As I said, I’m now in Brazil...

The Joola brought me safely to Dakar where I bussed my way to the airport. No more depending on others.

After this, quick stop-over in Paris to toothcomb all the junk I seem to be carrying around, weighing, listing, short-listing and nail-biting Angst – can I really do without this universal plug? – and at last I’ve got a genuinely portable, small and above all non-extensible backpack. The kitchen sink can stay at home.

Minitel, internet, bucket shops and anything else and still no singles available to Rio, wrong nationality or something. At least, that’s what they say. I end up with a relatively cheap ticket to Cayenne.

November 3rd, arrive in French Guyana. The town is about 12 odd miles away. I decide to walk and end up hitch-hiking.

A trainee male nurse drops me off at Avenue Ex-President of the French Republic where I find a cheap hotel for the night. Cheap but not cheap – all depends on the budget. But I’m tired.

Up at six and wander about town. Cayenne: a crumbling corruption of wood, rust and corrugated iron. Place Palmiste, back to Avenue ex-Thingamajig etc., down to the beach, the sea. On the horizon: islands, Papillon... Looking at the state of the buildings I understand what he was talking about better. But no, I won’t be visiting Devil’s Island. I want to get to Brazil as soon as possible, learn Portuguese and get rid of the language course I’ve been lugging around for the past three months.

The banks open, I change some money and off I go, 100 km of nice and easy hitch-hiking down to Régina, where the road stops. The next stretch, the only missing link between Venezuela and Terra del Fuego, is still being built, completion scheduled for 1998... Two contractors are on the job, one working northwards, the other southwards. They’re still on the earth-moving stage. And there’s another 10-15 miles where only the trees have been cut down.

I reach the raft-and-rope ferry where a large sign says "no entry". The ferryman tells me to bugger off too. Very kind. A road technician says he can drop me off at site office 39 K. After that, it’s up to me. An hour or so’s walk later, I decide to kip down for the night. Twenty yards from the road: the jungle.

The jungle, genuine jungle: snakes, jaguars, poison-arrow frogs, guerrillas, monsters, Indiana Jones booby-traps – the unknown.

Making a lot of noise, I wade through the knee-high sea of leaf cover into the tangle of green. Fungus, lianas and spiders, nothing wrong with that.

I hang my hammock, a parting gift from clients, between two trees. Although light and compact, it is very uncomfortable. The best description would be full spinal wedgy. I buy another one later. Now, I have other things to do. I sit down to sew my yet-to-be-patented anti-mosquito pyjamas: anorak with visor and gloves in tulle. It works, all it needs is a plug-hole for the rivers of perspiration. Back to the drawing-board.

Pitch black silence.

Wossat? A flash of orange electroshock banging against trees and branches turns out to be an enormous firefly like a lorry with indicators on.

Later, monsters-under-the-bed scare caused by nasty-sounding rustling and rushing around the undergrowth. Bird, tapir, jaguar? The next day they told me a jaguar had already killed three workers.

I go to sleep. Dying is less of a tither that way.

Breakfast is water and dried apricots. Then I start walking again. Half an hour later I stop, exhausted, dripping with sweat. The heat! And it’s only nine o’clock. Now I understand why the road’s not finished.

This is real hill-climbing country, up and down, up and down, peaks and valleys, rivers and rises. The road’s full of hairpin bends, but they’re vertical not horizontal. All that’s missing is the chain-gang. It’s ten o’clock and the shade is rapidly melting into the trees. The ground is a rust-red territe, impossible mud in the wet, baked brick-like sharp in the dry. The road snakes on forever, rutted by man-high wheels of bulldozers, gouged and chiselled by rain and landslides, and radiating the heat of the sun.

Walk, sweat, climb, sweat, walk. Howler monkeys bark out their territories, birds caw and whistle, insects buzz and skittle. I see beautiful orange butterflies with brown stripes, yellow ones, lime-green ones, but no cars. I have a litre and a half of water. Time to ration. Keep on moving. My feet hurt, my rucksack is getting heavier and heavier... Idiot: forty-five years old and still reckons he’s a nipper, wants to walk across the world! Imbecile.

From time to time I come across a flattish section increasing my average, but it still ain’t fast. My tee-shirt’s drenched, my shorts are starting to rub, a shoulder strap seems to have compressed a nerve and my hand’s gone pale and numb. Half way up a read bastard of a hill, I collapse panting in the one foot of shade available.

In three hours, I’ve maybe done four or five miles. Pathetic.

And I haven’t got much water left either.

My strategic analysis (in other words excuses for not walking now) are interrupted by an uneven noise, a sort of grinding metal sound. I can’t even tell which direction it’s coming from. And even if I could, even if it is a car, given my hitch-hiking average yesterday – one car every fifty-odd – who’s to say they’ll stop anyway?

At last it arrives, bumping and struggling up the hill, a big JCB with huge spatulas on each side, sort of cross between a stick insect and a sci-fi film-maker’s nightmare. There’s no room for passengers next to the driver, but he lets me climb on anyway. Sitting astride one of the telescopic legs, I ride the next half hour or so to the other side’s works area where an engineer drives me to St Georges d’Oyapock.

No, the road won’t be finished for another two years yet, and the bridge on the Oyapock will take two years too, and they haven’t even started it yet.

St Georges: one telephone, cayman for lunch for those who want it and a beautiful river sailing through the forest. The taxis have out-boards.

Over there, Brazil, customs, Portuguese, garimpeiros (prospectors), gold and diamond dealers, buyers, sellers, rip-off merchants, big-timers and small-timers. And some very beautiful women.

Six pm, bus to Macapá, main town of Amapá State. Still the same red road, but less tiring. Ten o’clock stop at unknown watering-place. Sitting quietly on the dusty floor of the toilet, a single duck’s egg. Perfectly white.

Macapá. Morning. New-world new-town of squares and squares and a bloody river that won’t flow straight. Macapá, town of streets with no name, no direction, no shade. In a bar, bewitched by my staggering beauty, a young lady offers me a coffee.

I wander about town, visit the church, the fortress built (with stone transported from Europe as ballast) to repel the British and the French. Nowadays they use guides: "Bom dia! Palavraspalavraspalavras!..." Visitor: "Sorry, don’t understand Portuguese." Guide: "Ah: inglês? Palavraspalavraspalavras!..." Visitor: "Lamento, no comprendo portuguais" Guide: "Ah: francês? Palavraspalavraspalavras!...". I eat something greasy covered in breadcrumbs and batter and dipped in oil, then go back to the hotel for a rather costly night of dreams.

Breakfast: something greasy... etc. Bus to the port of Santana where I scrummage my way through the ticket touts who assure me they have the best prices but there aren’t any boats today anyway

For five Reais less (R$5, one Real, "r" pronounced like a silent "h", plural Reais), I board the Nazareno leaving at 6 pm.

In the meantime, I go to a café and swat up on my irregular verbs. Two lovely little lasses of nine or ten with trigger-happy smiles and infectious laughs boss each other about for the privilege of teaching the ignorant foreigner the awful vowels, diphthongs et triphthongs tripping up the lusaphone explorer.

That night, encounter with the flower of Amazonia: farinha. Oh my God! Farinha! Manioc meal. A very course pebbledash grout like unpressed chipboard. It dries the mouth and terrorises anyone with time-share teeth and gums. Luckily, it is tasteless, if it had one it would be inconceivably vile. Once, no more.

Out there, on the banks, single light bulbs dangling from electrical lianas. Very cold night, pitstops in the middle of nowhere.

