I’m now back in Novo Aripuana (pictured), where the perfectly decent Hotel Tio Ze does not have perfectly decent beds for back pain sufferers. So, yesterday, with a nap aborted, I decided to take advantage of the two things the town seemed to offer me: a pharmacy, and a massage therapist.

I just started on a reporting trip in Amazonas state, so a word on the means of transportation here, which pretty much boils down to ABC: Anything but cars. Highways are few and far between here, both because historically it has been very difficult and expensive to lay down a lasting highway here, and these days, it is considered environmentally hazardous to the land it runs through. I've heard a few different slight variations quoted, but something like 52 out of 62 municipalities in the state cannot be reached by road.

If it had happened three weeks earlier, we might be looking at a 2016 Olympics in Madrid, Chicago or Tokyo, the three candidate cities where a police helicopter was not shot down by drug gangs this weekend.