Rollin' Down The River

Reporting from the Caribbean Sea, approaching Grenada, March 31, 2025.

There are rumors afoot, or so I’ve been told, that I have been compromised, muzzled or perhaps threatened in a way that would make me inclined to cease and desist in any criticisms I might have of Villa Vie and/or the utopian delights of the Big Ass World Cruise, now approaching its 6-months-of-sailing (as opposed to 4-months-stranded-in-Belfast) anniversary. (Which will, by the way, be tomorrow, April 1. Write your own joke here.)

Perish the thought. I continue to be the same whiny-ass bitch I’ve always been. My life continues to be a rich tapestry of disgruntlement, self-loathing, tomfoolery and beer. Mostly the latter. (Except when Villa Vie runs out of it.) It’s just that I have things other than life on the Odyssey to complain about.

For example, let me tell you about my recent trip down the Amazon.

As you may recall from our previous episode, the Odyssey’s much-anticipated journey to Manaus and back again had to be cancelled for reasons so dumb they might as well have been Pete Hegseth’s idea. But, because the revised itinerary involved Odyssey killing time in Belem, where the Amazon meets the Atlantic Ocean, some of us decided to book our own side-trips to Manaus. I, foolishly, was one of them.

Apparently the Golfinho do Mar I was swallowed by an anaconda. They are quite large.

Other people chose tours with rain forest treks, piranha fishing, visits to indigenous villages, swimming with pink dolphins. They had finely-appointed cabins (think “Fitzcarraldo”-era rubber baron finery) and sumptuous meals. I believe they were also allowed to kill one (but only one) local villager with a blow gun. That cost extra, though.

I, on the other hand, chose to take a no-frills four-day ferry ride from Manaus to Belem, 900 miles of brown water, bad food and endless indistinguishable shoreline, miles of rain forest occasionally broken up by shorn acres of deforested cattle ranches and occasionally dilapidated shanties on questionable piers. It was kind of depressing. Although, on the bright side, they have not yet built any Buc-ees.

Not that I could see any of it from my cinder-block cabin with no bedsheets, towels, chairs or an operable sink. It was pretty much a prison cell. The toilet, fed by opaque river water and looking like something straight out of Trainspotting, worked though. This would prove critical later on.

The smarter passengers (by which I mean all of the others) slept in hammocks on breezy covered decks, their belongings gathered around them, tarpaulins at the ready for the inevitable daily downpours, large groups of local people who use the ferries as their only means of long-distance transport. There are no Interstate highways in the Amazon. Not yet anyway. There is only The River.

However massive you imagine the Amazon to be, trust me it’s WAY bigger than that. It makes the Mississippi look like a drainage ditch. It doesn’t flow so much as disgorge. It swirls and convulses, the differing colors and densities of its many tributaries colliding in constantly-changing shades of brown. The black water of the Rio Negro mixes with the caramel-color water of the Amazon, sometimes as remarkably clear-cut lines of demarcation, sometimes as cinnamon swirls, sometimes looking like clouds of milk, newly-poured into a giant cup of coffee. It’s called the Meeting of Waters and it’s one of the coolest things I’ve ever seen.

Where the Rio Negro meets the Amazon, The Meeting of the Waters

During the “dry” season, The Amazon ranges from 2 to 6 miles wide. That goes up to 30 miles wide when the serious rains kick in. It’s 4,000 miles long and at no point is there a bridge on which you can cross it. It is the Milton Berle’s penis of rivers.

I boarded the Golfinho do Mar 2 in Manaus on a Wednesday morning, having flown in from Fortaleza, where I’d disembarked from the Odyssey the night before. I’d admired the Opera House, found a place to drink beer and listen to music, the Bar Caldeira. Then I’d gotten up at 8 a.m, an unnatural act. So I was already in a mood.

My suite, No. 4, is on Deck 3, above the bridge.

Also — and this will not be surprising considering that we were in a goddam jungle — it was hot and humid, about to rain, but not quite yet. I was, in other words, a soaked, steaming mess by the time I got to the dock. I’d booked through a tour company whose local representatives guided me through the chaos, put me in a line, handed me a room key and then promptly disappeared. There was only one person on board who did not speak Portugese. I’ll give you three guesses, two of which don’t count.

