Apart from the breathtakingly pretty short hop across the Irish Sea and up the Firth of Clyde from Dublin to Glasgow, this must be the most incredible flight ever. Basically, we flew up the Amazon! a 2 hr flight from the coast to and, if you check the map, while Manaus is deep in the rainforest, an awful lot of Amazon still lies to the west. In other words, this is a looooooooong river. Long and wide. Even at 30,000 feet at times you could barely see the other side as the slow moving river swells out into a series of vast flood plains.
The first thing that surprised me was the straight edge of cultivation defining where the rainforest ends and humanity begins. It stretched to the horizon. How, I wonder, do they manage to hold back the creep of the rain forest when I can barely contain the weeds in my garden! And then the rain forest just goes on and on and on, in all directions. Occasionally a gap would appear in the canopy revealing a postage stamp of apparent human activity. Of course at this height a postage stamp could be a sizeable piece of land. What was it? A hardy homesteader eaking a living from some marginal land? A scar in the landscape from some indiscriminate logging activity? Just a piece of land that the rainforest couldn\’t claim? I guess we\’ll never know for sure. But for the most part you\’re just stunned by the sheer expanse of forest below uninterrupted apart from the inexorable torrent of water flowing from Andes to the Atlantic.
And then, without warning, a city appears. Mannaus. Founded in the 19th century, God knows how, by intrepid rubber magnates. A city of 2 million souls essentially cut off from the rest if the world by a 2 hour flight or 5 day boat ride. It was hard to imagine what we might find there!
What! Scotland Qualified!!! 