Rude awakening at dawn. This is twelve-hours-light-twelve-hours-dark country. Breakfast: sweet coffee, salt biscuits, and as much warm margarine as you want. People speak to me but I understand nothing. I can’t make head or tail of what they’re saying so I resign myself smiling and "não falo português". Even the deaf and dumb Francisco uses a different sign language to the one I know.

I look around at the impenetrable green of forest and water. Somewhere, piranhas, manatees, monkeys. Where is the red ouakari?

The day passes slowly, the night arrives suddenly. A lady – iniquitous fruit of Father Christmas and Ena Sharples – invites me into her hammock. No thanks, I’m very tired.

Santarém. Francisco shows me to a cheap hotel, Hotel Brasil, then speeds off to evangelise use of the Brazilian Deaf-and-Dumb Association Card.

For R$10 a night (approx. £3) I have a too-well sprung and haphazardly upholstered bed, grubby don’t-touch-anything showers, stool-washing toilets (I’ll explain later) and very good breakfast.

The manager, cross-eyed paunch of a man, opens the gate in the language barrier according to the good old principles of yore. If the damned foreigner doesn’t understand the Queen’s Portuguese, then shout at him till he bloody well does.

Time to learn it. I buy a cheap tape recorder and sit down to work. I’ve already used Linguaphone for German, Swedish and Spanish, and it’s very good. This one is terrible. Boring, stupid, tedious and trivial. And the accent’s European so no-one understands a thing. But that’s all I’ve got and if I’ve lugged it around for the past four months it’s not to dump it in the bin. Too bad. I’ll deal with the accent later. But– o lusubrious lingo – there’s worse to come. I buy myself a dictionary. Oy vey iz mir!

It is the worst dictionary I have ever seen, even worse than the rather wittily-titled Dictionary of Cuisine French which told me that the English for "sauté" was "jumped". Animal rights, fair enough, vegetarianism, veganism, fair enough too, but what do you do with jumped-up potatoes? A hundred years ago, I suppose you could have called in the peelers (sorry, that was bad).

I digress: it informs me that "those" is the plural of "that", but not how you say it in Portuguese; I learn that "arco", a bow, is used for "throwing arrows", that "ponto de exclamação" is a "note of admiration"! It has "aduncity", "algid", "anile" (senile woman), "bibulous", "bice", "constringe", "depauperate", "epopee", "helve", "icteric", "knaggy", "quadruman", "to smutch", "waul" (something that cats do?), but useful words like "saucepan", "Brazil nut" or "enthusiasm"?...

It lists "disgustful", "inexaustless" and such a long string of imbecilities that I’m going to try and get it in the Guinness Book of Records for most errors per page.

O sweet little Mini Dicionário Compacto of mine, thou dost smutch me knaggily.

I have this feeling that Portuguese is going to be a long, hard slog.

I wander about the town, visit the church, the market, the "lanches" (straight borrowing from English. When are they going to give it back?) where they make the most extraordinary fruit juices imaginable, especially the far-from-anile lady at "Toque a Natureza" who chews her gum with such refinement that only a hardened laryngologist could admire. Let those bibulous of French footwash try to imagine the pure squash of a cupuaçu or muruci, a forest of flavours smooth, rich, sharp, tangy, sweet, fruity, full and sensual (sorry, waitress again). Watch and dribble as butterfly fingers prepare the fleshy ingredients of oral delight, massage them into her electric cornucopia, add a couple of tingle-shiver cubes of ice, a sweet pinch or two to liven things up, and two very full cups of milk. Then she plugs in the energy... A jolt, and her hands start to vibrate, whipping things up with consummate skill. Slowly at first, frottage becomes friction, friction becomes fusion, working faster and faster, the juices rise up into a frenetic explosion of frothy, creamy...

That was good.

Avocado, banana, avocado and banana, cashew-nut fruit, bitter açai, peanut and guaraná (said to be the most beautiful plant of the Amazon, the fruit has numerous properties, not the least of which being its staggering marketing success) an odd mixture, but very nice, guava, melon, orange, mango, pineapple, pineapple and mandarin, pineapple and ginger, pineapple and Kleenex.

And all that for 35 p! two glassfuls!

I shall go back. It’s the juices.

Santarém suits me. It’s a medium town of a quarter of a million inhabitants, and not too many diversions to divert me from my immediate task of learning Portuguese. It’s hard to get to know a country without knowing the language. Got to break it’s back in four weeks. I negotiate at the hotel and get the price down to R$6.66 per day for three weeks. Off to the bank.

Well, well, well: an HSBC here. That’s my bank. Before leaving, having had a couple of hiccups with my Cirrus, I applied for a Visa Gold. Shoestring travel perhaps, but well-heeled too... I insert the card, it comes out, I insert the card a second time, it comes out again. Right, I turn the card over and insert it. No... one more option: you insert the card in completely the opposite way to the picture on the machine. Obvious when you think of it. Success at last. Choice of language: English; Amount R$300; PIN: (not a compete idiot). Knaggy noise, the card spits out and the screen delights up: "This card is not recognised on our network. Have a nice day!"

Thank you.

Praça da Matriz (Matrix Square), I find Francisco in the middle of a very lively albeit quiet palaver with two young thigh-buy ladies. I can hear the gling-a-ling gringo in their eyes. The game opens with the queen’s advance, a direct move. I bring out my knight. She attacks with a little porn. I hide behind a bishop. "I wan ficki-ficki wiz iou". Check? Sorry, I’m a priest. Mate.

This is when an even nastier palaver begins: internecine war. Like cats in a scat except that paws are less designed for broken bottles: threats, menace and hatred are spit, spat and hissed around the arena. Five minutes later, having made her peers wet themselves with terror if you see what I mean, this stuntwoman for Raging Bull starts slamming her eyelids down at me in winks hard enough to smash nuts. They may be small, but they’re mine and I want to keep them. I stick to my vows.

And, anyway, there’s a church I want to see.

Praça da Matriz. I’ve got the vague impression that "matriz" means "uterus" as it does, I think, in German. Not sure. Obviously, my dictionary constringes me to look elsewhere. Another clue is its being located right in front of the church of Nossa Senhora da Concepção, our lady of conception.

The church is cool and has the standard statues and stations of the cross, aggravated by Brazilian cathkitsch. Marie, poor girl, is almost drenched beneath Barbara Cartloads of lace and enough tacky plastic red roses to make yer heart bleed.

Up on the ceiling, the Holy Spirit has opted for manifestation as obese pigeon with Marty Feldman eyes letting him keep track of any itches that need scratching on the crucifixes in front, below and behind him.

Next day, ill all morning, noon and night – unbelievable back and rib ache, can’t move, can’t not move – celestial spanking for blasphemy.

At the hotel, Paul, an Australian adventurer and Buddhist teacher, the manager and a Brazilian missionary back from Africa and on his way to a second spell in Japan, compete for first prize in the "who will save Simon thanks to his homeopathic, jungle-juice or megamaternal recipe" competition.

Back on my feet thanks to my own methods (do nothing, patience, and wait), I start getting to know my antipodean neighbour. Travelled all over the world, philosopher and expert in "the Tibetan question", that still doesn’t stop him getting pissed as a newt and behaving like a hooligan after a day’s fishing (bait: 40°) with the boys (hotel manager and friends). But I like him, easy to get on with and interesting to listen to. My missionary has a numbers problem. He can’t remember whether it’s 206 or 306 languages he speaks fluently. He can also say "hello" in English.

That night: storm, not very strong, but enough to reduce thirty boats to firewood and thirty families to tears. I saw one man standing on the beach, immobile, staring at the neither fully-sunk nor fully-sunk-in bankruptcy. Scavengers picked their way through the wreckage and walked off with the spoils of years of promises to do some refitting soon.

