| Ariau Towers, The Amazon Part One |
| Written by Phillip Greene | |
When my associate and I arrived at Ariau Towers, after an hour and a half outboard motor boat ride up the flooded Rio Negro, we were escorted to our VIP room on the top floor of one of the guest buildings. We were told that it had air conditioning, and many of the rooms didn't. We were grateful, because it was very hot and humid and we were dead tired from traveling for four days. When we got to the room, we found that it did have a window cooling unit on one side of the large room. However, to our utter amazement, there were openings below and adjacent to the air conditioner with nothing but insect screening covering them.
 Amazon River Taxi  So-called Air Conditioned Room
We took turns standing in front of the air conditioning unit to cool off, but that got old fast. There was an oscillating fan in the room, but it afforded only a minimum of comfort due to the humidity. We needed sleep and I couldn’t sleep standing up. It was just too hot for sustained, restful sleep. By 5:00 AM it had cooled down enough outside that we could sleep for a short time before we had to get up to go to our meeting with our clients.
 Guest Tower That was back in 1998. Ariau Amazon Towers has changed a lot in the past nine years. Now all of the guest rooms are air conditioned and have windows with glass in them. It has been called a “Five Star Rustic” Eco resort, although Eco Resorts are not rated in Brazil. Eco, used to describe a resort, refers to ecology or eco-tourism, suggesting that the tourist will be learning about the ecology of a given area. Ariau Amazon Towers is definitely not camping out, but it is remote. In 1998 I would have called it “One Star Primitive.” My company had received an inquiry about designing a theme park in Brasilia, Brazil. We had met the clients previously in Brasilia, the capitol of that beautiful country. Now, however, our clients, a group of Brazilian businessmen, felt that we should visit Ariau Amazon Towers as a means of helping us understand some of the cultural traditions of Brazil. Presumably, some of these cultural aspects could be somehow incorporated into the design of the park.
Aerial View Courtesy of Ariau Towers Note: Aerial view and contact information was removed at the request of an Ariau Towers representative who stated that my story was not factual. The story is a true representation of my experience in 1998. I noted in the article that Ariau Towers had changed since then. To find out more about Ariau Towers go to their website on the WWW.
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