Sometimes going to museums is sobering. The Manaus the Provincial Palace started as a home for a rubber baron who went broke when the Brazilian rubber market crashed. The Englishman Mr. Henry Wickham (you will hear more of him in a later blog post) smuggled rubber seeds out of Brazil to Kew Gardens where they germinated. The next generation became to seed for Malayan rubber plantations. In Brazil rubber trees grew widely separated in the rainforest. If you plant them close together, a blight spreads through the plantation and kills the trees. That blight doesn’t exist in Malaya so trees can be planted in neat rows and the latex sap easily harvested, easier than traveling through the rainforest, tree to tree to collect latex. The Brazilian market collapsed and several grand palaces became public buildings.
The Provincial Palace now houses 4 different museums. We visited two, an art gallery…
…and the museum of image and sound. That one made me feel old. The museum has rotary phones and the Polaroid camera that Pop used to document our family. He gave me a newer version of that camera to document our kids. It was all made obsolete by digital. There is a version of the first single lens reflex camera I owned, an Olympus half frame. I bought it in 1969 when I was a graduate student in Taiwan because it squeezed two shots into one 35mm frame. A 36-shot roll of film gave me 72 pictures. I saved half on film and another quarter on development. The camera on display was 5 years newer than my Olympus. Then there was the Zenith Trans-Oceanic short-wave radio that I coveted in High School. I never could afford one. Now a battered version sits as an antique in a museum.
Manaus is a town of battered and faded glory. Vast amounts of money were spent on the Opera House. (You can see more pictures of it from my visit 10 years ago here.) The Opera house closed for years after the rubber bust but reopened at the end of the century.
The city photographs better than it looks to the naked eye. Supergraphics on the tall buildings add to the atmosphere.
The colors on the buildings are not as faded and the alignment of pixels hides much of the chipped paint. But while faded the city is alive with street activity and is a captivating wander.
Manaus marks the halfway point in our cruise.
