The idea
You can fly Belém to Manaus in three hours. Or you can string a hammock on the middle deck of a riverboat and let the Amazon do the work for the best part of a week. We chose the river, and it rearranged our sense of how big a place can be — hours passing a single island, pink dolphins surfacing at dusk, kids paddling out from stilt houses to catch plastic bags of clothes tossed from the rail.
Belém, 2 days
Start in Belém at the mouth of the river. The Ver-o-Peso market at dawn is the Amazon compressed into a few hundred stalls: açaí being pounded into purple sludge, piles of unfamiliar fish, herbal cures for everything. Eat tacacá from a gourd (about R$15) and duck maniçoba if you are brave. Dorms run R$60-90. Buy your hammock here — a decent one costs R$80-120 at the market, plus two lengths of rope.
Boat one: Belém to Santarém
Boats leave from the Terminal Hidroviário several times a week. Hammock class Belém-Santarém runs about R$350-450 including three meals a day (rice, beans, spaghetti, mystery meat — bring hot sauce and snacks), roughly 2.5 to 3 days. Board early to claim hammock space away from the engine and the toilets; the middle of the deck sleeps coolest. Nights get genuinely cold on the water, so keep a sheet or light sleeping bag. The routine — sunrise coffee, river, lunch, river, card games, staggering sunsets — becomes weirdly addictive by day two.
Alter do Chão, 3-4 days
From Santarém's dock, hourly buses cover the 35 km to Alter do Chão (about R$4, or R$70 by moto-taxi). This is the Amazon's beach town: when the river drops between roughly August and December, the Ilha do Amor sandbar emerges opposite the village and you wade or take a R$10 rowboat across to white sand and warm green water. Take a day tour by boat into the flooded forest of the Lago Verde or up the Tapajós to the Maguari community, where locals walk you to a 400-year-old samaúma tree with buttress roots taller than you. Pousadas and dorms run R$70-120.
Boat two: Santarém to Manaus
Back in Santarém, boats to Manaus take about 2 days upstream, hammock class R$300-400. The river narrows through the Óbidos gap — the entire Amazon squeezed past a single town — and traffic thickens: barges of cattle, floating petrol stations, churches on stilts.
Manaus and beyond, 3-4 days
Manaus is a shock after the river: two million people, an opera house tiled like a jewel, a port that smells of diesel and fruit. See the Meeting of the Waters, where the black Rio Negro and sandy Solimões run side by side unmixed for kilometres (half-day boat tour about R$150). Then get out again — buses run 2 hours north to Presidente Figueiredo (around R$30), a scruffy little town surrounded by waterfalls and caves where you can swim in tea-coloured water under the falls at Cachoeira da Iracema. Jungle lodge trips from Manaus cost R$500-900 for three days; book in person, not from the touts at the airport.
Practical notes
Go July to November for lower water, beaches and fewer mosquitoes; the flooded-forest months (roughly February to June) are beautiful in a different, wetter way. Yellow fever vaccination is expected. Total for the route as described, about 12 days: US$450-600. Take twice the reading material you think you need.
