El Gran Apagón

Many people around the world will have heard about the serious power outage that Spain and Portugal had a few weeks ago, as the power grid for almost the whole of the two countries failed for the best part of the day. I know, first world problems for those who live in countries where electricity network failures (or even availability) are still a regular feature of daily life. But the event was still a useful wake-up call on just how dependent we have become on that network for so much of our daily activity, not least because the outage also left people with very limited or non-existent mobile phone and internet coverage.

The blackout happened in the middle of the day when a large part of the adult population was at work, getting home for those whose journey depends on electrified train or underground Metro services turned into a problem for so many. With bus transport and other road transport services overwhelmed by demand the only solution for a lot of people will have been a perhaps unfamiliar walk through a large city like Madrid or Barcelona. And then we get back to the collapse in the mobile telephone network, those mapping services that so many instinctively use for navigation were suddenly just as unavailable as anything else dependent on the internet.

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Santarém To Belém - We Ran Out Of River

Daybreak on our last full day on the river could hardly have been more depressing. The sky I could see from my hammock was a grey-brown colour, and the smell of burning wood was stronger than ever. We were in the middle of the river and there was very little visibility. It hardly even makes It into the news headlines any more, our ability to adapt to the mess we have created means that relatively few people are aware of just how serious the situation is as Amazonía burns.

Fortunately we were not going to spend all of the last leg with the smog. Slowly the sky started to clear, and things seemed better again. The forest on either side even looked a bit more like It had in the upper part of the river.

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The Last Boat - Santarém To Belém

Another early start, the day had come for getting on our last boat, the one that would take us to Belém. It wasn’t a promising start, I opened the window in the hotel and the smell of wood smoke was stronger than on any other day here. With limited visibility over the river.

We walked down to the port to find that the boat was already there. The Amazon Star had come down quite full from Manaus and this time we weren’t going to be lucky with our choice of hammock position. It was more a question of finding any free position, which we managed somehow with hammock ropes almost crossing.

Despite the grand sounding name the Amazon Star is a fairly basic boat, we had been spoiled a bit with our boat to Santarem. But It had an open space upstairs and a well stocked bar. The only things that let us down were the views of the river, the smog caused by fires was to be with us for some time to come.

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Alter do Chão

So we found something to do with our extra day in Santarém. The Guardian published an article in 2009 on the 10 best beaches in Brazil and there at number 1 is Alter do Chão. This qualifies It as a ‘hidden gem’ which these days means that only 50 million people know about It.

The bus from Santarém to Alter do Chão takes about an hour, and dropped us off just a couple of minutes from the beach. White sands, sparkling river wáter, with forest in the background - It is a beautiful place although I’m not convinced It will be the most beautiful in all of Brazil.

It was quiet too, most of the bars and restaurants on the beach were closed. Clearly not peak season. But the one place that was operating still did good business serving drinks and food to tables that are placed in the water a couple of metres off the beach.

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Santarém

My first impressions of Santarém were not very favourable. I had the idea of It being a smaller city, but It covers a wide área and our hostal was quite a distance from the centre. Three nights we had here, and It wasn’t clear what we could with that time.

We walked to the centre and found nice places to be by the river, and a restaurant serving regional dishes, including one (Maniçoba) where they have to cook the manioc leaves for days to remove the toxins. I’m still here to tell the story so they must have done It right.

The first full day we dedicated to exploring the centre and looking for another hotel not so far from the port for our final night. There was, naturally, some mapping to be done as we walked around. Outside of the centre there were areas with few amenities mapped.

The haze from the fires comes and goes in the city, with the wind. But at times the smell of smoke is very strong, and the pollution gets to your eyes and throat. Glad I don’t live here, Madrid ‘s traffic pollution is seriously unhealthy but not as bad as this.

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Manaus To Santarém

Another early morning start as we walked down to the port at dawn to catch the Santarém boat. This time there was none of the queuing and complication that we had in Tabatinga - we showed our ticket and went straight on to the boat.

