Nothing could have prepared me for our trip to the Amazon and dear God, we went with the RoadScholars, formerly Elder Hostel, how could this be such a mind blowing experience? I mean, this is the tour group that caters to old people.
The leader of the group, Wolf, was German. He got pushed out of middle management in his forties and followed his older brother, Tommy, to the Amazon, but prior to settling in the Amazon, he went to Canada and stayed with some Bosnian friends to practice his English. He came back to the Amazon and trained as a tour guide. He already was an avid naturalist. He got married to a native who is about 18 years his junior and made a new life. Wolf speaks like four or five languages. He was not what I expected. He was overweight, he wore a red polyester shirt with RoadScholar on the back, he had on red sneakers, and a hat that had a feather collection tucked into the hatband. The other naturalist, Hugo, was born in Peru and as a young man, worked in a bar in Manaus. He is also an avid naturalist, self taught. Both men are in their sixties. That’s a lot and we’re just getting started.
The water on our trip was not potable but suitable for washing clothes and dishes in. Yes, I know, but the dose makes the poison, we always have to remember that. All of our drinking water had to be purchased or supplied by RoadScholar. When we arrived in Manaus the streets were filled with trash as it had rained and flooded the city the night before. Tres Tijuana, this might not be fair as I haven’t been to Tijuana in decades, it could be different now for all I know.
We were told that there are laws to protect the Amazon but there has not been an appetite by government to enforce these laws. When I looked out of our hotel window in Manaus, I could see the jungle on the edge of the city. It felt like the jungle was panting to get in. I hope it can be saved, I think as the lungs of the planet, it will save us.
Regarding the tour participants, it was heavy on the retired teachers, six, and widows, four, demographic. That said, we only had 18 people in our group. The mental acuity and curiosity of the group made them all a delight. Ok, there was one retired bi-lingual elementary school teacher who was kind of out of it. She always spoke in rhyme and would answer questions by singing a song, “One two, look at you!” but in the main, they were mostly normal. In preparation for the Amazon I purchased four shirts from Aday. These shirts were touted to be sustainable, and B Corp, meeting high standards of social and environmental impact. They were no wrinkle, and quick dry, they were stylish (other women on the boat said so) and they were expensive. I spent $600 on travel shirts because I just couldn’t bear to look at another picture of myself in an REI multi pocketed something with epaulets. I just couldn’t. I know. So that’s what I wore. And the weather, for me, was like a warm hug. Yes, it was a rainforest but it didn’t rain on us everyday and I somehow felt coddled. It was much more comfortable than last summer in North Carolina. I did get a few mosquito bites but since Tom is the mozzy magnet, he got tons, on his butt of all places. I didn’t put bug spray on more than once or twice the whole trip. I was heavy on the sunscreen.
On the boat, we had our own cabin with a shower stall and toilet. The toilets had a little hose on the side that worked as an ad-hoc bidet. It cleans everything right up so you don’t have to use as much toilet paper. This was the land of no toilet paper in the toilet. It had to go in the little trash container. The cabin was very cold and although we could adjust the A/C we kept it cold. Tom likes to sleep in cold and the A/C dried our clothes out at night. We had a window with a view of the river. Most of the trip was spent on the Rio Negro. We had a chair and lots of hangers and a built in desk shelf thing.
On our first day on the boat we went out on motorized canoes before dinner. The group was split in two and Hugo was the naturalist on our boat. We saw night blooming lilies, bats that had special claws to fish with, all manner of birds. The night blooming lilies are white and female at night and pink and male during the day. We came close to shore to see the animals and before we knew it little spindly tree frogs with red fingertips had hopped on our boat and one had hopped on me! It was on the left side of my life vest and I looked down and said, “hello”. The next thing I knew it had hopped off and away. We then went on and saw a huge iguana on a tree branch and then this giant orange brown boa constrictor wrapped around another tree branch. At one point, Hugo reached into the water and pulled out a caiman! It was about 18 inches long and Hugo held it firmly by the head and tail. This caiman was called the spectacle caiman because it has a separate eyelid that is clear so that it can see under water. Hugo touched the eyelid so we could see it blink down. I am remembering this creature as having huge eyelashes like all of the girls are wearing these days and I’m certain that can’t be true. The other thing I remember, and this was true, was that the caiman started to squirm and I let out a blood curdling scream. Hugo promptly tossed the caiman back in the water at this point. Thank God.
The next day we were up and in the canoes before 6 am to view the animals as they were waking up.
So many beautiful birds, ibis, king fishers, terns, egrets, swallows and this weird looking bird called a Hoatzin. The Hoatzin has a double chamber digestive tract that allows it to ferment and then breakdown plant matter. It’s nicknamed the flying cow.
Howler monkeys, squirrel monkeys, capuchin monkeys, toucans, parrots, vultures, striated herons, duckbill heron, sloths, bright yellow butterflies, anis (a relative of the cuckoo bird) and greater anis, macaws, yellow finch, parrots,
cardinals, woodpeckers, pink dolphins, grey dolphins…The squirrel monkeys’ tails are not prehensile but are used for balance. I was seeing how that could come in handy on the tennis court. You know, counter balancing for the far reach.
We did a jungle walk and saw tarantulas that were as big as softballs and the biggest cutter ants I have ever seen. They were ginormous and walking along the ground in military precision with huge pieces of plants on their backs. We also saw some very small ants that when squished up smell like coconut. We found a downed tree whose bark smelled like clove because, it was clove. The sap of another tree was used by natives to caulk boats, buildings, etc. and the sap of another was sweet and sticky, it was chiclet, gum! There were huge piles of earthworm poop. This was from the martiodrilus earthworms that can reach five feet. Hugo had all of us take a small bite of a plant that was very, very bitter. He said it had medicinal properties. And the jungle continued to breathe.
