Santarém Ferry Boat – Makapa and Belem, Santarémm, Para Statem Brazil
Santarem seems to be the first place actually located on the Amazon River where you get a sense of the Amazon as the great River Highway of South America. Belem isn’t actually on the Amazon River but rather on a tributary, and it’s also on the Atlantic Ocean, so it has overland connections to other parts of Brazil. There are a few smaller communities on the Amazon between Belem and Santarem (Macapa, which we visited last year, comes to mind), but these are relatively small places, and in their river ports you don’t see as much hustle and bustle as you sense when you arrive at the river docks in Santarem, a city of over 300,000 people.
It is here,too, in Santarem, that we saw for the first time the large numbers of Amazon River ferry boats that are the aquatic equivalents of Amtrak and Greyhound in this part of the world. These ferries ply the Amazon, carrying passengers hundreds if not thousands of miles up and down river, at a speed of about 10 knots an hour. A ferry boat ride from Belem to Manaus, a distance of about 1,000 miles, that stops only to pick up and discharge passengers, takes about 4 days. By plane it’s about a 2-hour flight.
Last year we docked in Santarem several miles outside of town, near a factory owned by Cargill, the international food giant. Cargill’s plant in Santarem processes and exports soy beans from the Amazon jungle.
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