The early bird catches the best hammock position, and the first impressions of the Madame Crys were positive. It seemed to be a more modern boat than for Tabatinga to Manaus. It didn’t fill up completely but was busy and we did the right thing getting there early.

As we left Manaus It was clear that this was a more powerful, but less noisy, boat. We were up front looking for the meeting of the waters as the appropriately named Río Negro joins the Amazon a short distance out from Manaus For kilometres the two rivers run with little mixing and very different colours, and our boat steered very close to the visible dividing line.

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Manaus

I had very mixed feelings about returning to Manaus, 36 years after my first failed attempt at an Amazon boat ride to Belém. I hadn”t expected ever to return, had it not been for the FOSS4G announcement of Belém as the 2024 location. I hadn’t liked the city much the first time, although this had a lot to do with the local climate. Maybe I’m a bit more used to this now, after living so many years in Spain, but Manaus still felt like the hottest place I had been on the journey.

We got a new member of the team here, my partner Silvia flew in from Madrid just a few hours after the Tabatinga boat had docked. When she booked her flight back in August we had very little idea of when I was going to arrive in Manaus, in the end it worked out very well.

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Tabatinga To Manaus 3

By day 3 on the Manaus boat I was beginning to doubt that we might get there the next day. It seemed the boat was moving too slowly, we were tracking the route and there was a lot of river still before Manaus.

What we didn’t know is that the boat stops less on the second half of the journey, I guess because many of the places further downstream have their own services to Manaus. It did stop briefly in the river a couple of times just to let people off onto a smaller boat that was waiting.

The main event of the third day was a fairly thorough police check of the boat. I was fast asleep in my hammock when It happened, men had to line up on one side of the deck, women on the other. All baggage was also lined up in the middle so they could pass the sniffer dog by everything. We were stopped about an hour for this, it’s quite a routine thing on public transport here, I was told.

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Tabatinga To Manaus 2

Sleeping solidly is not that simple, the boat can stop at any time of night, and it turns out the range of comfortable sleeping positions in a hammock is not that big. But it doesn’t matter, the only schedule on board revolves around meal times, there’s nothing else to prevent anyone from resting when they feel like it. It can also be surprisingly cold on the open boat at night. I came prepared with a thin blanket and it’s not unusual to feel the need for a cover during the night. The first night there was also a distraction, a spectacular lightning display in the distance.

Day 2 started with our early breakfast, a ham roll and a cup of ridiculously sweet coffee. If there is one thing I really dislike in Brazil it is this custom where the people who make the coffee decide how much sugar the person who drinks the coffee is going to want. It’s always a lot, obviously there is a major sugar cane surplus. I managed to get some progress done on my diary entries and then it was river watching as a big rain storm moved in whilst the boat was ar one of the stops. In 20 minutes water was pouring down all the slopes towards the port. A small creek under a wooden bridge transformed into a torrent. All water still welcome in tbe Amazon, looking at the banks of the river I reckon there is room in the river for 8-10 metres more of water.

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The Second Boat -Tabatinga To Manaus

Departure day from Tabatinga and the start of the real adventure. Be here at 8, they told us when we bought the tickets, so here we were not much after that time, but once the people waiting for the fast boat had left there was just a handful of us. I didn’t mind, the early arrivals get the best hammock space and 4 days is a long time to spend in the wrong spot.

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The Triple Frontier 3

Monday was a list of things to do, the last day before departure for Manaus. Priority number one was to move from a hostel too far away from the crossing into Tabatinga to one that was almost on the frontier, a pillar 10 metres away from our rooms marked the boundary. A brief stop for breakfast and down to Tabatinga port to buy our boat tickets, again checking out hammocks on the way.

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The Triple Frontier 2

Day two in Leticia began with another visit to Tabatinga. It was Sunday and the boat ticket office wasn’t going to be open, but we did need to get our Brazilian entry stamp in our passports, we weren’t going to get on the next boat without that. Remote land borders can often be more difficult to cross than arriving at international airports, but we had no problems here - a couple of questions about the purpose of our visit and it was done.

