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.

The day was hot, despite the sun being partially blocked. But the boat made good progress. I was glad when the sun started to go down and we made a little detour to stop at the town of Monte Alegre. The night was fresher, I was just hoping that we would get through the smog for the final part of the journey. This was not how I wanted It to end.