Day 57 - 12/02/23 - Santarem
After a very smooth overnight sailing up river and missing the place where we went aground 4 years ago, we reached Santarem around 9am and a floating tender platform was set up in the starboard stern location of the ship while ship's tenders used the Deck A forward tender platform. Our little group of 14 met in the Mix and we were able to get on the second ship's tender for the mile long ride to the floating dock at the beach. Initially the tender driver did not want to take our group, but Florin worked his magic and we comfortably made the tender. At the beach, we were greeted by our guide, Pierre Schwarz. We remembered him from 2019 when he put together an improv 2 hour city tour after our vessel was late following its encounter with a mud bank. He remembered us and we remembered him.
We all then walked down the beach and boarded a typical Amazon River tour boat. We all had to walk the plank to board the vessel and unfortunately one of our group could not do that so he had to stay behind. Once we were comfortably settled on the top deck of the boat, Pierre explained what would happen on this tour. We then motored downriver to Maica Lake (actually part of the river system). We saw many grey and some pink dolphins along the way. There were also lots of various types of birds.
Upon reaching the last place this boat could travel due to the low water conditions, we did an hour and a half jungle walk where we saw more birds and a couple of sloths. One was particularly photogenic. Back on the boat we were served a sumptuous lunch of either fish or filet mignon. We had the fish and it was superb! We were then supposed to go in a little speedboat to do some more wildlife spotting, but the driver flooded the engine and they couldn't get it started, so we re-boarded our tour boat and headed up river back to the port where we observed the meeting of the two colors of the rivers. The Amazon is silty brown and the Trombetas is dark colored. Once again we saw lots of birds and Dan was especially sharp in spotting them, and I was able to photograph many of them. There were also a number of dolphin encounters, but they were difficult to photograph.
Back at the tender pier, we tied up to it and the shore crew begrudgingly installed a gangplank so we could exit on to the tender platform. Since we were back a couple hours before the last tender, there was an opportunity to do some shopping at the local craft market set up on the beach area. Nearly 100 of us made the second to last shoreside tender back to the ship and used the floating platform to exit onto the ship. If anyone would like a great tour guide in Santarem or Alter do Chao, contact Pierre at Pierre.Schwarz@protonmail.com. His website is https://santaremviagens.com.
I transferred my pictures from my big camera to my iPhone for editing and made a few online posts about our day. We enjoyed very light dinners before attending both performances by Diego Figueiredo. On this night his theme was The Art of Improvisation. Each show was totally different and Jeremy commented that the attended at the 9pm show was the largest of any 9pm show this entire cruise and we are at day 57. At both shows he received a hearty round of applause at the beginning of the performance and he hadn't played a note. At the second show, not only did he receive a standing ovation at the end of the show, he was prompted by the audience to continue playing which he did for another 15 minutes. Never have I seen such an audience reaction to a performer on a cruise ship. Afterwards we went up to the LIDO for the 10:30 feeding and I chatted with Diego a bit more.
Tonight we gain an hour as we are traveling west towards Parintins and Manaus. We'll have to give back the hour in a few days. It was a great day on the Amazon. It was very hot, but that's to be expected. There were no mosquitoes or other insects bothering us. We, however, did do a "bug walk" around the ship and photographed a number of large moths and what looked like a grasshopper.
Tomorrow we have a brief stop in Parintins to attend the Boi Bumba presentation. It's a very colorful and high energy show performed just for tourists. We went 4 years ago and it was so good, we decided to do it again this year.
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