In the river, surrounded by water, a little girl plays at the tiller of a ghost ship. Wheel of fortune.

The millennium doesn’t seem to have much importance here. There’s another date on the horizon: the 500 years since the discovery of Brazil. Now and again, I come across a display with the number of days left – 368, only 172... – no-one really knows. But who cares. There are things of greater moment than that: Terra Nostra and the loves and lives of Italian immigrants of years gone by.

Will green-eyed Matheu, faithful as a venereal disease, leave green-eyed Rosana and follow the destiny that script-writers and 100 million households demand? Will green-eyed Juliana listen to her heart and break the chains that bind her to the rich and powerful adoptive father (brown eyes, yuck) of her love-child and at last find true happiness in the arms of whoever it is she’s meant to?

Red-eyed, Brazil watches and waits.

The actress playing Juliana is so beamingly PRETTY she looks about to pop.

Meanwhile, one the other soap, Vila Madalena, we have one (green-eyed) actor whose facial expression reminds me of a paranoid schizophrenic looking for the beetles behind his eyes, and another (need I say) with two: completely shocked and slightly shocked.

But as far as gripping the heart and soul of Brazilians is concerned, this is nothing. Creativity, energy, joy, blood, sweat and tears, all that is noble, all that is beautiful comes together into one supreme art: futebol. Oh, the howls of agony, the look of disbelief, the appeal for witness, for justice, the eyes that would shame Disney cartoonists back to art school, the clenched paralysis on the floor, the brave attempt to stand up and immediate recovery when substitution is suggested. But everyone kicks people in the shins, John, everyone, you did yourself five minutes ago. Remember? And, anyway, it was your other leg.

Wind, rain, Terra Nostra, nothing can stop it.

And in the grandstand, the green orgasm climaxes in collective ecstasy. A zoology of hideous grimace and savage gesticulation, of rampant insanity and vicarious victory.

The clock ticks on, the players weary, the coaches screech, the pom-pom girls have lost their bounce. On the touch, the reserves are awaiting their moment of glory, stallions at the starting gate, neighing and whinnying. You can see the muscles grinding in their skulls, you can see the need for action, to do something, to be unleashed! All that’s needed is a little more effort, more strength, more speed, more energy, more determination, more... Just do it.

Football. Brazil...

Anyone trying to understand Brazilian culture just has to watch Planeta Xuxa, a children’s with a very big question mark programme hosted by a certain Xuxa (slightly more catchy than Maria das Graça) Meneghel. She’s fairly pretty, has a winning personality, charm enough to sell by the pound (24-hr hotline: all major credit cards accepted) and the most phenomenal range of smiles I’ve ever seen.

Those who know tell me – and given the number of people who read newspapers no-one’s going to baulk at another second-hand item of dubious information – that she started her career as porn-film starlet (which People-type magazines prefer to call "model"; but then, so did Madonna, see "Gang-Banged in the Bronx" – available in all good red-light districts). Having mastered the splits, she then used her head to get first into dancing and then into Pelé’s bed (or vice versa) and is now the most popular children’s entertainer the country has ever known.

Planeta Xuxa encapsulates Brazil: hysteria, sex and children. Not a square inch of screen without a faceful of rhythm-swivel boob, bounding buttock or sky-high thigh, and not an instant without a horde of screaming, shrieking, shouting, singing, nose-picking brats, angels, darlings, monsters, tantrums, little miss perfects or any other cause for vasectomy making a perfectly awful bloody racket.

The guest of honour the other night was Brazil’s current sex symbol. She has dyed blond hair and wears a net-curtain affair that starts on the bridge of her nose and stops just below the chin. And shoes. I think. Who looks?

The interview started off with a forefinger prodding the left tit to ascertain its biological origin, went through the "how hard it is for a woman to become famous and retain her integrity" routine, and ended up in true-life confessions and swimming-pool of tears.

Prediction: Brazil will be the first country to show sex live on TV as children’s entertainment.

For a couple of days the hotel has been invaded by a bizarre gang of exiles from the human race: the eerie, the wiry, the whorish and the retarded, making a menagerie of noise and slamming doors night and day. But there’s lots of them and it’s good for business. Much better than one quiet guest, all the more so since noise here is quieter than silence.

I still can’t understand Portuguese at all, and I can’t even pronounce it properly. I go for lessons to young man called Clayton. Not very Brazilian? Oh yes it is. Over here, it’s perfectly normal to come across a Tom Cruise (pronounced Tom-i Cruise-i) Oliveira de Ribeiro, a Sean Connery Ribeiro de Lopes, or even a Walt Disney Lopes de Oliveira. To each his own.

He speaks, I repeat, he speaks, I repeat, I forget. Damn, bloody language.

Portuguese is by far the ugliest language I’ve ever tried – after Dutch of course. It drops half the word and shouts the vowels, it’s full of nasal noises sounding like a B-movie victim trying to talk with carpet tape over his mouth.

Lesson 1: think and speak constipated.

Which, given the food, is not complicated. Standard meal: fish or meat, nearly warm rice, cold spaghetti, floppy salad, farinha. Revolting.

Which could also explain the proportions of the Santareinitas. Like liposuction patients whose machine was plugged in the wrong way round, their curves start somewhere mid-heifer, stack up hazardously around the skeleton, compacting towards the upper torso, and disappear somewhere behind the double chins. The naming of parts is not an exact science.

There’s more. They ladies of the town smear large quantities of oil into their hair, producing mops of dark glossy ringlets dripping down their backs. One shrinks from touching. The Portuguese for curly is "encaracolado", literally, "besnailed".

On top of this, they go for slinky lycra hugging every bulge and dimple of their glyco-packed bodies. The overall effect is to make them look like sausages dipped in cooking-fat. No surprise the country has a problem of battered wives.

I don’t go for none of that. To keep my figure young and lovely I peck at picolés. They’re fruit ice-lollies made from so many different types of fruit that I just have to eat them – reportage oblige – in Antarctic amounts. Half of the names I’ve never heard of – acerola, graviola, muruci, tucunaré (no, that one’s a fish) cupuaçu, açai; others I do, but not always for ice-cream: abacate (avocado – delicious), abacaxi (pineapple), amendoim (peanut – well, if you insist), all the red-orange-green ones from Europe, and tapioca. Tapioca: no. Beating all other school meals with the possible exception of burnt soggy rice pudding with upside down moonscape crater skin was tapioca, especially when bloodied nastily by wet strawberry jam with pips that get stuck in your teeth. Ice-lollies are meant to be nice and fresh and fruity. You can suck them till the colour goes, you can lick them and bite them, you can slip them down young ladies’ cleavages, you can... whatever... but you don’t chew them for hours on end like those knotted animal-skin bones they give to toothless dogs.

The Amazonians love them. Why? They come from manioc.

Today was a special day. Once I’d spent the couple of hours needed to track down an agoraphobic bus-stop, I went to Alter-do-Chão where, everyone tells me, I would see the most beautiful beach in Amazonia. There were lovelier things indeed. The undressing was fast and fervent. Tongue, lips, hand, eyes, senses sharpened by the heat and urgency, I knew I had at last found the one to share a place in my heart next to the caramel-toffee ice-cream of Stockholm 1982, a chocolate lolly. I ate three, one after the other.

My only regret is not being able to say that Brazil is the only country in the world with solid mahogany ice-cream sticks.

