Tchau, Amazon

Santarém was our final port call on the Amazon. It’s a smallish city with a long riverfront walkway that might be referred to as a malecón other places. This was another tender port, so we rode the tender over to the dock and used the Oceania-provided shuttle bus to get to the further side of town. Our plan was to take the shuttle bus out and then walk the two miles back to the dock to get some exercise. It was cloudy with the occasional sprinkle, which kept the humidity high but the temperature lower. Given that it was a Sunday the town was likely less busy than it would have been on a weekday. A number of locals were out enjoying the waterfront and the fish market was very busy. I got a couple of life birds on the walk: Buff-necked Ibis and Orange-fronted Yellow-finch. Plus some closeup looks at Smooth-billed Ani and Black Vulture. We saw a largish wader fly into the Cargill soybean facility, but I couldn’t ID it as I didn’t have my binoculars with me. Missed opportunity!

Now that we’re leaving the Amazon we can reflect on the experience. First, it was amazing to be in this unique place and we feel very fortunate to have had this opportunity. We all felt it was a little more built up than we expected. Manaus is the only big city, but the smaller communities and individual farms and cattle ranches were more common than we’d been expecting. I think our experience here was likely a microcosm of how the whole trip would be: we got to experience the Amazon in a lightweight fashion. We saw the river, saw the jungle, got to get out into the weather and the environment, met some of the people. We did not get the deeper experience of getting further into the jungle or spending a night there. Elizabeth and I traveled to Ecuador a number of years ago and spent several days at a jungle lodge. That gave us the opportunity to get out into the jungle with a small group, where you can stop and listen and see a lot more. The flip side – and Liz and I talked about this one afternoon – is that on this trip we can come back from a hot, sticky hike and take a shower in an air-conditioned room. And of course you can’t have a deep experience everywhere; there simply isn't time. The idea of the trip was to offer a sampler of many different places to the boys so they can see how wide the world is, file away the memories, and decide later on which of these places they’d like to return to.Leia mais