alex gallafent

Manaus 04.27.08 / 02:43am

I’m so close. Coming in to land at Manaus – a couple of hours ago – it was a game of ‘imagine the rainforest’. I knew in advance that the Miami-Manaus flight arrives past midnight, so I wasn’t expecting to see anything except lights. Still, it was tantalizing, banking to the left and glimpsing a shimmer of water. And those lights were active somehow, especially the ones in small groupings, before the city proper. Were those lights picking a way through the forest canopy? Were they outposts of indigenous peoples, sticking close to the business of Manaus? Or was the flickering nothing more than flickering, the kind of regular lights that you’ll see whenever you land at a city of about two million people? 

Maybe the Amazon has that kind of effect on visitors; even before I’ve seen it, I’ve seen it a thousand times. It has an imaginative force that’s hard to deny, even when all you’re doing is landing in the darkness. I think it’s something I’m going to have to be careful about. It won’t be enough to wax lyrical about the scale of the Amazon, the grandeur of it all – although I won’t be able to resist doing some of that. There will have to be something more – some bones under the flesh – to make that dreamforest concrete.

In any case, if you’ve got your head in the clouds there’s nothing like the purgatory of the airport luggage conveyor belt to bring you down to earth. (Take a look at Alain de Botton’s The Art of Travel for a dose of airport erudition.) ‘Have I been good enough to earn my bag?’, I fret, wilting in the heat. No, comes the answer, in the form of a list of passengers whose bags remain in Miami. My luggage, it seems, is staying for another mojito.