Tefé

There are no roads to Tefé. You arrive by boat from Manaus — a forty-hour journey up the Solimões on a river cargo-and-passenger boat, hammock on the main deck, meals eaten at folding tables, the river broad and brown beyond the painted railings — or by the daily flight from Manaus, forty minutes over unbroken forest, landing at an airport that feels like a large shed with good intentions. I came by plane and left by boat, which was the right order: arrive fast and unprepared, leave slow and looking.

Tefé sits on the southern bank of the Solimões River, roughly halfway between Manaus and the Peruvian border, in a part of the Amazon where the towns grow smaller and further apart and the forest grows correspondingly denser and less interrupted. The city itself has about sixty thousand people — river taxis, a large market, a cathedral painted blue and white that seems too grand for the street it occupies, and a waterfront where the boats arrive and depart at all hours according to a logic I never entirely deciphered. The lake behind the city, Lago de Tefé, is a dark-water lagoon several kilometres across, fed by igarapés from the surrounding forest, and local fishermen go out on it at dawn in thin wooden boats that sit very low in the water.

The food in Tefé operates at the intersection of Amazonian and interior Brazilian cooking. At the market, women sell pots of caldeirada — a thick fish stew with manioc, tomatoes, and herbs, ladled over white rice with a fried egg on top. On the waterfront in the evenings, vendors set up grills and cook tucunaré — peacock bass, the great game fish of the western Amazon — over charcoal, served with the ubiquitous farinha and a wedge of lime. The tucunaré has firm, flaky white flesh with a clean flavour that rewrites everything I thought I knew about freshwater fish.

Most people who come to Tefé are passing through to Mamirauá, and the town understands this without seeming offended by it. The IDSM research institute that manages the reserve has an office here, and the Uakari Lodge boats typically leave from Tefé’s waterfront in the predawn dark. But the city is worth an extra day regardless: the market is one of the most genuinely local I found anywhere in the Brazilian Amazon, and Lago de Tefé provides its own quieter encounter with what the forest does at the water’s edge.

When to go: April to August aligns with Mamirauá’s peak flood season and the best time for the reserve. The rest of the year Tefé runs on a quieter register, with fewer visitors and more space. Flights from Manaus are daily; the river journey takes thirty to forty hours depending on the boat and the current.