Rio Madeira

Rio Madeira

After the Rio Solimoes and the Rio Negro join to form the Amazon River, the next largest tributary is the Rio Madeira. The Madeira is a brown river, almost three quarters of mile wide in some places and so narrow and rough after Porto Velho that it is no longer navigable.

During my time in Brazil I visited the village of Fazendinha at the mouth of the Maderia and I lived for over a year in Porto Velho where boat traffic comes to a halt at the Falls of Saint Anthony.

For two and a half years I lived in Nova Olinda do Norte, and visited Borba, Nova Aripuana - where I lived two months the summer of 1977 - Rosarinho, Sao Sebastiao and Uricurituba with its large population of Japonese-Brazilians.

Going up stream, between Rosarinho and Nova Olinda was the large farm of a Japanese-Brazilian known as Oka. One of Oka's enterprises was that he was the first to have frozen chickens available to sell to the river boats going up and down the river. As I mentioned previously, travel on the river is slow, especially in the flood season when you are going against the current, and included in the price of your passage are meals on board the boat. For this reason the captains were happy to have a source of supply along their route.

The Madeira is a big and bold river and it is where I learned how to drive a small eight foot by twenty foot enclosed boat we used for our missionary travels. I was adequate as a pilot, but never excellent. On the plus side I never got stuck on a sand bar and the boat never sank.

Travel on the Madeira was always an adventure because even when the river was low during the dry season, the Madeira is a swift running body of water and it always seemed to carry a large amount of obstacles, especially fallen trees.

Along the banks of the river you would see the small farms and huts of the locals known as cabocles. Normally they farmed a little, hunted a little, and fished a little, their goal to survive, not make a great profit.

More on the towns of the Rio Madeira in the next edition.