Sometimes the twain shall meet (like the Amazon and the Rio Negro).

Alas, everything comes to an end sooner or later. Not only the Brazilian leg, but our winter tour around South America as a whole was drawing to a close. It was time for us to be heading back to Manaus, where there’d be a plane to São Paulo, and from there – back home. And what a fascinating route our tour had taken: Patagonia and Jujuy in Argentina > Atacama in Chile > Amazonia in Brazil! Done! Time to return to a place we hadn’t been for ages: home.

There was just one last thing we needed to see: the confluence of the Rio Negro and the Amazon itself. So it was in to a hydroplane and off we flew!…

Gigantic rivers. Monumentally huge ->

We’d been cruising around some of those channels on the Eugenio:

The anabranches and archipelagos go on forever!

Oh, Mother Nature, you really do pack some power…

The confluence of the Rio Negro and the Amazon is something you really need to view from up above:

Approaching…

And here it is! For various potamological reasons, the Amazon is terribly muddy, carrying silt and clay down from its upper reaches. The Rio Negro (Black River), meanwhile, is very much black, but also somewhat transparent:

A simply fascinating sight – the meeting of two mighty, dissimilar rivers:

I’d seen such massive movements of differently colored waters before… – way back in 2014, way over in Portugal! But that was viewing from down on the ground – not up in a plane. And anyway, the contrasts seem sharper here…

We turned around and headed in to land:

By the way, did you know there are no bridges across the Amazon at all? Yes – really: neither in the upper reaches (where the jungle is impassable), nor farther downstream (where the Amazon is rather wide for bridge-building (generally, that is). That’s how it goes. The greatest river in the world – and not a single bridge!

This bridge here is across the Rio Negro we’d just been cruising along:

Manaus from above – one of Brazil’s largest cities:

And over there – the port and fish market, where we’d be heading in an hour or so.

Once again, the same – only – bridge across the Rio Negro:

That’s it – coming in to land…

Favelas… and where in Brazil don’t you find them? // Actually: there aren’t any in the very south of Brazil; it can get chilly there.

That’s it – we’ve arrived!

Right next to the runway there was some kind of airplane graveyard:

Dozens of old planes that, for some reason, had been left here to rot and die.

Not the most pleasant sight – especially for frequent flyers. And for pilots and other crew members, probably not exactly great either.

Btw, way back in 2008 we landed here briefly for refueling. And back then there was only one such “retired” plane here:

The best hi-res photos from our LatAm-2026 trip are here.