With the rest of the day free we went back to Leticia and got on a boat to Santa Rosa for the last time on Peruvian territory on this journey. Johnattan was carrying a small drone, and we wanted to do a bit of drone and street level mapping of the island. All of the main points of interest on Santa Rosa are concentrated on a single road, so we mapped our way up from the clutch of restaurants facing Leticia to a midpoint in the village and decided that the heat merited a refreshment stop in a friendly and spacious bar restaurant.

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The Triple Frontier

With an eye on our (OSM powered) maps the first surprise on arrival at Santa Rosa was that we were being dropped off on what appeared on the map to be a separate island. Our moto taxi driver explained the reason for this, the drought that had affected so much of Amazonia had also changed the endpoint for a ferry that had been unable to run a few weeks before our arrival. In reality the two islands shown on the map are currently one, with a dip on the muddy track being the only indicator.

The triple frontier is a curious place, there are no formal border control posts, you have to go on arrival from Iquitos to the immigration office in Santa Rosa to get the Peruvian exit stamp, a pre-condition for subsequently getting entry into Colombia or Brazil. We were almost the first ones there at the office and the exit process took about 5 minutes. Then it was down to the boats that take you across to Leticia (in Colombia) or neighbouring Tabatinga (in Brazil). It’s a short crossing, I had read a couple of months earlier that in the worst moments of the drought people were able to cross on foot. That’s no longer the case, but the creek taking us in to Leticia had barely enough water to permit incoming and outgoing boats to get past each other.

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The First Boat - Iquitos To The Triple Frontier

The boat from Iquitos was to be our sole concession to relative comfort on the river, foreigners have to pay a higher price for the ferry than locals, but the benefit was to be on the upper deck with more space, and an outside area at the back. There are faster boats doing this stretch of the river, but you are stuck inside the boat the whole time with very limited views of the river. Ours was the middle option between the three day slow boat and the fast service, and finally we were on our way down the Amazon.

Leaving in mid-afternoon we had about 3 hours of daylight left for river watching. The first proper sunset I had seen in Peru lit up the river before dark. And then we had a glorious full moon ahead of the boat, meaning that we had some visibility all night long. The ferry is quite modern and relatively fast, we even had a TV showing Peru playing Chile in a World Cup qualifier.

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Iquitos

One more plane, and then the real Amazon journey begins. I think I read somewhere that Iquitos is the largest city in the world that has no road connection to other parts of the country It belongs to. So a plane was the only alternative to seven days on the Rio Ucayali.The plan was to get to Iquitos and leave as soon as we could get a boat, with roughly two weeks left before arrival in Belem at the beginning of December for FOSS4G. and SOTM LATAM. In the end it was to be an overnight stay, there was a ferry leaving the next day for the Triple Frontier shared by Peru, Colombia and Brazil.

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Pucallpa

Iquitos wasn’t our first Amazonian destination, before we headed for Pucallpa - located on the Ucayali river much further south. Johnattan has worked there and is also heavily involved in the local OSM group. At one point we even considered starting the Belem boat trip in Pucallpa, the Ucayali combines with the Marañon river way down nearer to Iquitos to form the Peruvian Amazon. But an estimated seven additional days on a boat to Iquitos was a bit too much, another time maybe. I was dealing with the change of atmosphere from the western side of the Andes, it poured with rain shortly after arrival and moving around in tuk tuk style transport to get anywhere made it feel like a different country.

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Huaraz

We were in Huaraz for an event on climate justice organised by the South American Wikimedia community. A very interesting event, my first with Wikimedia, and with a particular emphasis on giving a voice to the representatives of indigenous communities. Including a forum involving Saul Luciano who took the German energy giant RWE to court in a landmark case for their contribution to emissions that help to melt the glaciers that in turn threatens a deadly lagoon overflow for those living in the flood path below. He said he had never seen the glaciers recede as much as they had this year. OSM got some time and mentions at the event, although it got me thinking about how communities with so much in common seem to live separate existences.

