Sunday, Jan. 11 Santarem 2½ ° south of the equator
As we cruised up the Amazon we saw our first meeting, marriage or wedding of the waters. The tan colored muddy Amazon was joined by the blue Rio Tapajos. The two colors of the water were very visible as they ran along each other for several miles without mixing. Further along the Amazon we will see the same thing when the Rio Negro enters the Amazon.
A brief shower came and went as we stood on the deck to watch the approach to Santarem as well as to oversee the docking. Just before we reached our dock we passed a very large conveyer platform built out over the river. It belongs to the American company, Cargill, which has soy crop plantations and processing plants here in the Amazon. Some believe that soy is the future economic savior of this region. Others bemoan the loss of the rain forest. I believe most of it is shipped to China.
A transoceanic highway is being built from the Atlantic to the Pacific which will make it cheaper and easier to transport soy to the Asian countries.
Getting back to the docking of the Prinsendam -----for sailboat people it is hard to believe how relatively easily this 669 foot ship is slipped sideways into the dock with the thrusters. As the dock lines where thrown to the dock I could hear Alan silently screaming "get a wrap on it." I guess there wasn't much chance of the Prinsendam slipping away from the dock as the dock hands didn't rush to secure the lines.
As we hadn't booked a tour we took the port shuttle service to the center of town. It was described as running every 30 minutes "depending on traffic." I don't know how much traffic there is in Santarem weekdays but on a Sunday we didn’t see more than a dozen cars and a half dozen motorcycles. All but one gift shop was closed but the enterprising people of Santarem had a few stalls on the dock selling native jewelry, carvings, musical instruments and dried piranhas of all sizes. (We have been informed that both piranhas and anacondas were given a bad rap in all those old movies as the fish do not immediately devour you if you fall into the river (in fact they like decayed matter rather than tasty humans) and anacondas do not drop out of trees to wrap around you and squeeze. Nice to know but I worry more about the monster bugs.)
There wasn’t much uptown but a few ferries boarding. People were getting on with luggage, cardboard cartons and one TV. The bows of the ferries were on shore but unfortunately we weren’t there to see how they got off the sand and out into the river.
On the bus ride back I did see a ferry with the bow in the shallow shore of the river and people wading ashore. This was a commercial ferry of probably 60 or 70 feet , not someone’s little river boat. The water was about knee or thigh deep. Happily the children were carried in arms or piggy backed ashore.
We toured the little museum which had pre-Columbia artifacts as well as colonial documents and artifacts. I particularly liked the burial urns which contained pieces of bones. I’m sure they weren’t the original contents but who knows.
Yes, it was hot. Yes, it was humid. Yes, we are learning to walk very slowly.
We don’t sail until 8 pm ---why we can’t imagine as I think everyone has been back to the ship for at least a couple of hours. Tomorrow Boca da Valeria.
A little about Santarem. (there should be an accent over the “e”. If anyone has the sheet that gives foreign letters, etc., I’d love it if you could e-mail it to me.)
Santarem is about half way between Belem and Manaus and is the Amazon’s third largest city. It was settled in 1661 by Jesuit missionaries, 30 years after the first European explorers first came into contact with the native people. The settlement grew as escaped slaves made their way to the upriver areas. In 1758 the remote town was named Santarem by the Portuguese.