spread and violence perpetrated in these regions is tantamount to genocide – visit their website to find out how to help out. See The Man In The Hole on youtube.
Even today, the government outwardly express genuine concern for indigenous tribes whilst trampling all over their legal and human rights in the name of progress.
Ironically, it is the indigenous people’s knowledge of the forest that has helped us understand how to fully utilize it. This knowledge has led to advancements in modern medicine, understanding history and developing ecology. The rubber boom itself was exacerbated by the discovery of vulcanization by Charles Goodyear (the tire company was named after him); but it now comes to light that native American Indians had developed this process millennia before! The Olmec Indians were named by the Aztecs. Olmec means ‘rubber people’.
FUNAI do not print the locations or maps of the indigenous peoples for good reason, and vast spaces within the region have never been visited by anyone in any recorded history. It was calculated by the WWF that a new species was discovered every three days in the Amazon basin between 1999 and 2009, so it is vital that this fragile ecosystem is not disturbed and that the Brazilian government do much more to protect the region than they have been doing.
In the meantime, the spread of industry and commerce shows no signs of slowing down. After getting back from the jungle, it was slightly disorienting to see the huge cargo ships docking in Manaus, so far from the sea. We had not seen anything more technical than the lodge in 4 days, so seeing the vast container ships being docked by tug boats 1000km from the sea was amazing!
It took us a day or so to rest up and recover in Manaus. On 11th May, we had got it together it enough to go and visit the Palacete Provincial, which is a large colonial-style building that used to house the states presidents. Nowadays, it is a collection of permanent and temporary museums that are hugely varied.
The first museum we visited was the communication museum which houses a collection of old and new technologies. We saw old faxes, telephones and various other bits of junk – for Portuguese speakers this might be interesting, but there is nothing in English there.
On the first floor is where most of the good museums are located. The first one we visited was the coin museum. This museum provides an English speaking guide who led us around and explained the history of Brazil through its ever-changing coins. We found out that for a large part of Brazil’s colonial history, commerce was conducted through trade of goods. The first trade made in Brazil on record, was between Pero Vaz de Caminha and an indigenous Indian. Caminha wrote a letter back home to Portugal detailing the trade of his hat and cowl for the Indian’s necklace – thus leading the way for widespread exploitation of the Mesolithic natives.
We even saw Dutch coins at the museum from when they briefly held a small portion of the country. Most of the initial currency of the then young Brazil was printed in England. Gold was also used and minted within Brazil – one fifth of all gold found was sent to the crown in Portugal. Banco do Brasil was established in 1810 and printed their own money. The US were eve drafted in to print Brazil’s money in the 20th Century when Brazil was economically broken. The money looks exactly like the US dollar, with The United States Of Brazil on them. This was an error – Brazil is actually spelt Brasil, with an ‘s’. This is why we now spell Brazil with a ‘z’ in English.
In the next museum, the weapons museum, everything was once again in Portuguese, but we got a good look at some old guns, rifles, muskets and multiple uniforms and bladed weapons.
The last museum was a bit disappointing – it was the main one I wanted to see, but there was not much to it. The archeology museum is just a collection of lots of indigenous artifacts, all broken up, such as vases, pots, etc., that were arranged in the room exactly as they were found. As everything was smashed up, and the volunteer staffer there was too busy playing o her phone to give us any information, this is one museum you can safely miss.
Our hotel, the 10th July Hotel, is slap-bang in the middle of the cultural center of Manaus, so we did not have to go far to get to all of the places we were interested in visiting. The main attraction is Manaus’ answer to Belem’s theatro da paz (theatre of peace). Built between 1894 and 1896, the Teatro Amazonas is an excellent example of the decadence that Manaus found itself wallowing in at the height of the rubber boom. The townsfolk wanted to rival Belem as the new height of civilized modernity. Indeed, Manaus was wired for electricity before many European cities. The end of the rubber boom saw Manaus fall into disrepair, however, and it could not afford the electricity to power the lights for many years afterwards. Being a typical Brazilian city, it looks like it never really recovered – many of the buildings are broken up, with smashed windows and dirty walls.
The theatre was built by Italian architect Celestine Sacardim over a period of 15 years. It was built in the renaissance style, with Portuguese roof tiles, English steel, Italian marble floors and staircase and furnishings from France. The theatre is crowned by a huge dome, painted gold, and inside, there are 198 chandeliers made from Murano glass.
We took an English tour of the theatre (we were the only two people on it), and it was really interesting. It was really cool to see the old style paintings from the colonial period – but with native Americans and South American animals like jaguars!
We found out that it was Opera month in Manaus whilst we were there, so we booked in to see one (my first) – Wagner’s Parsifal.
One of the coolest things we saw was a huge Lego replica of the theatre. It was found in an old Lego factory by the new owners after the building had been abandoned for years, and was just sitting there! It was given to the theatre and is now on display, complete with lights added to the inside.
