The first thing I want you to know about Itaituba is don’t arrive there on a weekend! It was too late for me to reschedule as I had Cristalino booked for specific days and it was sold out so I couldn’t change it. Don’t count on being able to change money here or the ATMs accepting foreign cards, bring cash from Manaus, Santarem or elsewhere. The 3 most important things you need to do in Itaituba are:
1. Get a permit from IBAMA to visit Amazonia National Park.
2. Stock up on food to take out there.
3. Preferably hire a car as transport there is very limited.
I got lucky and a new birding friend helped me get the permit in advance from IBAMA but that person has transferred out from the Itaituba office and is no longer around to help.
In this map, the “A” in the bubble is the IBAMA office. You can see the jetty where the ferry from Miritituba will drop you if you arrive by bus. There are a couple supermarkets within a block of the jetty. The red dot with the arrow is Juliana Park Hotel which is your best bet if you get stuck in Itaituba overnight.
IBAMA OFFICE
Av. Mal. Rondon, s/n. Aeroporto Velho. Itaituba – PA. (IBAMA/ Parque Nacional da Amazônia).(93) 3518-4519
Any taxi can take you there. You will need your passport, maybe an extra photocopy and it wouldn’t hurt to bring some passport photos just in case. The permit was free in 2012. They are open M-F “business hours” so plan to get there before 4pm.
CAR HIRE COMPANIES
Chicão: (93) 3518-7199 or (93) 9976-5214
J. Farias – (93) 3518-1055
Jacy Car – (93) 3518-3025
The estimate is R$100 per day, you will probably need insurance on top of that. They were closed by the time we got there since our bus was late and we didn’t get to town until 4:30ish. It would seem that car hire companies are closed on Sundays too. We didn’t try to book in advance due to the language difficulties.
SHOPPING
There are small supermarkets in the area near the jetty where you can get very basic goods. Although the guards at Urua have limited refrigeration for their own use, don’t count on them being able to store your perishables. We bought tinned goods like cocktail sausages, corned beef and other items like rice, Ramen noodles, biscuits/cookies and water. You can boil water when you are there if you can’t carry too many bottles of water. There are larger supermarkets called Duvalle and Tradição but they are further away. Looking back, I wish we had made the effort to go there for a better selection of goods.
SPENDING THE NIGHT
With luck, you will be able to arrive in Itaituba, get your permit, do your shopping and get straight out to the park. If you do get stuck here overnight, the Juliana Park is a small, clean budget hotel. Here is a snippet on hotels from the Bradt Guide which is all I could find online. It’s a bit out of date but I agreed with their assessment of Juliana Park and can add that the WIFI is free and really helped trying to communicate with the manager using Google Translate back and forth.
OTHER WAYS TO GET TO AMAZONIA NATIONAL PARK
From Itaituba to Amazonia National Park, we could have taken a bus at around 10 or 11 am but wanted to get there early for birding so took a taxi for R$150. Even though we already had the park permits we still had to stop at IBAMA so the staff could explain to the taxi how to get there.
To get back, there is supposed to be a bus around 2pm, if we had waited we would have missed the speedboat to Santarem so hitched with a local couple and paid them the bus fare of R$25 each. Our guide at Urua, Gilberto helped us get the lift.
Once you have touched down in Brazil, preferably at Manaus and flown onwards to Santarem; you aren’t done yet! You still need to get to Itaituba and get a permit for the Parque Nacional da Amazônia and drive out there. The most pleasant way to travel is by speedboat down the Tapajos. We did this journey in the direction of Itaituba to Santarem since we had arrived in Itaituba by bus from Mato Grosso.
I don’t speak Portuguese but from what I can tell, this is the official blog of the company that runs the launches. I did my best with Google Translate!
Ships to Itaituba.
All days out boats from Santarem to Itaituba carrying cargo, packages and passengers. They leave at 16:00 (only on Sunday leaves at 14:00 hours). The vessels are castor and are usually boat medium and large making this trip that lasts about 17:00 usually.
Has the boats that depart at 13:00 hours and arrive in Santarem Itaituba about 21:30 the same day.
This is the ticket office in Itaituba. In Sept 2012, we paid R$65 each (around $35). I think it has gone up to R$70 now.
Lancha motor Princesa do Tapajós sai todas as 2ª-feira, 4ª-feira e 6ª-feira. (Tuesday, Thursday, Saturday)
Lancha motor Veloz sai todas as 3ª-feira, 5ª-feira e domingo. (não prestamos serviços para essa embarcação). (Wednesday, Friday, Sunday).
I could not find any reference to who sails on a Monday.
***UPDATED TRANSLATION***
Harvson3 has kindly provided a proper translation of the Portuguese I was trying to use Google Translate on. This is the correct version. As you can see, Google Translate sometimes leaves a lot to be desired but it’s usually all we have to go on. Thank you Harvson3!