Back to the hotel. Christmas is coming. The manager has made an asset-enhancement investment for the guest-room: a lovely string of multicoloured fairy lights. It flashes on and off. And it plays Music. And it plays Music. And it plays Music... Every thirty seconds, its electronic loop pierces the air, the walls and the ear-drums with the most horrible selection of refrains that this time of year can spawn, as long as they fit in the eight notes available. That night, not even Terra Nostra could keep its viewers viewing. The manager, I discover, is as deaf as a post. The next day, the beep-bip-bip-beep-bipbipbip-beep – beep-bip-bip-beep-bipbipbip-beep sings quietly to itself, somebody having given it the Vatican snip. Peace and goodwill to all men.

The Santarenos are marvellously resistant to any word I say.

I can read well enough. After all, it’s a Latin language like French. As I wander about the town, I collect samples of linguistic interest. Some of them are little jewels, like this one: Walter-resistant watches. They sell Durex batteries (non-spill presumably, but perhaps they would say ours make for more electric sex?), Dog underpants (why not, we have boxer shorts...) and Bummer football boots (launched after the 1998 World Cup?), there are Faith-in-God Diners, Born-Again Groceries, Jesus-Loves-You Xerox Stores, but you have to draw the line somewhere. It’s time for a shear but I ain’t going anywhere near the Moustache Unisex Beauty Parlour.

I’m not having anyone besnailing me.

For the past week, the main square has been if not buzzing (after all we’re only two degrees or so south of the equator) then gently fluttering with activity to prepare the town for Cirio 99, the feast of Nossa Senhora da Concepção. The old girl is taken down from her niche, bondaged up onto a chariot and paraded through the streets to the church of Saint Sebastian (patron saint of penetration, dodgy...) where she is raised aloft for the adoration of popcorn sellers, praised for her efficacy – and, given the abundance of twenty-six-year-old grandmothers, at least she earns it – then hauled back to square one for another year of townspeople disobeying Commandment No. 2. This is the one about not making and/or worshipping graven images (i.e. sculptures) of anything on heaven or earth. This would include crucifixes and plaster of Paris statuettes of the Virgin Mary. Now, I don’t wish to enter into polemics or anything but He does seem fairly firm about this. After all, He does put it before murder, theft, lying and all-purpose covetousness, and He is supposed to be a bit of an authority on the matter... Whatever.

For two weeks, the Santarenos give free rein to their basest impulses: singing, dancing and making an infernal racket. Fireworks at eight o’clock in the morning? Why not? The fact that they’re absolutely colourless and invisible doesn’t bother anyone: you can hear them. Sing the Santareno municipal anthem? Very patriotic, very civic-minded, but TWO HOURS, NON-STOP? However, what staggers me the most is that for a country that loves its music as much as Brazil, they sing so awfully. When the crowd is big enough, crowd-singing is almost impossible to be bad, even the wafting chant of football stadiums can be a goose-pimple experience. This is absolutely the worst crowd-singing I have ever heard, and what it lacks in harmony it makes up for in volume.

But who cares? It’s party time and to the fair we go! The four big wheels and dodgems aren’t working because the electricity’s not been hooked up yet, but you can always try and win the gold-coloured plastic ring with adjustable band to fit all fingers in the green and transparent ball that the crane always judders at the last minute and slips off into the carpet of marbles. Or have a drink in a plastic bag with a straw and watch the crowd. And what a crowd! Bustling hustling singing dancing flirting teasing ogling leering staggering groping grouping going off and coming back. There’s a man standing with a brick on his head to encourage technico-divine assistance in the forthcoming construction of his house. Someone else has 50 kg of grain, and there’s a very optimistic lad wearing the helm of a scale-model boat – no cap size problems for him.

May their wishes come true!

Up on stage, schoolgirls from gangly to gorgeous dressed in Carmen spin around in perfectly executed choreography. Applause from parents, friends and crowd. Next, orchestra, two thirds on cymbals, perform "best of classics". Applause from parents, friends and crowd. Then some boys do a male version of the French cancan: a mixture of West Side Story, Karate Kid and Amazon Rap. Applause... and more singing.

You’ve all seen those orange contraptions they sell for slicing optimistic amounts of fruit and vegetables that end up going mouldy and into the dustbin. Use one, and there’s a horrible moment when you realise that the red liquid gushing out is not the juice from that plump beetroot you were preparing for a borscht but five fingersful of your own existence. It’s roughly this sort of numb, stunned, horrified sensation that I start to feel about now. Karaoke, yes, it’s certainly karaoke... but... I can’t believe it... they can’t, it’s not possible, they can’t do that, can they? Oh yes they can: it’s karaoke and it’s Ave Maria.

Religion is everywhere, there’s no getting away from it. You do not walk past the church without crossing yourself. It reminds me of babies opening their mouths at the approach of the spoon. A sort of stimulus-response without any real thought behind it. Form without content.

There’s something else that intrigues me too. In a lanche, one day, I asked for a "guaraná". It’s a sort of Amazonian coke, based (if you can say "based" when it only contains 0.1%) on a fruit, carbonated, sweetened and e-numbered. The exact question was "tem guaraná?" which means "is there any guaraná?" (which is how you ask "do you have any guaraná?) and the answer was "tem": "there is" (we do). After this, you have to insert a fairly long pause for the following thought process: that man’s just asked whether we have guaraná. Yes, we’ve got guaraná, we’ve got guaraná all right, plenty of it in fact, it’s in the fridge, I saw it earlier. Umm. Why the silence? Why’s he looking at me like that with his eyebrows raised? I wonder. Let me see... he asked for guaraná, hum, he asked for guaraná, now what could he mean by that? Of course! Clever me! Maybe he wants some guaraná...

The lady then rattles off a list of products and, almost certain of what’s going to happen, I ask for a Sprite guaraná. And I knew it: Sprite, plain, bog standard lemonade. I expose the problem to the waitress, going through the difference between generic products and brand names, sub-types and parent groups. She says yes, smiles sweetly, and walks off, not having understood a blithering word I’ve said.

It’s not the same thing as asking, for example, for a Hoover. Go to your local store and ask for one and you’ll be shown a range of vacuum-cleaners. Here, it could be anything from dish-washer to inflatable-doll with integrated groans (please print your name in block capitals).

Guaraná is a type of drink with a specific flavour and is not any old soft drink.

But ask for a guaraná, and there’s one chance in two you’ll be offered a Gury orange (contains sodium benzoate, potassium sorbate, crepuscular yellow would you believe it colouring agent...), Coke or even beer.

Cunning tactics are required. You ask for a brand that (you think) only manufactures guaraná: "Tem Baré?" "Não tem, não" (no we don’t, no). And they offer you Gury orange, Coke... You put on your best American actor’s smile and ask, between gritted teeth, whether they have another brand of guaraná. Another desultory rummage produces another list like before: Gury orange, Coke, Fanta, beer... But this time, using the good old stand-on-tiptoe-and-lean-over-as-far-as-you-can strategy, you say: "And that! what’s that then?" "That" is a bottle of guaraná bearing the brand name Real, Regente, Magistral, Antarctica, Tuchaua, Tai, Schincariol, etc.

Nowadays I go straight to the fridge.

On another occasion, much later, I was offered a guaraná. "Yes please", I said, and found myself in front of a plate of fish and rice...

There’s guaraná all over the place. How they manage to sell it remains a mystery. It’s a name without meaning. Form without content.

It loses me completely. But that’s what travelling’s all about. Somewhere, there’s something I can’t see and I insist on looking for it through European glasses. Maybe guaraná being a local brew means it’s not fit for international jet-setters used to supping the more refined cocktails of western civilisation. Gringos drink Coca-Cola, don’t they?

