Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
5
THE TRANSAMAZÔNICA
Thirty years ago river travel was virtually the only means of getting around the Amazon region,
but in the 1960s the
Transamazônica
- Highway BR-230 - was constructed, cutting right
across the south of Amazônia and linking the Atlantic coast (via the Belém-Brasília highway)
with the Peruvian border at Brazil's western extremity. Inaugurated in 1972, 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 Santarém-Cuiabá and the Porto Velho-
Manaus, on which great hopes were once pinned. With the exception of the Belém-Brasília,
Cuiabá-Rio Branco and the Manaus-Boa Vista highway corridors, transport in the Amazon has
sensibly reverted to the
rivers
.
means of travel. Entering from the east, further along from
Santarém, are the small ports of Parintins and Itacoatiara.
The former is home to the internationally known Boi
Bumbá festival (see box, p.356) and the latter has bus
connections with Manaus if you're really fed up with the
boat, though the roads are often very hard-going in the
rainy season (Dec-April). From Itacoatiara it's a matter of
hours till Manaus appears near the confluence of the Negro
and Solimões rivers. It takes another five to eight days by
slow boat to reach the Peruvian frontier, and even here the
river is several kilometres wide and still big enough for
ocean-going ships.
Brief history
The region was only integrated into Brazil after
independence
in 1822, and even then
it remained safer and quicker to sail from Rio de Janeiro to Europe than to Manaus.
It was useful as a source of timber and a few exotic forest products, like rubber, but
remained an economic backwater until the 1840s, when Charles Goodyear invented
a process called vulcanization, giving
natural rubber
the strength to resist freezing
temperatures and opening up a huge range of new industrial applications.
The new demand for rubber coincided handily with the introduction of
steamship
navigation
on the Amazon, beginning an unlikely economic boom as spectacular as
any the world has seen. By 1900 Manaus and Belém were the two richest cities in
Brazil, and out in the forest were some of the wealthiest and most powerful men in
the world at that time.
The rubber boom ended in 1911 as suddenly as it had begun, as rubber plantations
established in the Far East (with smuggled Brazilian seeds) blew natural rubber out
of world markets (see box, p.354). The development of the region came to an almost
complete halt, relying once again on the export of
forest products
to keep the economy
going. There was a brief resurgence during World War II, when the Allies turned to
natural rubber after the plantations in the Far East fell under Japanese control, but it is
only in the last forty years or so that large-scale exploitation - and destruction - of the
forest has really taken off (see p.654).
Belém
Although less well known than Manaus,
BELÉM
, the only city in the Amazon that is
truly old, has much more to offer: an unspoilt colonial centre, one of Brazil's most
distinctive cuisines, a stunning collection of architectural survivals from the rubber
boom and, to cap it all, an
urban revitalization
over the last decade that has seen new
parks, imaginatively restored historic buildings and leisure complexes transform its
centre and riverfront into easily the most attractive city for tourism in the Amazon.
Belém remains the economic centre of the North and the Amazon's main port. The
wealth generated by the rubber boom is most evident in the downtown area, where
