Piranha fishing on the Amazon! But wait…. we’re jumping ahead too quickly.
Our Amazon cruise on Iberostar’s Amazon Grand Expedition was divided into two segments: a 4-night cruise on the Rio Negro, and then a 3-night journey up the Solimoes River. Before we could see the Solimoes and go piranha fishing, we had to stop off in Manaus to change up passengers who were only doing a short cruise on just one of the two rivers.
We didn’t mind a few hours in Manaus since it gave us a chance to stretch our legs and walk up to the Teatro Amazonas (Manaus Opera House) for a tour of this opulent building in the heart of the rainforest. This Belle Époque building with its dome in the Brazilian flag colours is on UNESCO’s “tentative” list as “a model of Europeanized civility reproduced in the tropics due to the Amazon Rubber Boom in South America” (whc.unesco.org/en/tentativelists/5996). Since we had just visited Museu do Seringal Vila Paraiso (the “Rubber Museum”) the previous day and had heard stories of the ladies of the fabulously rich rubber barons sending their laundry to Europe and then importing the latest French fashions on the returning ships, it was easy to imagine the fur-clad women parading into the opera (no doubt wishing that they were back in Europe!).
After our tour of the Opera, it was time to reboard the ship to see the Rio Solimoes. This river was a muddy brown, silt laden river in complete contrast to the black water Rio Negro that we’d just come from. The silt, in combination with the annual flooding, means that the Solimoes has fertile pasture and grazing land, rather than rain forest jungle. There were more villages, more boats, and herds of cattle but less wildlife to be seen.
The tours of the wider river (as pictured below) were of swampy wetlands and local villages with beehives and trails to the giant lily pads of the Amazon. There was certainly some wildlife, since on our night excursion a “vampire fish” leapt into our boat; not sure what he was trying to flee from. But of course the best tour of all was the piranha fishing.
On the second leg of our cruise we had another Captain’s dinner (we didn’t bother with a second photo op) and a second viewing of the “meeting of the waters” (at 6:00 a.m. so we passed). And then, all too soon, our Amazon cruise was over. We went directly from the ship to the Manaus airport where another full day of flights took us to our last stop in South America, Rio de Janeiro.
See our pictures of “The Amazon; Rio Solimoes” on Flicker:
www.flickr.com/photos/100countries/albums/72177720332344285
Visit our Uruguay and the Amazon page to see all of our posts from our first trip of 2026!