A few days later we checked out Museu Amazonica, a free museum behind our hotel, which belonged to the local university. This museum was quite small, but it has a nice little collection of local indigenous antiques from pre-colonial times. Burial urns, masks, clay whistles, pipes, and musical instruments where all on display, but my favorite piece was a glove from the Sateré-Mawé tribe. This tribe traditionally has little contact with the white man. When the boys are ready for their coming-of-age ceremony, they are made to wear the gloves for 10 minutes. What makes this so special is the hundreds of bullet ants that are woven into the gloves. A bite from a bullet ant is extremely painful, like being shot, hence the name, so being continually bitten by the ants for 10 minutes is insane. The boys shake uncontrollably for days afterwards due to the venom from the bites. They do this up to 20 times over the next few years…crazy!
The next day, the 14th May, we went to the Bosque da Ciencia, or the science grove. This is essentially a 13 hectare wooded area which contains lots of different species from around the Amazon basin. It was impossible to get a bus there, so we opted for a taxi. The first animal we saw was a giant river otter – almost impossible to see in the wild, so it was nice to see here.
There were half a dozen large water tanks holding manatees here too. The tanks were a bit shitty and disgusting, but it was cool to watch the manatees through the windows of the tanks. The enclosures might be a bit aged, but I think the animals all seemed to be relatively OK with enough food, space and company.
We saw lots of agouti everywhere, which are large rodents, about twice the size of rats. They are pretty cute and extremely docile.
In the start of the park is a building with a lot of taxidermy. They had owls, snakes, huge leaves from the amazon jungle, anaconda skin, eels, insects and piranhas. I was looking at the tarantula when it moved! Oh, it is alive – glad it was in a tank!
We stopped outside and had some food and ate some tucumá fruit, which was small and yellow. I thought it tasted a bit like kiwi to start with, but hated the aftertaste. Francesca thought it was drier and tasted like a fig with a horrid aftertaste. Funnily enough we found a tucumá tree in the park straight afterward. We were taking pictures of it when we saw an amazing site! They had a three-toed sloth, and it was only meters away from us!
I had learnt that the harpy eagle noise often brings sloths down out of the trees so I was whistling fairly loudly. Sure enough, poor slothy started looking all around itself for the non-existent bird! Sloths only come down once a week to use the forest floor as a bathroom, and we were lucky enough to witness this majestic sight! Ha-ha! It was amazing though – sloths are such strange creatures, all gristle, bone and claws.
The next animals we saw were an electric ell, which was relaxing under a waterfall. These things discharge up to 600 volts – more than enough to kill a person. The eel is an apex predator, but deaths from them are rare these days.
At the back of the park was a bunch of cages where there were half a dozen caiman. These common caiman were pretty big, but were all just relaxing in the midday sun.
We also saw some turtles, various birds including the aracari, a relative of the toucan. The park was really cool and we both really enjoyed it.
We did try and get to the Museu de Ciencia Naturais and the Museu do Homen do Norte whilst in Manaus, but both were closed, despite being big draws in all the guidebooks online. So we decided to visit an old rubber barons mansion, the Palacio Rio Negro.
Built by a German, Waldemar Scholz, the river Negro palace is eclectic in style and architecture. The first thing that struck me was the floor. In this region, i.e. Belem and Manaus, the old, huge buildings constructed at the height of the rubber boom all had two-tone colored flooring. These floors were made of two types of wood – yellow wood, and the dark Brazilwood (now endangered, due to de-forestation). It is said that these contrasting woods (used in the Belem and Manaus theatres and the palace for flooring) represent the Meeting Of The Waters.
One of the most interesting things about the palace were the stairs, which were imported from Europe, much the same as the furniture and other fixtures and fittings. The view from the back balcony was amazing too, and it is no wonder these barons build such luxury houses.
There were some other nice items in the house too, such as an old grandfather clock, various paintings and erotic, artsy statues.
We decided to send a package home to Orlando and to Colchester – some gifts and some travel mementos which we did not want to risk carrying around with us. After this, on the 16th May, we headed off to the Palacio da Justica, which is behind the theatre. This is a similar building to the river Negro palace, with beautiful marble, stairs, painted ceilings and walls. There were numerous rooms here with a lot of lovely antique furniture in it, and we even had an English-speaking guide so we could appreciate it a lot more.
There is a library here for people to look at the old law books. The tour really starts in the old supreme justices’ chambers and debating chambers though. There is information on the various Chief Justices throughout history, and the tour really comes into its own at the end when you get to see the court room itself.
The accused did not sit with his lawyers as is the norm today. He or she had to sit with the judges and jury surrounding him, and sitting much higher. On the walls were chiseled masks with strange scary expressions – all designed to scare the criminal senseless. I wondered aloud about what were the most famous cases, and the guide bought us to the next room which details the case of Delmo Pereira.
Delmo was a student in 1952 in Manaus who had fallen on hard times and was a drug addict. He robbed his father’s saw mill one night, attacking the night watchman and shooting to death the taxi driver who had bought him there. He was tried and found to be mentally ill, due to his addictions, and therefore not responsible for his actions. He was sentenced to a mental hospital.