But I like it. There are loads of things I don’t understand, and not just the language. I don’t understand their mania for standing in shop doorways bellowing into microphones and deafening customers already brain-dead by the store’s sound system and the mammoth loudspeakers on the back of advertising trucks. I don’t understand why a country wetter than an industrial car wash should have toilet cisterns that only contain the pint and a tenth needed to rinse dejections without actually evacuating them. And, above all, I don’t understand they sinister infatuation for kaleidoscopic coffins. The three-ply hand-painted to look like hardwood are indeed repugnant. So be it. But do we really need punch-in-the-face purple? Sky blue? Aha, sky, that’s where heaven is... I see, I think.

But that’s Brazil. They love colour. Houses can be scarlet with khaki trim, baby pink with lilac doors and navy-blue windows. When they calm down it’s orange and green with turquoise woodwork. At Manaus I saw a three or four storey building painted bright canary yellow, pavement included.

Altogether, I take six lessons with Clayton, when he arrives on time, when he doesn’t forget. On those days, I talk – figure of speech – with the lovely Joseane, an attractive dark-eyed woman of twenty-eight who divorced her husband for sexually abusing their son. Life here is as happy, musical and friendly as it can be base and hard. She earns one and a half salaries (a "salary" means "minimum monthly wage", about R$134 or £44, unit of measurement for lower-bracket incomes) about £66/month, and she’s well paid. I’m finding it hard sticking to my ideal budget of £200.

And yet I eat cheaply. Juices are incredibly filling and inexpensive. I often go and see my friend at the Chapuri lanche near the river, an immense smile of a man who, obviously, can’t make out a word I say. And vice versa. But we understand each other, we think, and get on well. I have a "salgado" – something savoury with no less than 300% fat – and he always insists I have a fruit juice with it: 50 centavos, 17 p the lot. Sometimes he won’t take my money.

For another 50 centavos, I can buy a bag of crisps, thin slices of sweet banana fried gold in salt. Very very nice. You don’t go swimming afterwards.

This evening, I bought a cheese-waffle-type affair (sorry Montignac). It’s for later. I put it on the table and get out my road map of Brazil – only one I could find – and start drooling over rivers to explore, animals to see – maybe the red ouakari? – and strange encounters to be made... There was an ad on the box the other night. A tourist gets caught by natives who take him back to their chief, who turns out to be a very sexy blonde: "Ah, at last someone to speak English with... You do speak English, don’t you?" He ends up in the pot. Rivers, certainly no shortage of them. And such evocative names! The Santareno river Tapajós that floats down from far-off Mundurucânia; the Xingu that springs out of the Mato Grosso, the Rios Moju, Jauaru, Baracuxi, Macucuaú, Itanhauã, Unini, Aripuanã; and the big ones: Solimões, Madeira, the Branco and Negro, the Amazon! Water six thousand kilometres long, that climbs up trees in the rain, that’s called Caquetá in Colombia and Japurá in Brazil, that smuggles in from Bolivia, Peru, Venezuela, Surinam...

And again! Two hours later. Whenever I look at a map, the same thing! Where was I? Ah yes, the waffle that goes into my mouth... Strange taste though, then again if I’d wanted fish and chips I could have gone to Clacton. On the other hand, it does remind me of a Corsican cheese I once bought outside Saint Lazare station: rich and tangy, sharp and tingly. Odd feeling in my lower lip, like pins and needles. I glance at the wrapping-paper: hundreds of tiny ochre-coloured ants go about their business, indifferent to the cruel fate of their sisters. Travel changes your eating-habits.

One day left before leaving, at last, for Manaus. A few times now, I’ve walked past a curious little museum that looks very much like somebody’s front room. Now and again, I stick my head in for a quick look. It really is a bit kitsch. Who cares, let’s have a look at this so-called Museo Dica Frazão. A grandmother so bent by the years she’s vertical again grips hold of my arm. There was an ancient milliner, she stoppeth... Smiles at me.

It certainly is kitsch, but exquisite. Standing around the room like wallflowers waiting for their cavalier, a ballroom of magnificent hand-stitched gala dresses. Not many, but each one a unique masterpiece painstakingly put together from native forest raw materials. The names of the plants and trees? She can’t really remember any more. The one that looks like albino rolling-tobacco for giants might, she thinks, be patchouli roots. She’s not very sure. Those wispy things, they might perhaps be "malva". One that fascinates me is a sort of natural weave. It’s like a body-stocking between the wood and the bark. The Indians she buys it from know how to get it out and keep its loop intact. Dica Frazão turns it into a wasp-waist bodice. It’s breathable and stretchable.

Raphia, "buruti" and "tucumã" straw, phloem, all sorts of bits and bobs from trees and plants, and month after month of broderie anglaise and invisible needlework. Superb.

Nowadays, of course, an employee or two do the same job on sewing-machines, tourisme oblige. But here – it is her lounge – an entire lifetime devoted to designing and creating the ultimate gowns for her sensuous and sometimes very sexy Amazons.

As a parting-gift, she gives me some samples of her materials, plus two visiting-cards for when I go home, so other people can come and see her work:

Museo Dica Frazão – Rua Floriano Peixoto 281 – Santarém

Tel. 091 522 1026, no fax, no e-mail.

Next day: departure. I say goodbye to Clayton and Joseane, to M. Chapuri and she who makes my sap rise, and I take the bus, the Orla Fluvial, an old ’58 Mercedes with wooden seats, which drops me off at the port.

I look up and see something I’ve never seen before: a perfectly circular rainbow around the sun. Meteorologists: explanation please.

For unknown reasons, the Lirio do Mar II is not sailing. For obvious reasons, Moreira da Silva III puts its prices up, from R$25 to 30. Ooh, I don’t like that. I argue and haggle and end up clinching at R$28. Wow! Watch out when Simon hits the stock exchange.

It’s a banana boat that’s dirty and packed to the gills. Finally manage to get to sleep, constantly jabbed by hyperactive mother and son on one side and terrified of snapping grissini-like nonagenarian on the other.

Breakfast: sweet coffee, salt biscuits, and as much warm margarine as you want.

The river is at mid-level, you can see the high-water mark several (4/5?) yards higher. The banks are sculpted into cliffs of clay. Every year, thousands of tons of iron-rich earth collapse into the water, turning it brown and widening its bed. Major slides, when the bank calves chunks big as a houseful of bricks, are due to a giant snake moving about. It’s true, at least three different people tole me.

Two days’ journey: Santarém – Parintins – Itacoatiara – Manaus. Time to look and watch. I see a toucan – four wingbeats, torpeeedo, seven wingbeats, torpeeeeeedo... – I think. Later on, the green dazzle of a parrot. Pink or grey dolphins roll and loll about the water, I see a bird stab its beak, flick a flash of silver into the air, then swallow it whole. I look into the trees for signs of life.

On the bank, a solitary cemetery: twelve or so white crosses.

When he works José is a painter and decorator, or farm labourer, KP, anything. And when he doesn’t work, i.e. six months of the year, he travels. He has an insatiable need to talk and to be with people. He talks to anyone and everyone. Children love him – and so do women. José is neither a Casanova nor a Don Juan, just a romantic, frivolous, seductive flirt with a definite gift of the gab. He falls in love at least once a week. He spent many years in Brussels and speaks perfect Frenchuguese. Hard to work out sometimes. Another one who’s been around the world twice and back again. You can see by his rucksack. They don’t make them like that anymore: frayed yellow nylon over bendy steel frame, shoelace gathered round the top and leather straps with rusty buckles. Doesn’t matter, it’s still hanging together, it’ll do for a bit longer. A real traveller’s rucksack.

