As you walk around Boca da Valeria, you might sense it was designed to delight tourists. Certainly, people do not live like this today. Soon into your boat tour, you float by the first waterside community. Sure enough, the rustic wooden houses look the same. They are perched on questionable stilts. Wooden canoes are dragged up along the shoreline. There are powerlines between the houses but the electricity is supplied by a communal generator. Drinking water is stored in plastic tubs on makeshift towers. This is the chosen lifestyle of thousands of people along the Amazon River and its tributaries.