Butterflies here are as big as an adult's hand. Shops stocked with the things one needs for jungle living sell fishing hooks the size of coat hooks to catch Amazonian fish as big as cats. Haggle in the market for souvenir piranhas, preserved and mounted, mouths agape to show off those famous teeth. Above the city of 2.2 million people, vultures circle in the thermals.
Manaus is the most remote of Brazil's World Cup cities. The others are at least 2,000 kilometers (1,250 miles) distant. Porto Alegre, in the far south, is a 4-hour, 3,230-kilometer (2,000-mile) flight.
England and Italy will be the first of eight teams to sweat and perhaps wilt in the heat and humidity of the Arena Amazonia, with its lattice roof of diamond panels that look like snake scales and 44,000 seats in the colors of tropical fruits. Also playing here are Cameroon-Croatia, the United States-Portugal and Honduras-Switzerland.