He often comes over to where my hammock is. Reason: pretty mum with black curly hair and laughter in her eyes, and we get on. In two days, I learn a lot. His marriage to a Danish woman, his life and son still in Copenhagen, his divorce (the bitch), his childhood in Angola, tyrannical brute of a father, apple-picking in Australia, his co-travelling brother, currently – temporarily – married to a Brazilian in Belgium, his jobs in England, Unites States, French Guyana, the girls in Caracas, La Paz, Manaus... The girls on the boat.

He buys sweets, eats one and gives the rest away to the sponge of children that follow him around. There’s no shortage of them, all over the place, like spiders: shake ’em off and they still leave a glistening filament of bodily excretions clinging to you.

The boat is packed. Upper deck, there’s about fifty of us – a racket and squawk and chase of children, salesmen, grandparental crèches, lots of single mums – and down below, sharing hammock space with bananas, mangoes and mandarins, the same thing. Plus a very beautiful woman.

She’s called Rosa, Rosa Alba (white rose of Albion?), but doesn’t like her second name. She comes over to ask for a light. "Não fumo, sorry, don’t smoke." Doesn’t matter, she gets out her lighter.

She’s going back home with her sister and four kids (2+2). To Manaus, to her husband. Am I married? No. Communication difficult. When tongues fail, the eyes translate. Later on, she comes up to see me. Sits on my hammock. She talks to me, I listen and smile. I pick out the odd word here and there, so does she. Eye speak, so does she. I touch her knee. The light – always a haphazard affair on these boats – fizzles out. Another energy surge. The light comes back on. The electrons keep buzzing.

New fizzle. She melts. Inside and onto me. Appetiser of desire. When the eyes translate, the tongue always ends up getting involved.

"Come and see me later." And away she goes.

José, still at the casting stage, wants to hear everything.

Night on the river. The wind is fresh. Everyone sleeps. Here and there, hammocks rock to the rhythm of the water. Moving slowly, a miniature star hovers over the door to a house made of wood.

I go down.

Prince-like, I charm. She wakes up. We go to the fore-deck. There’s a queue already. Too Titanic, we kiss goodnight.

Next day, she says little and seems rather disinterested. José is wild with whys and whys: "Ah les femmes!" I haven’t got a clue what’s happened. A second visit a few hours later and it’s utter silence. Her sister smiles at me.

In the dark of day, different reasons, different emotions. I don’t understand what’s going on? So I accept I don’t understand, no conjectures, no hypotheses.

Nine pm, arrival at Manaus. All-round dispersal, each to his (or her...) world of home. José’s finding it hard to abandon his pretty mum with black curly hair whose husband has yet failed to turn up. And what if he doesn’t come?... Can’t leave her here alone...

We go to the Pension Sulista, it’s in the book. José knows it well, he’s been here plenty of time before. My room is a dusty cupboard, his has three beds and hooks for hammocks. Ah! That’s what I like. We end up sharing. Works out R$3 cheaper.

We go out for a meal. But. Quick visit to see if pretty mum is still awaiting knight in shining armour. No. End of story.

Near the buses: "churrasco". You choose your kebab, wait for it to be cooked or re-heated, add farinha (no you don’t add farinha, you leave it where it is for other barbarians to choke on), spicy sauce, and burn your lips. Delicious.

Manaus, target town for the Amazonian millions. Now, night-time down by the docks and buses, the last pickings of day-to-day survival. Street children with eyes hardened by cynicism and beatings, lurkers and losers, prostitutes as rough and dirty as the gutter, muscular trannies in miniskirts, too proud and haughty to be true. A multiple pile-up of misbegotten love, a snake’s nest of famished yearnings squabbling and scrabbling and scratching in the dust.

And not one contraceptive pill, not one condom. Jean Paul II is a good pope.

We finish and go back towards the city lights. The building behind the barbecue is I think one of the most beautiful in town. Today, it’s disfigured by years of indifference, graffiti and fly-blown posters. People piss on it, gob on it, bank nails into it. The building does not exist, it is just a wall. Spoiling such beauty saddens me, and bothers me even more. Does a building affect me more than human life? It’s a rich man’s building, a 1920’s bourgeois brag. Do I identify more with this, with their aesthetic vision, than with the poor of today, the thousands of lives that converge on the city of fortunes, the dispossessed, dispossessed for having seen what they do not have?

You can’t eat rich man’s beauty, but you can still enjoy looking at it while eating farinha. The owner may have been rich, but not the craftsman. Wishful thinking, maybe, but I would like to believe that he derived pleasure from the beauty he created with his own hands. Perhaps he did, but it must be terrible too to create beauty and have it taken away for just one week’s survival.

In Holland, did any of those guilded gentlemen in impossible-to-iron collars really understand the genius of Rembrandt? His genius was in his brush and in his portraits. All we have is the portraits. He died in debt in misery, but nobody took his brush away, his creative experience.

I also wonder why everyone seem to spit all the time. Nearly everyone does it. What does it mean? What are they trying to get rid of? Saliva, a bitter taste? You also spit for reasons of hatred, repugnance, rejection... How do people see the world they spit on?

Tricky subject, is it the point of view of a Westerner, a European, a middle-classed, well-fed, safely-moneyed tourist? Yes and no. Obviously, tourism can bring wealth to a town or region, but it can spoil it too. Ditto for industry, textiles, fishing, etc...

I’m still at the start of my travels, preconceived notions do not melt overnight, even in hot climates. We shall see.

Where was I? We finish and go back towards the city lights. What I call the town centre is "Central Avenue", the part of the Avenue Eduardo Ribeiro that start opposite the Alfândega, the old customs house (transported stone by stone from Europe as ballast; big business, ballast, in those days), that runs up past the Nossa Senhora da Concepção Cathedral gardens and stops at the crossroads with 7 de Setembro where stands, planted in the middle of the road, a Christmas tree glistening with CDs.

All along Central Avenue there are concrete benches, lanches with tables and waiters (with or without tresses), mini-boutiques on wheels selling drinks, salgados, drinks and more drinks, and five hundred years of tan- and copper-coloured hybrid vigour.

Latin America. Music equals dance, one without the other is not conceivable. It’s a physiological imperative. I’m sure they don’t even realise they’re doing it half the time.

Here, in the deepest heart of Amazonia, they have devised a cruel mixture of body language that sounds the unfathomable depth of meaning in the songs with limbering-up exercises for circus contortionists producing what – despite all former experience to the contrary – I am told is dance. So popular is this dance that when the night is feverish, hordes of body-screaming, hand-flinging, joint-flexing carcases are herded into the Olympic Sambadrome for mass exorcism and much dripping of tallow. The dance is called the "boi": the ox. I rest my case.

Time for beddy-bies.

I wander about the town. First impressions good. I decide to find a room for the month. Manaus is a town where building never stops. Result: half the hovels I’m offered still aren’t finished and the other half don’t have any rats left. I take a look in the favelas, shanty-towns of wood and blue plastic sheeting in the land of frogs and toads. The deeper in I go, the closer it gets to the water, the more the planks are rotten, the poorer the poor and the more the prices stay the same. And it’s not because I’m gringo. The writing’s on the wall. So, do I pay R$150 for Bill Sykes bedsit and watch the sun go down over six months’ rubbish waiting for high water to wash it away to the sea, or R$80 for Hotel I’ll-finish-it-one-day Cajueira with table promised for the very same afternoon?

