Amazon & Carnival Explorer Cruise - Day 39: Boca da Valeria, Brazil

Thursday, March 14

Today our port is Boca da Valeria which is a very small village of indigenous people located where the Valeria River joins the Amazon.  There is no real tourist infrastructure here with no restaurants, hotels or anything else.  The population is only around 120 and has about a dozen structures including houses, a church and a school.  Boca da Valeria is representative of many of the small villages along the Amazon and its tributaries.

Today is a tender port so we wanted to get up early and beat the crowds, as well as the midday heat and humidity.  We caught the tender around 8:30 and were on shore 15 minutes later.  They had warned us that the tender dock was very rickety, but it looked like some work had been done as there was new planking and it appeared very solid.

As you leave the tender dock, you were immediately surrounded by children wanting you to take their picture (for a dollar) or lead you somewhere in the village. As we walked along the riverfront there were many villagers selling various crafts, and many of them were wood, though we were warned that bringing would back from the Amazon area might be a customs violation.  Rather than chance it, we passed on the craft work.

There were a few young people dressed in native costume wanting you to take their picture for a donation.  There were also children holding turtles and sloths wanting you to take their pictures.  We contributed to the economy a bit and then reached the end of the pathway through the village.  We started back towards the tender dock and saw numerous boats and boatmen offering a tour of the area for $5 a person.  That was a bargain we couldn’t pass up and spent the next hour motoring and gliding through the floodplain.  It was very beautiful and interesting, and again hard to believe that this would all be dry land in six months.

Our boatman's wife pushes us off at the start of our boat ride.

 

This green foliage is floating as we proved when our boat stated plowing right through it in the picture below.

 

The Veendam anchored out in the main channel.

 

Our tour of the area is over.

After the boat ride, there wasn’t much else to do and it was starting to get pretty crowded with people from the ship so we headed for the tender dock.
There were very few people waiting so we were soon back on the ship.  It was only 10:30 when we got back to our cabin, so we had time to rest a while before lunch time.

We headed off to the Lido for lunch and ran into Tony and Evelyn who will be joining us on a photo tour tomorrow.  We sat down to lunch together and had an enjoyable conversation.  After lunch, Val and I went out on the Lido deck to see what the view was from the other side of the ship and found it much better than the view from our balcony as it faced the village area and cliffs along the Amazon.  The cliffs were something we hadn’t seen before as it seems like we see mostly jungle coming right up to the shoreline.

We returned to the room and Val read, but I had two days of the blog to catch up on so I went to work on that.  Around 3:00 Val and I went out on our balcony and watched us sail away from Boca da Valeria.  I can’t tell you how amazing it is to be sailing up the Amazon; we keep looking at each other and say “we’re on the Amazon River”.  We were very much looking forward to this part of the trip and it has met and exceeded our expectations.  The Amazon is both beautiful and awe inspiring because of its sheer immensity.

Tenders are heading back and forth from the ship to Boca da Valeria

These cliffs were an unusual sight on the Amazon, usually the jungle comes right down to the waterline.

Later in the afternoon, Val was off to trivia and I finished up the blog and then downloaded our photos from the day.  Val returned from trivia today with the good news that her team had won with a perfect score today.  We spent the rest of the afternoon watching the river go by from our balcony and relaxing.

We did our usual dinner routine of trivia, dinner and the casino and called it a night.  Val was back to her winning ways tonight and even I had a good night for a change.  After the casino we returned to our room and after reading for a while we called in a night.  Tomorrow we will be in Manaus, the furthest port we visit on the Amazon.