On the way to the hospital the ambulance driver, in cahoots with a large number of taxi drivers, handed Delmo over to a furious mob. They drove and marched Delmo to a remote place outside of Manaus and beat and tortured him to death. The resulting trial was the largest in Brazil’s history at the time – with 27 defendants. All conducted in the palace of justice in Manaus. Most of the taxi drivers got at least 10 years in jail, some even got 30 years, and the ambulance driver committed suicide in prison. Grim reality – and luckily Manaus is a slightly safer city today.
Just around the corner we found the Museu Casa Eduardo Ribeiro, which is a museum dedicated to Eduardo Gonçalves Ribeiro – the governor and visionary who transformed the city in the early 20th Century. Our visit coincided with a school field trip – nightmare, I thought initially. Then we realized we were to be treated to a performance of two main characters - Eduardo Gonçalves Ribeiro himself and his housekeeper. Two of the museum workers were dressed up for the kids to show them all around and teach them about the history – and we were to be provided with an English translator! Excellent!
Ribeiro was born in 1862 and died in 1900 (he was possibly murdered – there is no way of knowing, as an autopsy was not performed). He was an editor of the journal, The Thinker, and became governor of Amazonas state twice, overseeing the construction of a reservoir, the justice palace, the Amazonas theatre, and more. We were shown how they lived their lives at the end of the 19th Century, and we saw all the different items that they owned in the house. Ribeiro progressively got more and more erratic however, as he was possibly schizophrenic. His paranoia extended, eventually, to never leaving the house. He was found, dead, in his chair – still in the house – under suspicious circumstances.
At the end of the tour, we were invited to have our picture taken with the school kids, and some of them thanked us in English. Somewhere in Brazil, there is a picture on a school wall of lots of school kids on a field trip with Francesca and I standing, grinning, at the back – ha-ha!
That evening we went to the Opera at the famous theatre house. We had bought fairly cheap seats, so we decided to turn up and queue an hour before the start so we could sit at the front of our little box. Success, and we were one of the first to arrive. After we were seated, directly above the orchestra pit and next to the stage, a few people turned up in our box but they could not see anything and so left – leaving us with a box all to ourselves – yippee!
The opera was in German (it was a Wagner), but they did project Portuguese subtitles above the stage – useless to us, of course, but I really enjoyed the opera’s soaring emotiveness. Luckily, after the jungle trek we went on, we had bought binoculars and so got some really good views. The make-up, costume and set design were some of the most professional I have ever seen on the stage – not too sure about the German singing though – maybe an opera in Italian would be nicer.
I did look up the opera afterwards online, and learnt that the plot was all about the Holy Grail – I never would have guessed from watching it. The opera was 6 hours long though, with two intermissions, and that was a bit long for us, so we watched about 4 hours and decided to call it a night. I did enjoy the opera though, and look forward to our next one, probably in the States!
The next day, we went to Parque du Mindu, which is a nature park on the periphery of Manaus. We were extremely excited about seeing the bare-faced tamarin, a small primate that is now endangered and only exists in this area. The park is 42 hectares big, and was advertised as having 7 different trails through rainforest which contain numerous animals, trees and plants. The best time to go, was supposed to be early in the morning, so we set off, by taxi, and arrived in the morning, excited to see the monkeys.
The park turned out to be a disgrace of the proportion that the whole city of Manaus, and state of Amazonas, collectively, should be ashamed. A river that delineates the public park with a restricted access park (for researchers) flows there from communities surrounding Manaus. The river, the banks, trees and bushes were totally covered by trash. When I say totally, I mean totally – check out the pictures! Reviews of this park by local Brazilians raved about this park, and were given online recently – how can they not be outraged by this? I can only surmise that the state of Brazil itself has desensitized them to the third world environment we encountered at the park.
Turtles, caiman, red-headed turkey vultures and other animals all were degraded by the litter and trash that surrounded them. It is no wonder animals are injured and die in the wild when people treat fragile ecosystems like this as their personal rubbish dumps! The trash spoiled the whole journey to the park for both of us, as we were so disappointed and angry, it was impossible to enjoy. If you think I am over-reacting, then remember that this is the one place that is left for the bare-faced tamarin, an endangered species. The governor of Amazonas must have a lot on his plate, in terms of illegal logging, animal and narco-trafficking, and health, education and other social welfare issues, but it would not take a genius to employ and motivate a local group to tidy up the park, add a filtration system, and prosecute offenders who trash the place. It really made me think that some of the people who live around Manaus do not deserve the beauty and nature that they have been, by history, assigned to safeguard for future generations.
We did not see the monkeys – only agouti walking around the park. I counted at least 6 employees at the park – all sitting around doing nothing or watching soap operas. If the money exists for them to do this, why not set a firework off up their arse and get them down to the river to protect the wildlife – especially the endangered species!
This park did not sour our overall Manaus experience though, and it has been my favorite city so far. Next stop, the Pantanal (wetland), where Francesca will describe our hunt for the jaguar, anaconda, and other surprising wildlife.
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