EDITOR'S NOTE: Today, we offer Part Three of a seven-day series on boat-related vacations that leave the steering, cooking and maintenance to somebody else. For more about this series and why we did it, please see the Room 13 blog.
The Rio Negro, I am told, is a river like any other. This is Brazil, so it is full of tropical fish. This is the jungle, so it's an air force base for brightly colored birds. Like the Amazon, which the Negro feeds into, it supports our boat.
But the Negro that I got to know a bit didn't appear to be made of water. Rather, it seemed a river of beer, lightly fermented thanks to the compost of leaves and insects along its banks. Drinking a glass wasn't that tempting during a weeklong cruise on the Tucano, a riverboat run by Ecotour Expeditions. Negro means black, and we get intimate with the river's cocoa richness when we take showers and brush our teeth.
Peter MandelIn the foreground sits a houseboat made by locals, while our boat, Tucano, lies at anchor in the background.
Our boat trip into the jungle begins in the city of Manaus, where Plantation owners once tapped nearby rubber trees for their fortunes and gave the town dashes of elegance and art. The Tucano, which is moored here, looks like a model of a Mississippi steamer. A bath toy at first glance, it has room enough for nine elegant cabins that are paneled with forest woods and polished carefully with wax. I would see much from the deck of this boat, and even more from the canoes it dispatches.
There are many ways to get on the water, and not all of them involve sitting in the captain's chair. While we all love our boats, planning a vacation as a passenger this winter will allow you to travel to exotic waters while leaving the hassles to someone else. It's a strong antidote to the dreary, landlocked days some of us have in store.
To lend some inspiration to your planning, Mad Mariner is publishing a story every day this week that highlights vacations both exotic and aquatic - vacations to places like Brazil's Rio Negro.
UP THE RIVER
One of our guides, Edivam Regis, explains our route. We are heading upriver on the Negro because it is wilder and less settled than the Amazon itself. Guide number two, Alzenir Sousa, a local who was born in the jungle, goes to work in the dining room setting up what becomes a quiz about local vegetables.
