Manaus is the capital of the state of Amazonas. From the plane, the Amazon looks like a huge green carpet. Then the trees part making way for the city of Manaus, located next to the Rio Negro.
As we walked out of the plane, the heat blasted straight into our faces. My mother had already told me about it but I never imagined it could be this bad and the humidity just made it so much worse. But the locals didn’t seem to mind, so I guess this was just a regular day in the Amazon.
Our luggage took a long time coming but something really funny happened while waiting. This guy threw his hat on the luggage carousel and it kept going round and round. It was fun counting how many times his hat came around. Once his luggage arrived, he then took his hat off the carousel and pt it on his head!
We had quite a few suitcases and I helped spot them, and pick them up with my dad. Outside the airport someone was waiting to pick us up and take us to our hotel. It was a guy who worked for Mundus , a travel agency my parents chose. It organizes ecological and expedition type trips.
He then took us to Hotel Tropical, which is a huge and awesome hotel. There are long hallways everywhere, shops, tennis courts, restaurants, and a couple of swimming pools. The hotel even has its own botanical garden and mini-zoo.
It was 95 degrees and since we had woken up early to travel, we decided to spend the rest of our day taking it easy in the swimming pool, which I didn’t mind at all. This is the greatest pool in the world. It had a machine to make waves. I body-surfed, pretending that I was in the ocean.
The pool is also a great place to meet other kids. Most of them were from Brazil but I also heard kids speaking Chinese, Japanese, English and even Arabic.
