May 27, 2026
Amazonian habitation – pt. 1: land-based.
Olá pessoal!
It’s time to tell you about the places we stayed at in the Brazilian Amazon – those on water and on land. Today: land – and there was just one: the Mirante do Gavião hotel. And since we checked in straight off the yacht – that is, from the river side – and left by seaplane, we never did get to see what it looks like on the other approached-by-road side, but only from the river – and from the inside:
This hotel sits about a hundred kilometers from Manaus as the crow flies, or 200km by road. Hmmm… and São Paulo is a whopping four thousand kilometers away from here! Impressive. Approaching something like proper Russian distances, those ).
By the way, if you ever luck out (or get unlucky enough) to travel this route, it runs right through former tropical jungle. Yes, alas, it’s all been cut down. There’s basically nothing left at all! But that could be a subject for a separate post…
But back to the hotel…
As you can see: rather smart and luxurious. Best bit: nothing but greenery all around, with the walkways laid just above ground level:
Ooh! A tower! Gotta get up that…
Minutes later…
Taking in your surroundings from up high is always more interesting:
The river at a medium level:
But it’s time to head to our rooms.
Not bad in here at all! We could happily have stayed longer but we had just two nights here.
Never did manage to kick back on the balcony…
Out the window:
In all: more than decent.
The restaurant in the evening (same place as breakfast in the morning) – open-air! No walls. Lucky them down here in the tropics, with no need for central heating ever :)
Everything’s here for a leisurely stay – but we hardly took advantage of the facilities. Thus, the pool remained un-swum-in.
Looking down from above, it becomes obvious that the fish in the restaurant is always the freshest :). By the way, one of the floating structures in that cluster is a fuel station – a common sight in relatively densely-populated shores.
The Rio Negro in all its glory:
Like I say, this was what the river looked like somewhere in the middle between low and high water. At low water, everything looks different:
Turns out our hotel isn’t on a bank of the huge river at all, but somewhere set well back from a little stream that feeds into it:
But at mid-level it’s just a hundred meters or so from the hotel down to the water:
Here’s the view from the water looking back. Who’d think there’s a nice hotel over there?!…
The maximum water levels are marked on a wooden board:
Shame they don’t show meters and centimeters up from the low-water mark.
And that’s all for the land-based habitat. Water-based – coming right up!…