Disoriented and dripping wet, I stumbled through the lower decks, dodging hammocks and street hawkers trying to sell snacks, hats and, I don’t know, life insurance? I had no idea where my alleged cabin might be or whether my chronically-compromised hips and knees would allow me to climb the steps that were more like ladders and led to the upper decks.

Actual footage of me trying to find my cabin.

I found it, Suite No. 4, at the front of the boat, directly over the bridge. It was probably the best cabin on the ship, location wise. There was a bunk bed, windows that opened, a barely-functioning air conditioner. If I stood in front of the open windows, I had a panoramic view of the river and a full-on frontal breeze. This was fine until it rained. Which it did. A lot. Because, you know, it’s a rainforest. It’s right there in the name.

When it wasn’t raining, I found my way to the snack shop/bar on the top deck, where I could drink beer, sit in a plastic chair and watch the jungle glide by. There was also an alleged cafeteria on the lower deck, where I somehow managed to purchase dinner without knowing what it was or how much it cost. What I got looked something like this:

There was meat of some sort, rice, beans, spaghetti and a small salad, all in one slightly-warm container and passed to me through a kitchen window the other side of which I could not see. It wasn’t bad, what with the beer and the jungle and all. Things were looking up.

Until they definitely weren’t. Sometime in the middle of the second night, between the frequent trips to open and shut the windows depending on whether the rain had stopped or begun again, I raced from my sheetless mattress to the questionable toilet, not quite making it in time. The river had apparently changed course, because now it — or something very much like it — was coming straight out of my ass.

The good news, I guess, is that I had extra underpants, plenty of toilet paper (which got deposited after use in a covered pail, the flushing mechanism apparently not up to the task) and a semblance of privacy. Had this happened in a hammock, we’d have had an international incident on our hands. And everywhere else.

Oh, look, a big old chunk of rainforest being hauled off so you can have a bigger dining room table.

I didn’t eat much for the rest of the trip. Some wafers, some rice, some bottled water. I’d look at the jungle for a while and then go back to bed. This is how I spent the next three days. By the time I boarded the Odyssey in Belem, I was grateful to be there. When people would ask, “How was your Amazon trip?,” I’d just answer, “Moist.”

Which doesn’t mean everything on the Odyssey is ok. It most definitely is not. The wi-fi and the air conditioning are still unreliable, to say the least. The pools are only open on sea days and then filled with barely-filtered seawater. There was something quite close to an uprising over recently-added charges and changes in the terms under which cabin owners can rent to the tenants of their choice.

And then there are the tenders, both of which are out of commission until further notice, one of them with a malfunctioning engine that stranded it at a recent Brazilian port, the other with a nasty gash left over from a frightening incident in Ilha Grande in which the swells were too much for the tender — or at least the pilot — to handle. The modified lifeboat bounced violently while attempting to line up with Odyssey’s gangway.

One of the Odyssey’s tenders, when they were still in service.

One Resident stepped off just as a swell took hold and she was left dangling between the ship and the tender, crew members and Residents holding on to either end of her. They pulled her back into the tender just before it once again banged into the Odyssey’s hull. A Resident who was there (I was not) said if she’d still been between vessels when the collision occurred it likely would have killed her. (She’s fine, by the way.)

But now the Odyssey won’t be stopping at any more anchorage ports — the ones where a tender is needed to get to the shore — until the damage is repaired. Probably that’ll be somewhere in the Caribbean. Most likely Barbados, where a container ship of supplies, replacement parts and Resident possessions that we were supposed to pick up in Peru is scheduled to meet us. Until then, we just keep our expectations low and our glasses full.

I recovered enough from the Amazon to go out on our last night in Belem, to the groovy-cool Studio Pub to see even-cooler Brazilian pop singer Joyce Alane, who normally plays larger venues but was doing a rare (and sold out) acoustic show in Belem. She was stunning. The crowd knew every song. It was almost a perfect night.

Except they’d run out of decent beer. No IPA’s. No craft beer of any kind. The best they could do was a draft pilsener they’d stocked just for St. Patrick’s Day. They had some left over.

What? Green Beer? Goddammit!!! Noooooooooo!