Aaaargh! At night the cafés come creeping out of the woodwork. And from then until two, three o’clock in the morning, they play the summer’s four top hits one after the other, boom boom boom boom, again and again. Three hours later, up at the crack of dawn, my painter neighbour – signs and silk-i-screen-i executed with perfect precision – dips and daubs to the sound of Kiss and co.. Turn the volume up: boom boom boom boom. Manaus: boom town.

Manaus: noise, colour, and a bit more of both. Shouting, beckoning and bellowing in a closing-down sale at the paint-factory. Sweaty men with muscles like horses racing about with immense parcels. Sweaty women with muscles like horses unpacking parcels and packing the display rack so tight you can’t get the tops and tee-shirts out. Hangers like sardines in an accordion pinging off the end and manhandled back while the carton goes flying into the road where someone else grabs it to pack everything up and jump it into the box and tie it down and lug it back to where it came from. Behind the Municipal Clock (keys cut inside), four lanches, back to back and side by side, each one with its own amps, own speakers, Yamaha keyboard and plangent plagiariser. And watches! Japanese cuckoos and Swiss digitals, all made in Hong Kong. Someone’s buying empty cans: 60 centavos the kilo, there’s a Photomaton (when he’s not drunk and can focus properly), shoes, shoe shine, shoe repair, manicure, pedicure. Shops two-deep, with salespeople emblazoned in company colours clapping their hands, inviting you in, smiling, opening imaginary doors, eyeing up the bargains for you, winking, and not taking a blind bit of notice if you go inside. Stalls selling everything: batteries, biscuits, bananas, bendy samurai swords, hot-plates, greeting cards, playing cards, umbrellas, knickers and bras, fireworks, cuddly toys, alarm clocks, dominoes, spanners, bananas, images of the Virgin Mary, kitchen knives...

And, of course, everyone sells the same multicoloured musical fairy lights.

Musical fairy lights! The memory beeps in my ears like nine o’clock in Wigmore Hall.

Manaus, free-port capital of Amazônia, state ten times greater than Britain, will celebrate Christmas in a way nobody will ever forget. It buys a thousand miles of musical fairy lights and drapes, lassoes and generally strangulates every tree in the city with the musical equivalent of a full Nelson and intestinal hernia.

Babel, cacophony, eaves-dropping at Victoria Station – nothing can compare with the hallucinating discord. Every street, every crossing, day in day out, night after night, the same insomniac torture: beep-bip-bip-beep-bipbipbip-beep – beep-bip-bip-beep-bipbipbip-beep. It gets everywhere: on your nerves, on your wick, up your nose. No hemis, no demis, no semis, this is pure quaver. It’s like an army crossing a suspension bridge, like schoolfuls of under-sixes invited to practice recorder inside your head, like the long screech of the tube train of eternity demonstrating that infinite is curved. It is hell.

While Central Avenue becomes our evening rendezvous, during the day José chases up the girl he came to Manaus for, an eighteen-year-old already pregnant with someone or other’s child when they met six months ago. Or chatting up the woman who works across the road. I chase about town trying to find a decent map of Brazil. Various people point me towards "A Casa das Mapas", the map shop, and I’m in a state of advanced drool when I finally reach the hallowed steps. Two of them. Up I go into a dark room that contains and I am not exaggerating (much) approximately two maps, two school-maps of Brazil, one with wooden mouldings at the top and bottom, and one without.

Someone else says there’s a media-library. A media-library?! And off I sweatily speed. Computer room closed: rain stops play. I go to the Loans Desk to ask a question. A girl trips in with a piece of paper bearing the title of the book (probably one her teacher recommended to 300 other pupils as well, but still). Slowly, with all the certainty of a chronic depressive who just knows that the news will be bad, the librarian takes the paper. For a couple of seconds, the slightly crumpled paper trembles in her need-another-cigarette fingers. She’s looks elsewhere. Somewhere, there’s a universe without this inevitable hammer about to strike her librarian’s soul. Painful, but look she must – and does. I can hear the wail of absolute despair, the keening that starts deep in the taiga of her forefathers, whistling through the trees, twanging the hides of the hut of the dead. I can hear the mourning of generations of tribespeople communing with the spirit of a cruel, harsh nature – mother earth with the matted grey hair, falcon of the snows, salmon-son of Tlabec. The look she gives the girl is so full of grief that I am tempted to suggest suicide as profoundly happy ending. Instead, I slope off, no more question.

I go to the Amazônia Desk. Two books on the local fauna: one pretty with lots of nice photos and no information at all and another with lots of information – Portuguese names, local names, Latin names, Tupi-guarani names – but no photos.

I ask to have a look at their map of the region.

"Não tem, não" (remember this one?)

The Amazônia section of the Manaus media-library has no map of Amazonia?

"Não, não tem" (note the subtle change of syntax).

I end up buying a street map with tourists’ Amazonia on the back. That’s all there is. The problem is quite simple: like a fool, I forget to bring the map (Made in Canada) I bought in Paris, and I ain’t going walkabout in the most complex and changing river system in the world without one.

Cajueira (cashew-nut tree) Hotel is in the Rua Joaquim Nabuco, road where all the cheap hotels are (minimum rental three hours; when all the family sleeps in the same room under the same mosquito net, it’s nice to get some privacy at times, specially when it’s not your sister who everyone knows), road where all the whores are (easier to solicit when you’re dragging your ten-year-old behind, good excuse if the police arrest you), road where all the dealers are (Can’t pay, who cares? All major knives accepted) and one-time Manauaran (adjective, alongside Manauensan, of Manaus) high street.

The buildings are superb, flamboyant neo-baroque with such frilly-knickered mouldings that not even ecstasy and icing-gun could conceive of. The blue and white hospital of the Sociedade Portuguesa Beneficente, the Portuguese charitable society, and its little mortuary chapel next door with its sad little hexagonal tables, the Treasury Office and folly after folly of money that grew on trees, but now only the cheques are made of rubber.

Some modern genius has built a two-storey wooden tent.

Manaus seems to be the most tourist-unfriendly places I’ve seen so far. Tourists come here, and bugger off as quickly as possible to see the alligators, piranhas, etc., then fly to Salvador or Rio, or back home.

And yet there are so many things worth seeing here, some real gems, if you turn a blind eye to the surface degradation. OK, they get a bit over-enthusiastic with the colours, painting them pink, purple or fandango yellow, putting a cherry or two on top, but they’re still worthy of Prague or Vienna. They then go and obliterate the façade under adverts or a collective copulation of cables. At the corner of Ruas Barroso and 24 de Maio, there’s a well-preserved, well-painted example of neo-colonial style. It has five large luminous signs hanging off it and right in front are two pylons with dense curtains of grubby sooty wiring like the filthy tangle you get in the vacuum-cleaner when clearing out your deceased great-aunt’s attic. But at least it keeps the plastic bags off the streets. On the opposite corner, you have a perfectly unobstructed view of a 1970’s jerry-built concrete blockhaus.

I slouch off to the Teatro Amazonas, which – according to a certain Mr Carreras – is one of the most beautiful in the world. A guided tour tells me that it was build with the money made by the robber barons – "?" "yes, from the robber trees..." "Ah, rubber barons!" – and that during performances the streets around would be carpeted with robber to prevent disturbances. And, yes, it’s true, it is beautiful. The painting is discreet and done with taste: salmon and cream. But, of course, they can’t stop while the going’s good, they see a dome and with all the subtlety of a pools winner putting fluffy dice in a vintage Rolls, they bung the Brazilian flag on top. Electric green and shocking yellow. Pigeons fly past with their eyes closed. On the other hand, they could have painted half a football, I wouldn’t put it past them.

