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The Amazon is a vast forest - the largest on the planet - and a giant river system. It covers over half of Brazil and a large portion of South America. The forest extends into Brazil's neighbouring countries, Venezuela, Colombia, Peru and Bolivia, where the river itself begins life among thousands of different headwaters. In Brazil only the stretch between Manaus and Belem is actually known as the Rio Amazonas : above Manaus the river is called the Rio Solimoes up to the border with Peru, where it once again becomes the Amazonas. The daily flow of the river is said to be enough to supply a city the size of New York with water for nearly ten years, and its power is such that the muddy Amazon waters stain the Atlantic a silty brown for over 200km out to sea. This was how its existence was first identified by the Spaniard, Vicente Yanez Pinon, sailing the Atlantic in search of El Dorado. He was drawn to the mouth of the Amazon by the sweet freshness of the ocean or, as he called it, the Mar Dulce.

To many Indian tribes, the Amazon is a gigantic mythical anaconda, source of life and death. In its upper reaches, the Rio Solimoes from Peru to Manaus, it is a muddy light brown, but at Manaus it meets the darker flow of the Rio Negro and the two mingle together at the famous "meeting of the waters" to form the Rio Amazonas. There are something like 80,000 square kilometres of navigable river in the Amazon system, and the Amazon itself can take ocean-going vessels virtually clean across South America, from the Atlantic coast to Iquitos in Peru. Even at the Obidos narrows, the only topographical obstruction between the Andes and the Atlantic, the river is almost 2km wide and for most of its length it is far broader - by the time it reaches the ocean the river's gaping mouth stretches further apart than London and Paris.

Ecology And Development

The Amazon is far more than just a river. Its catchment basin contains, at any one moment, over one-fifth of all the world's fresh water, and the rainforest it sustains covers an area of over six million square kilometres, stretching almost right across the continent and forming the largest tract of forest on Earth. The Amazon forest is a vitally important cog in the planet's biosphere controls. There are over a thousand tributaries (several larger than the Mississippi), whose combined energy potential is estimated at over 100,000 megawatts daily (an endlessly renewable supply equivalent to five million barrels of oil a day). Eletronorte, the region's electricity supply company, today produces around 20,000 megawatts from Amazonian hydroelectric power.

Although in 1639 Pedro Teixeira travelled 2000 miles up the Amazon and claimed all the land east of Ecuador for Portugal, the Portuguese really gained control of the Brazilian Amazon, in a political sense, through the Treaty of Madrid in 1750. Four years later, Governor Mendonca Furtado was appointed Boundary Commissioner and began his tour of inspection in the Amazon. He saw the prosperity of the Carmelite missions on the Rio Negro and initiated the Directorate System of controlling "official" Indian villages which were essentially labour camps. Having seen how effective the Carmelite missionaries had been in manipulating native workers, the governor was determined to do the same. Some Indians, remaining free in the regions upstream on major tributaries, tended to gather in villages at portage points like difficult rapids where they acted as guides and muscle-power for traders. Others retreated deeper into the forest.

The region was only integrated fully into the Brazilian political scene after Independence in 1822. And even then it remained safer and quicker to sail from Rio de Janeiro to Lisbon than to Manaus. Within a few years of Independence the region was almost lost to Brazil altogether when the bloody Cabanagem Rebellion overthrew white rule and attempted to establish an independent state. When things had quietened down a little, in the mid-nineteenth century, US Navy engineers were sent to the Amazon to check out its potential resources. They reported that it was wealthy in forest gums, fruits, nuts and excellent timber, and provided with a ready-made transport network in the form of rivers which gave direct contact with the Atlantic. Within a few years one of those forest gums - rubber - was to transform the future of the Amazon.

Until Charles Goodyear invented the rubber tyre, the Amazonian economy had ticked over at a bare subsistence level, sustained by the slave trade and lumber. But the new demand for rubber coincided handily with the introduction of steamship navigation on the Amazon in 1858, beginning an economic boom as spectacular as any the world has seen. By 1900 both Manaus and Belem were extraordinarily rich cities, and out in the forest were some of the wealthiest and most powerful men in the world at that time, beyond the reach of the newspapers, conscience and worries of nineteenth-century Europe: men like Nicolas Suarez, who earned a reputation as an autocratic ruler of a rubber-tapping region larger than most European countries. Controlling the whole of the region around the upper Rio Madeira and into modern-day Peru, he was a legendarily harsh employer even by the standards of the day.

When the rubber boom ended, almost as suddenly as it had begun, following the success of rubber plantations established in the Far East (with smuggled Brazilian seeds), development of the region once again came to an almost complete halt, relying on the export of the traditional products of the forest to keep the economy going at all. There was a brief resurgence during World War II, when the rubber plantations in the Far East were controlled by the Japanese, but it is only in the last thirty years or so that large-scale exploitation - and destruction - of the forest has really taken off, along with a massive influx of people from other parts of Brazil, the Northeast in particular, in search of land.

Travel Details

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Buses

Belem to: Brasilia (2 daily; 36hr); Maraba (1 daily; 14hr); Salvador (1 daily; 32hr).

Boa Vista to: Bonfim (2 daily; 4hr); Manaus (4 daily, 12hr); Santa Elena (6 daily; 3hr).

