So we turned around and started back to Tabatinga. We stopped at an island in the Amazon right in front of the park, where we birded for several hours. That was pleasant and turned up lots of the expected species. This complemented nicely our previous trip to a different Colombian river island a couple days earlier. That night Curtis was on a plane back to Manaus and I prepared to join the tourists for a 10-day luxury boat ride to Manaus.

Part 2 of this entry, about the boat trip back down the Amazon to Manaus as a hired guide, will be short because it turned out that we never got out in the woods during the best times of day to see birds. But my traveling companions made the trip interesting. Not everybody gets to show almost no birds at all to computer giants Bill Gates and Paul Allen, and rock musician Peter Gabriel