And we did some mapping, enough to refresh data for the centre of Huaraz. My first Peruvian changesets. As for the nearby mountains, I had taken a tough packing decision to fill valuable rucksack space with my mountain boots and a bit of winter clothing in case I had the chance for a day in the mountains. it didn’t happen, the weather wasn’t kind and the boots haven’t seen any use. Of course the views of snowy peaks had to be fantastic the next day as we flew back to Lima in preparation for moving onwards to Amazonia. A planned presentation/workshop in a Lima university never happened as a strike timed to coincide with the APEC international summit closed the university for three days.

Landing In Lima

There were nervous moments before starting the journey. The terrible drought this year across Amazonia even put the whole project in doubt, we couldn’t be sure that the boats would be running as reports came in of Amazonian towns suffering water shortages. Together with the brutal wildfire season it seemed that we had picked the wrong year, although the real question after 2 consecutive years of drought might be whether there will be better years to come? Hard to believe when I looked at the hydrological data I had loaded for the Amazon basin. At one point I was considering buying a reserve air ticket from Lima to Manaus, which would have been a very disappointing way to do that journey. In the end October brought better news, it rained enough for the boats to run and Johnattan organised a short Peruvian itinerary (including OSM mapping!) which would take us to Iquitos for the first boat down the river. The first of three or four that we would need to get all the way to Belem with an estimated travel time of two weeks.

I landed in Lima on the 5th November and had a couple of days to acclimatise before setting off for the first destination on the trip. Great ceviche in a market stall which the tourist guidebooks will hopefully never discover, and time to see some of the city. Even time to drink a bit too much pisco, but you have to try the local products? Then it was off to Huaraz, located at 3000 metres and lying below the Andean peaks of the Cordillera Blanca. What does this have to do with Amazonia? The mountain chain is where all the debate about the source of the Amazon is focused. You can hardly get more of a landscape contrast than that between the western and eastern sides of the Peruvian Andes. I went up to Huaraz on the bus, and through the desert surrounding Lima then upwards through a semi arid mountainous landscape which differs sharply from the forest to be found on the eastern slopes.

Big River - The Project To Go With The Trip

Once I had decided to make the trip down the river I thought it would be interesting and useful to have an Amazonian themed maps and data project. A couple of years ago, in FOSS4G in Florence, I attended a presentation about TerriaMap and it ticked a lot of the boxes for a plan I had to do an open data and maps catalogue for Madrid and possibly other regions of Spain.

I had installed the tool and done some fairly basic experiments - but with the Amazon journey already being booked the focus changed and I embarked on a possibly over ambitious attempt to combine multiple data sources for the whole Amazonia region. That means a significant part of Brazil, Peru, Ecuador, Colombia, Venezuela and Bolivia. The project is online at Big River although for the moment it contains mostly base cartography sourced from national mapping agencies.

A lot of OSM data is in the queue to be loaded, already there in the case of Peru, and the first cross frontier thematic dataset covering the frightening wildfire season of 2024 across the entire Amazonian region is also in the pipeline. There’s a huge amount of open data available and work on the project will continue - but first I have to get down the big river!

How Did I Get Here?

Big River, or how to get to FOSS4G/SOTM LATAM in Belem the slow way. There’s a backstory here, the short version is that 36 years ago - on an extended journey from Costa Rica down to Rio de Janeiro - I tried and failed to get a boat trip down the Amazon from Manaus to Belem and the fine hammock I had bought on the way in Venezuela never got used. In the end I saw very little of the river. Time passed and the regrets faded until they announced that FOSS4G 2024 would be held in Belem.

The announcement got me thinking, obviously this was a chance to try again with at least part of the Amazon. And then, because I’m fairly light on work commitments at the moment, I started thinking that the journey could begin further up river than Manaus. Maybe even in Peru?

So back in April or May I sounded out Johnattan Rupire from the Peruvian OSM community to check whether it was a crazy idea to go to Belem from Iquitos by boat. It is a bit crazy, but it turned out that he was thinking of doing exactly the same trip. And with that, plus quite a bit of internet research on just how many boats we would need to get to make it happen, I got on a plane to Lima in early November.