Manaus

Manaus needs 3 days: touring the Teatro Amazonas, an opera house of marble and European ironwork shipped in by boat deep in the jungle, and the Municipal Market, on one, seeing the «Meeting of the Waters» where the Rio Negro and Solimões run for several kilometers without mixing due to their differences in temperature and density, on another, and an overnight excursion into the Amazon rainforest on the third. June-November is the dry season, ideal for jungle trekking. It's expensive by Brazilian standards, with jungle lodge excursions as the main expense. Founded at the height of the late 19th-century rubber boom, its Teatro Amazonas -with materials imported piece by piece from Europe via the river- is the most eloquent symbol of the wealth and geographic isolation of that golden era.