Manaus Day 1 Part 1 the meeting of the waters

I am breaking this post into 2 parts. The first part is our arrival in Manaus as we arrived in the morning and the big highlight is the Meeting of the waters. As I have mentioned previously the Amazon is full of sediments and causes the water to have a chocolate color to it. When the Amazon meets up with the Rio Negro river (Black River) which flows from up in Colombia and Venezuela you start to see signs of the sediments disappearing. As you will see in the pictures the Amazon gives way to the Rio Negro slowly but eventually is flowing side by side and as you arrive in Manaus the Chocolate Amazon disappears.

As you can see in this picture we are at the point where the Amazon is flowing from Colombia and Peru and we are heading up the Rio Negro towards our parking spot.

The ship was anchored off of Manaus on the Rio Negro past the location where the Amazon river turns for a time into the Solimoes River until it reaches its origin of the Amazon in Colombia and Peru. In case I haven’t mentioned it the Amazon flows from Peru and Colombia and the reason the dark chocolate color is due to the extreme rate of flow of the river that doesn’t allow the sediments to settle.

This map shows where the Rio Negro flows into the Amazon river and the location of the bridge that spans across the Rio Negro that the ship was anchored by. 

As you can see in this picture our ship is anchored by the bridge for Highway 070 on the Rio Negro river.

Our first tour in Manaus was the meeting of the waters and a visit to the village of Janauari to search for the Victoria Amazonica Lilies’. This was supposed to be a trip where we rode in a River Boat and then transferred to a small 10 person motorized canoe. We ended up transferring from the River boat to a smaller speed boat and then transferring to a motorized canoe. This is an interesting village all the houses are on floating foundations and rise and lower during the dry and rainy season, we were here at the end of the dry season and that is why we transferred an extra time as the River boat couldn’t make it to the village.

So they took us around the lake and soon discovered the lilies were not here during the dry season but they did make a section with some of them brought in from the grassy areas.

After we finished the tour of the village they reversed the transfers and we took a boat tour of the meeting of the waters. This was pretty redundant to what we experienced on the way in on the cruise ship. The only difference is the Brazil Marines pulled over our river boat and boarded it and were checking the crew credentials and the boat for safety equipment. We then returned to the ship where we had a few hours before our second excursion, Caiman Spotting, to be continued on the next entry.