Kevin's Blog

The Amazon river

As I said we traveled by boat from Manaus. Our first stop was at Autazes, just for picking up supplies. To do this we went downstream and back up a tributary. Below is a map from Google Maps. Manaus is in the upper left and Autazes is in the lower right, labeled with a red A marker:



The rivers flow from left (west) to right (east). Note that some rivers are blue, and others are black. The blue rivers actually look brown up close, and are full of sediment; the black rivers actually look black in real life and are full of organic matter. Manaus is actually at the crossing of two rivers: the Rio Negro in black on the top-left and the Solimões river (the Amazon proper) in blue on the bottom-left. As you can see, the rivers maintain their color for some distance even after they merge. This is apparently something you can see when you're there but we missed it because we got there at night.

We visited several villages: São Félix, Igapizú, Murutinga, and one place that we had church services at that I didn't get the name of. I did find Murutinga on Google maps (the others are probably too small, but are in the area of Autazes and Murutinga):



We came at the peak of flood season, so there was more water and less land than is in the map here.

For Igapizú, we couldn't bring the boat in to shore but took some smaller boats in. In the previous post there was a picture of locals taking a boat. That was at Igapizú, and that shot was from our boat.

More about the boat next.

posted by Kevin Iga @ 12:13 PM