Manaus Day 1, Part 2 (Caiman Spotting)

The Caiman excursion was the one we have been looking forward to since we started planning this trip. When we did the first excursion to Januari Island earlier in the day they mentioned if we were doing the Caiman Spotting tour we would be back there for this trip. As interesting of a trip into the village we were really curious what it would be like at night. There was a large group of people going on this trip and we were relieved to see the tour boat come to the ship instead of us tendering to land and getting on them there. We were a bit curious on how large the boats were as you remember we were on a River Boat smaller than this and had to transfer to a smaller boat to get into the village. We just figured we would end up transferring before we got there, well that didn’t happen. So these 2 very large boats, probably 80 passengers each were going to navigate this channel into the village. I forgot to mention we have been told in the past they have pilots on our ship as the Amazon changes on a daily basis with the force of the flow. So we started to make our way into the channel which had several switchbacks and we got stuck and they spent 10-15 minutes trying to get free and finally were able to get loose. They had to stop again because the prop was full of grass and they had to clear this before we could get going. A small boat came out and a guy with a pole spent time finding the channel and guided the boats through the passage. All I could think about was we made it in hope they would be able to get us back out. It was a bit of a wild time but the wait was worth it when we made it to the dock to get into the canoes. We ended up with a front seat and that was great, right where everything was happening. So we headed out and Christine was our Naturalist and she had been on our previous trip so we knew we had a good guide. The guide was shining the light looking for Caiman’s he would spot them and the driver would follow his light, the first time he found one but somebody started talking and we lost it. The next time he caught up to the caiman and brought it into the boat and he handed it to Christine. She held it and told us we could hold it but we didn’t have to if we didn’t want to, we opted to just pet it while she held it.

So we went around spotting more Caiman but not bringing them into the boat before heading back to the dock. After spending some time at the dock it was time to load up and head back to the ship, this was around 10:00. We were the lead boat and the other one was following us out, we all of a sudden stopped and I looked behind us and the other boat was nowhere to be found. We spent a good 20-30 minutes trying to work off of being stuck, during that time the other boat showed up. We found out later they had hit something and broke the rudder assembly, they had to stop and fix it and then caught up to us. There was a smaller boat traveling with us and they tried to push us to get us off of the sand bar without any luck. They decided they needed to lighten the load and transferred 20 passengers from our boat to the other large boat. After they did that they had the rest of us move to the front of the boat, even with all that we were still stuck. Then all of a sudden somebody yelled there’s Jesus! Come to find out it was just one of the crew members walking next to the boat as we were in only 2 foot of water, but it looked like he was walking on water. After all these attempts failed they sent the other big boat back to the ship and the Captain called for some other boats to come out and help push us. The small boat had stayed with us and after about 20 minutes he was able to get us freed and we were on our way to all the cheers! After about another minute or two the cheers ended as they shut the engine down, it was overheating as the cooling hoses to the engine were clogged up with sediments from being stuck. It only took a couple minutes to get the hose cleared and we were on our way. We ended up getting back on the ship at midnight, about 30 minutes after the first boat. Waiting for us on the ship were several crew members with champagne and small sandwiches, nice to see they put out the effort to make us happy. Most of the people on the boat just considered this an adventure and really didn’t hear any complaining. So off to bed with us as we had an early breakfast and tour in the morning!