When we got back to the boat the young widow of a man who used to clear trails for Road Scholar had trinkets for sale and we were encouraged to buy them because she needed the money. I bought some earrings and what I thought was a flute but turned out to be a blowgun. I also picked up a necklace.
Some of us took a dip over the side of the boat. It was great for my bug bites.
I asked Hugo about treatment for Lily and he suggested tea made from soursop leaves. He said, ideally, if the tree you get the leaves from dies, then it pretty much guarantees the patient will thrive. I decided to just get some commercial soursop tea for Lily.
We went to a small village that had been abandoned after the bust of the rubber trade. Within forty years the trees had mature roots going up and through stone walls. The jungle came in and devoured it in what felt like a couple of breaths. To me, it felt like, if I were to turn my back on the jungle for five or ten minutes, it would devour me. I swear, I could hear it breathing.
Bright yellow mushrooms, rhododendron, bougainvillea, Giant Kapok tree, resin trees, cloves vine, chiclet trees, rosewood and brazil wood. I can’t do justice to the plant life in the rainforest.
At some point, we had to go and check in to some sort of government office to confirm that we were the ones on the list.
Outside this government office there was a huge turtle nursery. It looked like an above ground swimming pool with turtle eggs buried in it.
We went to a nature preserve and saw more squirrel monkeys. We saw manatees, such gentle creatures, a very talkative yellow bellied bird, turtles and we had a lecture on mosquitoes and which mosquitos carried which diseases. The lecture was given by a young female college student. She could not have been more adorable; big brown eyes, wavy hair lightened and pulled back in a ponytail. She was wearing those stick earrings that the kids like that go in one part of the upper ear and then out of the other. She also had some sort of lip piercing. When she wanted us to move along she’d say, “Come!’ and waive her hand indicating that we were to follow her. It made quite a few of the group laugh, the way she said it. She was so stern and she looked at me and asked, “they do not understand?” I told her , “yes, we understand” just darling.
We visited a manioc plantation. The farmer, Pedro, looked quite a bit like the late Eddie Van Halen, only a little browner and a little shorter, dimples, and missing teeth and all. He always carried a machete. Kindof the same way I was told Eddie Van Halen always carried his guitar around. I thought of how fun it would be for the boys if they could have run around with machetes when they were kids. I didn’t get a straight answer on what age kids were allowed to carry machetes, but on the farms, they all did. Pedro is 62 and has had 8 children. Only daughter and one son still live with him. The son works the farm with Pedro and I got the feeling that the main “farm” income at this point is really, giving tours to ‘eco tourists’ The house was about 50 yards from the river and up on a hill. Although most of Pedro’s home was quite primitive, he did have a big screen tv in the living room and a, well, I think that was the only ‘mod con’ if you will. The indigenous people used native plants for birth control for both men and women. I did not get the deets on this, shame on me. They would limit their children to only how many they could carry or move through the jungle with. As the indigenous people started to settle along the river their families grew. Wolf said that with the introduction of televisions, the internet and cell phones, family size is down to one or two children now. I am just going to leave that there.
Processing the manioc is a pain in the ass and I don’t know how people figured out how to do it. I’m sure that many people died in learning how to process it. First off there are two different types of manioc, sweet and poisonous as hell. So, the sweet manioc does not need to be processed over a period of days before it can be consumed but sweet manioc gets eaten by rats, capybara, etc. The other manioc is filled with cyanide and it has to be soaked and then boiled and then and finally, beaten. How in the hell birds weren’t falling from the sky during the boiling process as I’m sure cyanide gas was released or the farmers and their children and stock weren’t falling over during the beating and drying process, God only knows.
We did swim with pink dolphins and it was a little disturbing to me. I had thought that we’d just jump out of the boat when we saw them and you know kindof be with them. How naive. We went to a family run business where they have trained the dolphins to come in for fish and they have you stand in a little shallow bit of water so that the dolphins are with you, as it were ,so you can pet them but not on their heads or their fins. Pink dolphins are quite big and they have a fully articulated spine. They looked like brutes, nothing gentle about them. They have been in the Amazon for thousands of years.
Tom fished for and caught a piranha. Fierce little shits.
The Amazon has free health care but we were told it’s just the minimum health care. I’m not sure what that means but there are Hospital Ships and Red Cross ships that provide additional health services.
The people of the Amazon are the most racially diverse group of humanity that I have ever seen. I’ve lived in port cities so that’s saying something. I saw a woman with latte colored skin, green eyes and loose copper curls. She was a vision, but what was her nationality? your guess would be as good as mine. In the main, the Amazonians were shorter than North Americans. Warm cake was part of the breakfast buffet every morning and I said to Wolf, “if I ate like this everyday I’d be as big as a house, how do these people do it?” He responded that next to North America, Brazil has the highest obesity rate in the world. This may be true, but I didn’t see it and neither did Tom.
The people are moving from the jungles to the cities and villages. Little motor boats go up and down the rivers ferrying kids to and from elementary school. Wolf’s twelve year old daughter is learning Korean because she’s a K-pop fan and a member of a K-pop fan club that meets in Manaus. The mind boggles. The city is in disrepair, huge holes in the sidewalk, tangled masses of electrical wires attached to poles. I held my breath waiting for an electrical fire with this mess in a tropical rainforest. But everyone has a cellphone. There’s some middle class growth with new compact cars zipping around on these crumbling streets. And on our last day, off of the river, we had lunch in a restaurant that could have been in any major city, San Francisco, Raleigh, NY, Paris, with beautiful dishes with edible flowers and even the roast beef and mashed potatoes looked, unrecognizable it was so artfully arranged on the plate. So there’s money, somewhere, amongst the crumbling walls, and the breathing forest and the children running in the streets.
