Day 40: Setting Out on Our Internet-Free Amazon Rainforest Boat
The rainforest footprint is the size of mainland US and accounts for 20% of the world’s oxygen — the sheer scale of it is too much for human brains to comprehend — but the sliver we got to enjoy over four days will stay with us, and our kids we hope, forever.
We moved onto the Jacare Tinga, a two-story wooden river boat with 3 sleeping cabins, open-air common areas upstairs and down and a kitchen. It looked like something out of Swiss Family Robinson or the Jungle ride at Disneyland.
None of the crew spoke English — three guys and two women plus our captain — but our guide for the trip was Josue (aka Joshua), a local guy whose English was great thanks to 20 years leading trips like this for foreigners.
The only other guest on the boat was Laura, a retired PhD from Sao Paolo who loves adventure but whose husband does not. She booked her solo trip at the last minute through a travel agent who told her, “I’ve got one open spot on a rainforest boat but you’ll be with a family and two small kids.” She said yes because she loves kids. She was delightful to have with us.
The boat was not luxurious. Not totally roughing it — a cook prepared our meals, someone else made our beds and the cabins had AC at night — but we more or less lived in the same clothes, hung our wet towels on clotheslines and the crude showers were just handheld sprayers of river water. Our miniature cabin had two tiny bunk beds and the ceilings were about 6 ft. Cozy!
Luckily for us, the third cabin was unoccupied, so we were able to use it for all our bags — definitely helped us spread out a little.
The temperature was perfect. The group before us had had nonstop downpours, but we had sunshine the whole time. Not too hot, not cool. Just warm and pleasant. Out on the water there weren’t mosquitos because of the water’s acidity. So when we were on the boat we were just barefoot, shirtless, frizzy, breezy and happy.
Oh! Important detail: There was no wifi, so probably happier than happy. 🙂
To reach the boat we cabbed from Manaus 2.5 hours to Novo Airao, a small coastal city of about 80k people.
Pit stop 
Taking a carsickness break.
The boat tour company is called Katerre, which is owned by a Japanese-Brazilian guy from Sao Paolo named Rui (pronounced Hooey) Carlos Toni who built two boats and owns a lodge and restaurant. We met him before we boarded.
Once on board we rode for about 7 hours through tributary waters of the Rio Negro, flanked on both sides by jungle. We were headed into the protected Anavilhanas park, made up of 800 islands in an archipelago — infinite capillaries of water to explore.
The kids were antsy and a little anxious that afternoon — they wanted to go up and downstairs constantly and we weren’t yet comfortable with them not falling overboard or tumbling down the ladder stairs, so we trudged after them, annoyed.
Teddy knocked his head about 7 times, hard, which didn’t help. We attempted some school.
When the sun went down the kids got really clingy, freaked out by the darkness and the jungle sounds. We didn’t blame them. Takes some getting used to.
We ate a communal dinner on the lower level around 730 — the food was delicious every meal — and retired to our bunks, exhausted.