Speaking of which, anyone familiar with the ignoble thuggery called Brazilian football will find no difficulty in understanding why the pavements are foul. There seems to be no municipal effort, each shop or home being left to its own, and if I wish to make mine ten inches higher than my neighbour’s and leave big gaping holes in it, then so I will. This is, of course, only half the story. There are good pavements, beautiful antique paving slabs, in most up-market areas. But where there’s money there’s air-con so most people walk in the road to avoid the myriad machines dripping ice-cold condensate down the back of your neck.

And the museums? What about the museums? After hunting back and forth, I eventually found the Casa da Cultura, the cultural centre. Closed, locked up and abandoned. So I went to the Public Library, a fabulous building with the sort of cast-iron staircases reserved for turn-of-the-century railway stations (by which I mean turn-of-the-last-century – what do we say now? I suppose we carry on with turn-of-the-century, this one’ll be turn-of-the-millennium. There’s at least 150-odd years till the next one needs dealing with and that’s their problem, like the Italians with their next trecentro). Up I puff to the seat of Manauense letters. They must have a thousand books. Nearly. Hard to say because you’re not allowed to browse anyway, you have to use the card index. Or ask the librarian. Ten minutes to find a Portuguese-English dictionary – even smaller than mine.

How can you use a library if you’re not allowed to browse?

With a bit of persistence, I discovered there was another Centro Cultural.

The guardian of the gates, dutifully snoozing beneath the veranda told me to come back tomorrow after four o’clock. I wandered off to the Museo do Homen do Norte, museum of the northman, natives of the Amazonian forest? I never found out, the museum was closed for restoration.

Next day, I tried the Centro de Artes Chaminé, former water processing plant: closed for restoration. Got talking to some of the youth orchestra rehearsing away and was invited to the concert next day. Went back to town. Museo Tiradente, Museo de Numismática: closed, open 8 am to 2 pm. Finally, I saw an excellent exhibition of modern art at the now open Centro Cultural, ice-cold installations with plastic bottles, photographic flames, spatial sculptures worthy of Paris or Düsseldorf.

While the museum was washing behind its ears for the launch, that very evening, of a new household cleaning product, Pinho Sol Amazônia, (comes in three fresh fragrances), I decided to go downstairs and wait for tonight’s film in the café: closed for restoration.

The film on tonight’s programme was an early Michael Caine, the Holroyd something-or-other, in English. In the auditorium it was Roger Rabbit dubbed in Portuguese. And the video kept on breaking down.

I went back to the hotel. José was in a foul temper. He’d just found out from his girlfriend’s half-sister that she’d flitted to Argentina and left her new-born with her adoptive father. Be back Wednesday. How could she do such a thing? How can she run off and leave her baby like that? And where’d she get the money from? She couldn’t afford to pay it herself... etc., etc., the explicitly expletive bitch! Bitch maybe, but he’s certainly got her under his skin. And when she comes back, she’s under his skin again in the impassioned, destructive, horizontal reconciliations that couples tear apart and patch up so well. Two lost souls living in each other’s knotted emotions. She disappears again. And why does she this and why does she that? Why does she she she?...

José, why do you persist with a woman you know is like that? Been through that one before myself.

In the meantime, he carries on chatting up the woman across the road. At least she’s someone you can count on... Until the day she...

I take him to the concert with me, he loves music. Concert cancelled.

José goes back to chat up etc. I wander off to have a look at Amarelinho, which turns out to be the monument celebrating the construction of the monument called Amarelinho. Something must have got lost in the translation.

Down below is a shipyard so I go and have a look at the boats. All Amazonian boats are built on the same plan, the main difference being size and number of decks. They’re perfect riverboats as long as it’s calm. Someone comes over to speak to me. Boat-builder from father to son since fathers had sons. We discuss boat-building, wood, techniques, caulking (thanks Abdoulaye!), prices... It’s cheaper in Rio Branco, 2000 km to the south, wood’s expensive at Manaus...

Back to the hotel. Have a drink with José in the bar next door and watch the people of the street. Here, it’s literal: they stand talking in the middle of the road and the cars swerve around them. Sometimes, a taxi stops, a girl gets in and disappears. She doesn’t know where she’s going. It’s all organised. And all for a noseful of coke.

Pedro runs the bar with his brother. You can see which one’s the boss. I go there mornings for a fried-egg sandwich and coffee: R$1.60. Now and then, a carful of plain-clothes drive past, slowly. Pedro’s a good boy, beer and soft-drinks wholesaler. Keeps his nose clean. The other cafés are a bit too unsavoury for my liking.

I’m still looking for a dictionary to depauperate my wordhoard. Bookshops here don’t sell books, they just let them gather dust. That’s what the cover’s for.

They’re like those museums you had to visit at school. Everything preciously locked away in grubby glass cabinets that unemployed stamp-collectors breathe over then wipe with clammy fingers. Relics of bygone interest. Starchy information on curled and decaying buff-coloured card typed in pompous pseudo-scientific Latin on a machine whose ribbon keeps getting stuck.

Somebody wants to buy a book? This is not a matter for a mere assistant. The proprietor himself, enthroned in majesty behind his till, slides his glasses down a sebaceous nose to inspect "the customer who wants a book". "Tem Bulgakov?" I shall spare you the litany of guarano-literary proposals I am put through, the "no"s, the "sorry"s, the "tut-tut"s and the final flinging of hands and eyes to a better bookstore in the sky.

Bulgakov? Bit stiff that one I must admit. They’re still hawking the pamphletary drivel of revisionist padres, booklets of prayers to the Virgin Mary for a New Millennium, etc. For the really street-wise, it’s the CD of Monsignor Rossi whose leery smile practised for hours in front of a Guido Reni painting simply dribbles with sanctity and good news. Thanks, I prefer the three-card trick, it’s more up-front.

The church is everywhere. Or rather: churches are everywhere. The Bible is so thoroughly inconsistent that you can read whatever you like into it and then prove the contrary. So to allow the true truth to be preached in all its limpid glory and satisfy the power freaks who don’t rave on Saturday nights but do rant on Sunday mornings, the number of churches is virtually unlimited.

There’s the Assembly of God, the Unification Church, the Quadrangular Evangelical Church, the Church of Christ, the Church of Peace, the Brazilian Pentecostal Church of God, the Tabernacle of Faith Evangelical Church, the Weysleyan Evangelical Church, the Worldwide Messianic Church of Brazil, the Universal Church of the Kingdom of God, the Presbyterian Church of Crespo, the Gideon Three Hundreds, the Jehovah’s Witlesses, the First Baptist Church of Manaus (goes up to five), the São Paolo Lutheran Evangelical Community, the Spirit, Love and Light Group, the Seventh Day Adventist Church, the Baptist Good News Church, and dozens more, innumerable missionary organisations and, strangely, but at least it shows I’ve done my homework and used the Páginas Amarelas, Beltram Building Materials... rogue church, aspiring to become one, or just a nave?

In the suburb of Cachoeirinha (little waterfall) a mile or so east of the town centre is a little church with a grand name: Capela de Santo António. (Saint Anthony, punter who went down in history for ignoring the advice of both Oscar Wilde and Mae West and resisting temptation.) Built by one man, it is only four by five yards. Nowadays, everyone calls it the Igreja do Pobre Diabo, The Poor Devil’s Church (I think "poor bugger" would be a better translation but this is meant for a young readership). Who was this poor bastard? A labourer called Cordolina Rosa de Viterbo. And what was his temptation? To kill the imbecile parents who gave him two girl’s names?

At last I find my dictionary in "Amazonas Shopping". It is called "Oxford Escolar, para estudantes brasileiros de inglês", and thereby hangs a tail.

Another thrilling instalment coming soon...