Itaituba – Gateway To Amazonia National Park (Parque Nacional da Amazônia)

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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.

Itaituba can be reached by plane from Manaus or Santarem on Azul, by bus from Mato Grosso or by boat from Santarem.

Map of Itaituba

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.

IMG_5831 IMG_5832IBAMA 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.