Manaus to: Boa Vista (4 daily; 12hr).

Maraba to: Araguaina (several weekly; 13hr); Belem (1 daily; 14hr); Tucurui (several weekly; 6hr).

Porto Velho to: Cuiaba (2 daily; 22hr); Guajara-Mirim (5 daily; 4hr); Rio Branco (4 daily; 8-9hr); Sao Paulo (2 daily; 36hr).

Rio Branco to: Brasileia (3 daily; 6hr); Porto Velho (5 daily; 8hr).

Boats

Belem to: Macapa (several weekly; 1-2 days); Manaus (several weekly; 4-6 days); Santarem (several weekly; 2-3 days).

Macapa to: Belem (several weekly; 1-2 days); Oiapoque (1 weekly; 2 days); Puerto La Cruz, Venezuela (1 daily; 18hr).

Manaus to: Belem (several weekly; 3-5 days); Caracarai (irregular; 4-8 days); Humaita (4 weekly; 3-4 days); Porto Velho (3 weekly; 4-6 days); Santarem (daily; 2 days); Sao Gabriel da Cachoeira (weekly; 5-7 days); Tabatinga (several weekly; 5 days plus upstream, 3-4 downstream).

Porto Velho to: Manaus (3 weekly; 3-4 days).

Santarem to: Belem (several weekly; 2-3 days); Macapa (several weekly; 2-3 days); Manaus (1 daily; 2-3 days).

Tabatinga to: Iquitos (several weekly; 3-4 days or 12 hr by speedboat); Manaus (several weekly; 4-5 days).

Planes

Belem to: Boa Vista (1 daily; 4hr); Brasilia (1 daily; 2hr); Macapa (1 daily; 1hr); Manaus (2 daily; 2hr); Porto Velho (1 daily; 5hr); and daily to all other main Brazilian cities.

Manaus to: Alta Floresta (1 daily; 1hr 30min); Barcelos (3 weekly; 1hr); Belem (2 daily; 2hr); Boa Vista (2 daily; 2hr 30min); Brasilia (3 daily; 3hr); Cuiaba (1 daily; 3hr); Macapa (2 weekly; 2hr); Porto Velho (1 daily; 2hr); Rio Branco (several weekly; 2hr 30min); Rio de Janeiro (3 daily; 3hr 30min); Sao Gabriel da Cachoeira (1 daily; 3hr); Sao Paulo (several daily; 3hr 30min); Tabatinga (1 daily; 2hr 30min); Tefe (3 weekly; 1hr).

From Porto Velho , Rio Branco and Maraba , there are daily services to major Brazilian cities. Tavaj Linhas Aereas covers most towns in the western Amazon, including a helpful link from Rio Branco to Tabatinga (2 weekly; 2hr).

Getting Around The Amazon

Most people who visit Brazil will, at some time or other, have dreamt about taking a boat up the Amazon . This is not hard to do, though it's not as comfortable or easy going as daydreams might have made it seem. Given the food on some boats, the trip can be tough on the stomach, and you'll need meditative patience to appreciate the subtle changes in the forest scene on the often-distant riverbanks. But with a bar on the top decks of most boats, most passengers, whether Zen adepts or not, make a great time of it.

The classic journey is the five or six days from Belem , a friendly coastal city worth visiting in its own right, to Manaus in the heart of the jungle; and perhaps on from there on a wooden riverboat to Iquitos in Peru via Tabatinga on the Brazilian frontier. But sticking only to the main channel of the Amazon is not the way to see the jungle or its wildlife: for that you'll want to take trips on smaller boats up smaller streams, an option which is particularly rewarding in the west where the rivers aren't quite so wide.

Thirty years ago river travel was virtually the only means of getting around the region, but in the 1960s the Transamazonica - Highway BR-230 - was constructed, cutting right across the south of Amazonia and linking the Atlantic coast (via the Belem-Brasilia highway) with the Peruvian border at Brazil's western extremity. It remains an extraordinary piece of engineering, but is now increasingly bedraggled. Lack of money to pay for the stupendous amount of maintenance the network needed has now made much of it impassable. West of Altamira it has practically ceased to exist, apart from the Porto Velho-Rio Branco run and odd stretches where local communities find the road useful and maintain it. The same fate has met other highways like the Santarem-Cuiaba and the Porto Velho-Manaus, on which great hopes were once pinned. With the exception of the Belem-Brasilia, Cuiaba-Rio Branco and brand-new Manaus-Boa Vista highway corridors, transport in the Amazon has sensibly reverted to rivers. Access to what remains of the Transamazonica from Belem or Brasilia is via Estreito, the settlement at the junction where the BR-230 turns west off the old north-south highway, the BR-153/BR-010.

One thing to bear in mind while travelling is that there are three time zones in the Amazon region. Belem and eastern Para are on the same time as the rest of the coast, except from October to February when Bahia and the states of the Southeast and the South switch to summer time, leaving Belem an hour behind. At the Rio Xingu, about halfway west across Para, the clocks go back an hour to Manaus time. Tabatinga, Rio Branco and Acre, in the extreme west of the Amazon, are another hour behind again.