New house

This post is a bit out of sequence I'm afraid, but I'm going to have to go in a moment and have no guarantee of when next I'll get internet access, so here's the latest...

Cutting a long story short, we finally took the plunge and bought a house. It was over our original budget (nothing new there then), and not precisely what we were looking for (ditto), but we both loved it the minute we saw it. After some strategic toing and froing and some reasonably hard bargaining, we got the price down from R$290,000 to R$200,000 with an air-conditioner thrown in(!). I don't have any pics yet, but will endeavour to post some in the coming weeks or months. For those who like google earth, you can get a clear picture of the site (it shows the original house, bottom left, and oubuildings, right) at 3 deg 1 min 36.11 sec South/60 deg 4 min 30.04 sec West. It belonged to a vet, and the outbuildings are actually kennels. A new house was built on the site of the old one, and a swmming pool (yay!) added in 2003. We hope to move in tomorrow, so more on this later.

We've also placed an order for a small 6m powerboat (bote - as per awful pic), which should be ready by the end of the month. We've had no luck so far with the floating bar - there are currently no available boias or floats in the area we want to place the bar (3 deg 49 min 13.13 sec S/60 deg 22 min 17.95 sec W), meaning they would have to come over 100km by river from Manaus. Eek. Still looking, but if we don't find something this month, the water may be too low for us to get the boias across, meaning a delay of almost a full year. Keep you posted.

Manaus - the start of things

Sadly my poor addled brain is apt to forget lots of things (as many will attest), so I'll have to give you the gist of events, and when I can put together a more complete diary I'll add anything of interest at a later date.

After ensconcing ourselves in our billet in Sao Jose (b&w pic) and recovering for a while, we visited old friends Charlie (Italian) and Annick (Belgian) on Sunday and had a thoroughly enjoyable evening. Annick was able to tell us of someone who was selling a car which was almost new. We weren't desperately enthusiastic (in Brazil 'almost new' or semi-novo can mean anything up to 200,000km or 10 years), but said we would have a look. Having arranged to do this, we then proceeded to look at some new (and semi-novo) cars first. Ha ha ha. The price of a half-decent 2-wheel drive people carrier is around GBP30000 - GBP40000. Anyway, we then went to look at the recommended semi-novo, which turned out to be a Renault Scenic with 16000km on the clock. Apart from a few dents and scrapes and a leaking oil sump (cars have it tough here), and apart from being French and a Scenic, it looked pretty good...so we bought it for R$35000 (around GBP8000). First problem resolved.

Meanwhile, back at the house, we were suffering from a distinct lack of air conditioning, and had discovered quickly that walking the dog, apart from being a ludicrous thing for anyone to do in Sao Jose, was fraught with problems. Firstly, the roads are like mini obstacle courses, with drivers of all sorts of vehicles competing at high speed for any available patch of unholed tarmac. There are no road signs, no traffic lights, no zebra crossings (ha ha ha), no road markings. Where there is any pavement, it is usually covered by weed, rubbish, turds, stray dogs and dead people (OK, I exagerate slightly on this last point). To get to one, you have to first traverse the stream of water cascading down from all sorts of dubious outlets protruding from the popular houses lining the road. These usually culminate in open sewers located at strategic points so that you can either drive into them, ride into them or walk into them. The stray dogs, of course, are not used to Irish royalty (I refer to Ozzie, in case you doubt) striding purposefully among them and piddling on their favourite posts or mounds of rubbish. So of course they round on the offender to chase him off. So we quickly discovered that walking the dog needed two people - one to keep Ozzie in check until he's done what he needs to do; and one at the rear with a big stick to fend off the repeated attacks of the locals. All this in 34 degrees of heat is somewhat tiring, and normally results in us (all) collapsing on the bed after the walk. More of a battle than a walk, in fact. So far, we are winning the battles, but the war is clearly theirs...

Phew!

Phew indeed. It has been an interesting (Chinese sense) time since our last post some 3 weeks ago now. Since for the forseeable future my posts may be pictureless (but I'll do my best), I'll keep them short in order not to bore you too much.

You may or may not know, but chaos reigns in the skies of Brazil at present, with hordes (squadrons?) of flights cancelled or delayed, so we were relatively lucky that our flight to Manaus was delayed only 2 hours. Interestingly, since the break-up of the national airline Varig, the most common carrier now is called GOL (Goal, in English). It is difficult to know who they're modelling themselves on (see pic., if I can upload it) - orange livery, pay-per-bag, no seat booking, no food, sour faces, no refunds etc etc. Hmmm.

The good news is they've put their latest modified 737 on the SP - MAO route, cutting the time down to 3.5 hours. Hooray! So we arrived late afternoon, and when we emerged from the airport it was raining - I thought for a moment they'd flown us back to Belfast. But that rain was the last we've seen since then, more's the pity - no more now until October.

We were picked up at the airport by Naice's brother Robbie, and driven the 40km or so back to his house in Sao Jose, which is an area rather hopefully described as being "popular". Makes more sense when you understand that 'popular' in Portuguese can also mean 'poor''. Anyway, that's where we remain to date, although we hope to be moving tomorrow morning. more on this in a mo.