One small correction of the above: 2a feira (also written segunda-feira) is Monday, 4a feira is Wednesday, sexta-feira (6a feira) is Friday.
terca (3) and quinta (5) are Tuesday and Thursday.
My translation of the above paragraphs:
Every day, boats leave Santarem for Itaituba carrying cargo, packages, and passengers. The boats leave at 4 PM in the afternoon (only on Monday they leave at 2 PM). The ships rotate and are generally boats of medium to large size that do trips that last usually around 17 hours generally [sic].
There are boats that leave Santarem at 1 PM and arrive in Itaituba around 9:30 PM on the same day.
Lancha motor just means “motorboat,” akin to the smaller boat you took.
You can buy snacks and drinks on the boat but we bought some sandwiches, snacks and drinks at a small cafe across the street before leaving.
The larger boats also go to Santarem but are much slower. This type of boat also travels the Amazon between Tabatinga-Manaus-Santarem-Belem. Our launch was much smaller, see the difference in the photos. You will have seats assigned but if the boat isn’t full just change seats to wherever you want. The whole trip takes about 8 hours.
The journey down the Tapajos is very scenic and pleasant. You will pass by Fordlândia which is a now-abandoned, prefabricated industrial town established in the Amazon Rainforest in 1928 by American industrialist Henry Ford to secure a source of cultivated rubber for the automobile manufacturing operations of the Ford Motor Company in the United States. In the map below, Fordlândia is where the A in the bubble is. The red dot on PA-435 is the town of Aveiro. This is where you would get off if you wanted to try to find Golden Conures along the Cupari River but you would need a guide and chartered boat to do that.
Tapajos River
Here are some photos showing the whole journey from Itaituba to Santarem.
The sunset was amazing!
This is where we disembarked in Santarem. It’s a ways out of town, I think the taxi was around R$10-15 to get to downtown where we finally found a room at the Sandis Hotel.
Although flights on major routes can now be bought online at reasonable prices, there are times you will need to use the bus when moving from one eco-tourism hotspot to another. Let’s have a look at BR-163, the only route between Mato Grosso (Pantanal, Alta Floresta for Cristalino) and Itaituba (jumping off point for Amazonia National Park). I have highlighted in yellow these cities on the map below. The “A” shows the location of Guarantã do Norte which is the boarding point for the bus headed north to Itaituba or where you will change buses if heading in the opposite direction.
Mato Grosso to Itaituba
This route is operated by a bus company – Verde Transportes. Their website is only in Portuguese so I will walk you through how to use it to get information and possibly even book a ticket online. The online booking wasn’t open to foreigners last year when we were there so we bought all our tickets at their kiosk in the Cuiaba terminal. We took several buses: Cuiaba-Alta Floresta, Alta Floresta-Novo Sta Helena, Novo Sta Helena-Guarantã do Norte and finally the 20 hour bus trip to Itaituba. They take credit cards at the kiosk and can book all your tickets and issue them right there.
Somente Ida is “One way”.
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You will be redirected to Net Viagem. You can see there is only one bus on the date I asked for that leaves at 20:00 (8pm) and it costs Brazilian Reis R$ 143.90 which is about $70 USD. Tick the radio button below “selecione” and hit “comprar”.
Net Viagem
You will see which seats are available. If they are accepting foreign credit cards, at this point choose a seat and hit “comprar”.
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You won’t have an account so click the radio button with the red arrow, put your real email and make up a number for the CEP. Then hit “Prosseguir”.
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It won’t like your fake CEP and you will see this screen. Hit “Fechar” to get rid of it.
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Hit the “Foreign” radio button and you will get rid of the Brazilian fields and have more international fields to fill in. I made up some info for the screenshot, you would be putting in real info.
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You will have 2 blue buttons to hit on the following screens and then you get a purchase screen.
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Hit “sim” on this screen.
This is the final screen. Theoretically you should be able to pay with a Visa or Mastercard. I would suggest calling your bank to warn them to expect an online transaction from Brazil so they don’t think it’s fraud.
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Hopefully you will have an e-ticket to print out and bring on the bus. Otherwise you will have to do as I did and buy the ticket there. I think you will have to do each leg of a multi-segment trip individually. Make sure there is availability on each leg before buying anything.
Here are some photos of our 3 leg journey from Alta Floresta to Itaituba. These are not the deluxe executive buses you see on the bigger routes but they are OK. At the time of our trip, the road wasn’t paved after Novo Progresso but this may change by the time you do your trip. The bus doesn’t have a toilet but will stop every few hours at a road side cafe where you can get food and use the facilities. None of the buses we took were full so we were able to grab a set of 2 seats each and spread out a bit. We managed to get a bit of sleep and arrived in Itaituba around 4pm. Actually the bus will drop you at the river (Miritaituba) and you take a ferry across which is free.
