Category: City by the Book

City by the book: Amazon/Manaus & Ibbotson

Perhaps my favourite read from my trip was, unsurprisingly, a children’s book. Mid way through our trip we arrived in a small city close to the Colombian and Peruvian borders of Brazil – Tabatinga. From Tabatinga we took a four day boat to Manaus, a bustling city in the heart of the Amazon rainforest. While most people on the boat were saving their pennies in hammocks, my sister and I splashed out for a cabin. To our surprise, it ended up being the most luxurious part of our trip, and allowed for a lot of reading time.

Enjoying the luxury

And the views!

The boat was really quite spectacular, as we covered 1200km of the Amazon river, accompanied by daily sunsets and sunrises, dolphins, lots of birds and obscene amounts of pasta, rice and potato brought to our door three times a day. The absolute joy of the boat trip was made even more magical for me as I read the celebrated children’s story Journey to the River Sea by Eva Ibbotson.

Not joking about those varied carbs…

Or the sunsets!

The story is about a British school girl, Maia who is orphaned and sent to live with her long lost relatives on the edge of the Amazon river, near Manaus. What she hopes to be a jungle adventure full of local delicacies and cultural exchange turns out to be Little Britain with added disinfectant as her relatives are nothing like how she imagined them to be. Luckily her governess Miss Minton and fugitive Finn save the day, offering her all the adventure she could have imagined.

It is actually pretty dark at times for a children’s story, but it is one of those unforgettable adventure stories that leaves your mind wondering, not least over questions raised by Maia. My favourite was probably ‘why can’t grown-ups understand that we might know what is right for us just as well as they do?’

Teatro Amazonas

More than that though, Journey to the River Sea educated me about the area as I drifted down the Amazon. I learnt about the rubber industry, the origin of the Amazon’s nickname ‘River Sea’ and the Teatro Amazonas which I was excited to see right behind our hostel when we arrived in Manaus.

Miss Minton is a bit of a feminist hero in the book too, if I say so myself. Her corset seems to act as the image for all the restriction she experiences, physically, intellectually and proffessionnaly. The way she tosses it off when she’s free is very empowering, and even though the moment is sad, when the corset returns it is not an un-funny moment:

‘Miss Minton had spent the night with her sister and bought another corset because the good times were gone’.

I loved this book and I loved the boat portion of our trip. It provided the perfect opportunity to transition from Spanish to Portuguese, playing Uno with new friends who spoke no English in the evenings and meeting a man from France who happened to grow up in the tiny town I taught in during my year abroad. However, I was rather suddenly dropped into the Portuguese as the sniffer dog, Alaska, before we got on the boat took a liking to my bag. Trying to explain English Breakfast Tea turned out to be much harder than one might expect… let’s just say we didn’t get very far with them screaming “marijuana?” at me and me replying with “PG TIPS!” Not quite Maia and Ibbotson’s adventure, but it was an adventure nonetheless!

Amazon dog rating: 9/10 – all for Alaska!

Alaska the sniffer dog and me

Previous City by the Book:

Cartagena & Márquez
Lima & Llosa

August 10, 2017
City by the book: Lima & Llosa

Also from Peru – Mashed Potatoes Saved My Life: An Alternative Route to Mach Picchu

I have to admit, Lima was not our favourite stop on the trip. Perhaps because we had just descended from the excitement of a four day Salkantay trek to Machu Picchu as well as the general hubbub of Cusco, or because we hadn’t the time or energy to venture out of Miraflores. That being said, after a week of non-stop altitude sickness, I greatly appreciated Lima’s sea level location.

My sister, not exactly ‘loving’ Lima!

The truth is, Lima appeared to us to be a bit nothing and it seems to be that way in Mario Vargas Llosa’s The Storyteller too. This novel picked for Lima because wikipedia classed it as ‘set in Lima’ instead offered much more insight into the more tropical areas of Peru that I had the opportunity to experience during the Salkantay trek.

There were of course references to Lima, that were very relatable as Llosa writes of how in Lima “even bright sunlight has a grayish cast” – while it is physically true of Lima’s haze it seems like a good metaphor too…

Yet since the characters of The Storyteller are fascinated with ethnology – the study of different groups of people and the relationships between them – much of the novel’s insight was very connected with the impression our trek guide Juan Carlos gave us of Peruvian, and particularly Inca culture, but also of the Amazonian world I would come to experience in Brazil, later in the trip.

My favourite part of the novel is probably more to do with the characters than the setting. I love when Saúl realises his passion for ethnology, I think Llosa has a really poetic way of describing the moment:

“He had discovered, without the slightest doubt, what it was that interested him in life. Not in a sudden flash, or with the same conviction as later; nonetheless, the extraordinary machinery had already been set in motion and little by little was pushing him one day here, another there, outlining the maze he eventually would enter, never to leave again”.

I can’t say I’ll be returning to Lima, but the rest of my Peruvian adventure was rich in stories, history and potatoes. I look forward to writing about Cusco, the trek and Machu Picchu!

Lima dog rating: 4/10 (but Peru as a country gets an 8!)

Last week: Cartagena & Márquez

August 3, 2017
City by the book: Cartagena & Márquez

Last month I embarked on an adventure with my sister for four weeks around Colombia, Peru and Brazil. It was brilliant. Part of what made the trip so great was that in four cities, I read books associated with the city. Not only is it a much cheaper way to immerse yourself in a city’s history when you’re too broke for museums that don’t accept UK student ID, but it totally enhanced my experience of visiting a new place. I mentioned this when I wrote up my holiday reading list, but now I want to dive in and reveal how I found the cities, share a few disaster stories and talk about how the books changed my trip.

First stop of our trip was Cartagena, on the northern coast of Colombia. Despite everyone telling us we would be mugged the moment stepped off the plane, Cartagena proved to be an incredibly exciting place full of respectful people. My book for Cartagena was Gabriel García Márquez’ Of Love and Other Demons. Telling the story of a girl who is bitten by a dog with rabies and who is sent to a convent to handle her ambiguous ‘demon’, the book probably increased any preexisting paranoia I had about stroking the city’s dogs – difficult when you’re a big dog person.

Not only was the story compelling but it described the city in a way that I could see and place events in the book into the city in real life. The street my hostel was on was even directly mentioned. FYI the hostel was Mystic House in Getsemani and was everything you could want from a hostel.

What’s more, the discussion of religion throughout the novel was fascinating as I saw for myself how entrenched Catholicism is in Cartagena, even though it was introduced in a pretty grim way. On a roof top bar for ‘sunset’ my group found ourselves in a spectacular thunderstorm, where our bartender, terrified out of her wits, abandoned us, signing the cross as she fled. Even those who seem to reject the role of religion in Cartagena remain suspiciously respectful of catholic values, making Márquez’ line “one never quite stops believing… some doubt remains forever” feel comfortably accurate over two decades later.

I highly recommend Cartagena as a city to visit, the food is delicious, full of chicken, rice and plantains, as well as their famous ceviche which while delicious was served a little strangely… Our short time in Cartagena had a really great balance of hard touristing and relaxing on the beach, and we spent a couple of really great evenings soaking up the fun (and the amazing street food) in Trinidad Square.

Cartagena dog rating: 5/10

For many more (ridiculous) photos of our trip they can be found on the Instagram hashtag #hermanasbravas… don’t ask how or why the hashtag is what it is!

July 28, 2017