This week, I would like to introduce you to my all-time favourite bird. In their native land, Brazil; they are known as Ararajuba. The Golden Parakeet or Golden Conure, (Guaruba guarouba), formerly classified as (Aratinga guarouba),is a species of Neotropical parrot. Sometimes known as the Queen of Bavaria Conure, it is the only species (monotypic) in the genus Guaruba.
Its plumage is mostly bright yellow, hence its common name, but it also possesses green remiges. It lives in the drier, upland rainforests in Amazonian Brazil, and is threatened by deforestation and flooding, and also by the now-illegal trapping of wild individuals for the pet trade. It is an endangered species listed on CITES appendix I.
Mature pair of Golden Conures at the Emilio Goeldi Zoo in Belem
Juvenile Golden Conure at the Emilio Goeldi Zoo in Belem
Flock of wild Golden Conures in Amazonia National Park
Getting to see them in the wild is no easy feat! Their range is in a very remote area of Brazil and there are no eco-lodges or established eco-tourism in the area. The full story of my journey to see them can be seen in the April 2013 issue of Flock Talk by the World Parrot Trust. Scroll down and click on the PDF. The World Parrot Trust also has a species profile on this beautiful bird. At the end of this series, I will upload the text from this article written by myself with more photos and hyperlinks to all the posts I am doing to show you how to do this trip for yourself.
This is the range of Golden Conures as shown on Golden Conure Survival Fund. (For those who are curious, I did get a glimpse of a Hawkheaded Parrot at Cristalino).
Range of Golden Conures
The range of Golden Conures extends far westward into the Amazon basin reaching all the way to the right bank of the Madeira Rio in Amazonas state; the bird reaches as far east as the Gurupi in Maranhâo state. It is found in much higher density (almost ten times) within the confines of the current study area. This coincides almost directly with the heaviest deforestation zones (Hartley 8).
The Golden Conures are distributed in pockets strewn across northeastern Brazil, south of the Amazon River, in eastern Pará and northern Maranhâo to the western edge of Tapajós (Low 183). Their range has been reduced by as much as 30% in the last 2 to 3 decades.
In the map below, the red dots represent the airports (L-R: Manaus, Itaituba, Santarem, Belem) that are relevant to the journey. The yellow highlighted areas represent areas in which I found documented sightings of Golden Conures during my research. The highlighted area south of Itaituba is the Amazonia National Park where I ultimately got to see them. The yellow area between Santarem and Itaituba marked “CR” is roughly the location of the Cupari River in which the birds have been sighted by Gil Serique, a famous Brazilian guide. The yellow area marked “CX” is roughly the location of Caxiuanã National Forest. Finally, the other yellow area near the Tucurui Dam has had sightings of Golden Conures, though they may have been driven out by the deforestation in the area.
When I first started planning my trip, I had originally hoped to go to Caxiuana. At one point, they did have tourist accommodation but they stopped this several years ago. They still host groups of scientists, biologists and researchers. It seemed like it would be easy enough to get there from Belem and once there, there would be guides to help us find the birds. Directions to get there (in case they start accepting tourists again): The scientific station is located in the municipality of Melgaço, 350 km west of Belém, the capital city of the state of Pará. The trip to the scientific station has to be made in two stages. The first stage can be made by flying or traveling by commercial ship (12 hours) from Belém to the interior city of Breves along the south of the island of Marajó. For the second stage, one boards a motor launch in Breves run by the Goeldi Museum. The launch continues for 9 hours through the Melgaço Bay, located in the Rio Anapú basin, passes the villages of Melgaço and Portel, and up to Caxiuanã Bay. This last leg of the journey can also be made by speed boat, reducing the time of the journey to only 4 hours.
Gil Serique who lives in Alter do Chão – a beautiful beach town near Santarem can lead tourists to the Cupari River area and he knows a lot about these birds. My husband and I couldn’t afford to hire a charter boat and hire him for several days but anyone who has a group would be well advised to do so. There are no accommodations in this area so most people would be sleeping in hammocks either on the boat or ashore.
I finally chose Amazonia National Park since it was accessible by public transport and they have a bunkhouse at the Urua guard station. This is the trip I will be blogging about in hopes that others who care about these birds can see them before it’s too late.
Although I managed to get some photos of the wild Golden Conures, I didn’t have time to get video as it all happened so fast. Luckily there is a professional clip on YouTube (Portuguese language) with some amazing footage of these stunning birds. You also get a glimpse of my guide, Gilberto da Silva. Even as I watch this 8 months after my trip, my heart still skips a beat as I remember my brief but unforgettable encounter with the Ararajubas of Brazil!
IBAMA OFFICE
