Why I wrote the book
I wrote this book because I didn’t want to forget all the details of my trip to the Amazon. And I didn’t want to keep telling the same stories over and over again to people who asked how it was. Now I can hand them this book.
I wrote this book to remind my family and me years from now what the Amazon used to be like before big corporate hotel chains and logging companies had their way with it. I thought I’d get there before they pave it.
I wanted to create a growing book for my niece and nephew to entertain them as they get older.
Exploring the jungle and canoeing in water so high that you can touch the treetops has been a dream of mine since I first heard about rainy seasons and rain forests in grade school. My whole life I have wanted to float down a magical river where I could reach out and touch the tops of trees. Being there was like appearing in a documentary that opened up and took me in. In this book, I wanted to pass a little of that feeling along to my reader.
The Amazon
The Black River in the Amazon is a really big river in Brazil. Like BIG.
In South America it rains a lot for part of the year, and the Black River gets bigger, about 14 miles across. In the dry season, it is about 10 miles across. All that rainfall stays in the Amazon Valley because the height of the Andes Mountains keeps the clouds from carrying the moisture to the western side of South America. But only the top few inches of the valley is soil. Underneath that is sand. If it wasn’t for the height of the Andes Mountains, the Amazon forest would be a desert. The idea that this is fertile land waiting to be cultivated is a myth. In fact, the Amazon valley has been ocean floor several times.
I stayed on a tributary to the Amazon River called the Black River, or the Rio Negro in Spanish, because the water is so dark that it is almost black. In fact, it looks a lot like tea without cream in it.
Food
I enjoyed a sushi dinner at the airport in a last hurrah to food safe to eat. There were strict warnings about the acceptable diet for Brazil. No seafood, no milk, no unpeeled fruit or vegetables, eat only cooked food, and then only if it was still hot when it was placed in front of you. The upshot of this is that there was no escape from the jungle heat through comfort food. Now I understand what previous generations meant by ‘people who lost their minds in the jungle.’ If I was in that heat for a month, with the food making me sick and the heat and not one familiar plant, it could happen to me. Maybe it already has.
When I ran across a McDonald’s in a mall in Manaus, Brazil, I eagerly ran to it and ordered a burger and fries. It’s hard to appreciate here, but that is one place where the food is always safe no matter where you are in the world.
I also packed a large bottle of Gatorade for almost every day of my trip and some anti-bacterial soap at the behest of my mother. Good old Mom was prophetic once again. I developed a small infection on my big toe in the jungle. In the US, it would be nothing but a slight redness on the side of the toenail, but in the jungle it became swollen and throbbing. The soap I took to appease Mom came in handy then. Eventually the big toe scare died down, the ramifications could have been serious. I could see the Foreign Service officer at the embassy telling my parents that a virulent toe infection caused my doom. I’m sure it happens all the time, and in that jungle heat, you really start to believe it. Even the diseases are more alive.
Traveling
I didn’t realize that my last hurrah to American food was also a last hurrah to airports as I knew them. People were wandering around, no armed guards were visible. The people working the X-ray machines acted out their class resentments in the usual surly manner. It was scary going to Brazil, let alone the Amazon, alone. Suddenly, all sorts of minor decisions took on the significance of the last round of the World Open Chess tournament. I was puzzled and confused. What should I do next? Am I in the wrong place? I was seized with a conviction that I must immediately RUN to the other end of the terminal, and yet I was frozen in place. On baggage security guard signaled me over. “Give me your bag.” I complied. She gave directions to the proper gate, while pretending to do an in-depth search of my carry-on luggage. “We’re not supposed to help people like that. We are only supposed to check bags.” I had mistakenly dashed from terminal to terminal looking for my flight, never noticing the steak knives or the lemons being sliced before my very eyes.
After the airplane, I sailed in a boat for three hours away from the city into the jungle.
At the dock, the boat was loaded with passengers. A bunch of Texans who suddenly realized – yes, I am going into the Amazon jungle. They were all salespeople for some computer company who were the highest sellers in the country. As a prize, there win a surprise trip to somewhere exotic. This year was the Amazon. You could see the realization sink in. They dashed into the convenience store at the dock and grabbed handfuls of candy and armloads of beer. The clerk tried hard to keep a placid face. The rank puzzlement of the Brazilians was openly displayed as the candy bars began to cover each other in piles on the counter. Man cannot live by chocolate alone, however, and there was a commensurate amount of beer to accompany them. Munching and slurping were not entertainment enough it seems.
“Hey, anybody up for a quick round of poker?”
“Yeah.
”Yeah.”
“Yeah.”
“What can we play on?”
“How about this thing?” the man thumped some protrusion of the ship.
“Yeah.”
“Yeah.”
“Yeah.”
And so they began. As we puttered deep into the jungle on the wide, dark water, perhaps the vicious beasts of the forest were alerted to us by ceaseless pointless jokes and the very loud rankling. All I know is they didn’t attack.
Imagine – sailing into the unknown and exotic to experience untouched wilderness, danger, and excitement. These trees may become extinct. In ten years the ecosystem may have collapsed. All that will be left are documentaries and tourist brochures. But how could that compete with popping a brewski and winning a few dollars on a card game?
Our guide sang disco songs as the boat pulled up to the dock at the hotel. Local legend has it that fresh water dolphins swim around the hotel during the rainy season will come to greet you if you sing to them. So we all sang a Gloria Gainer song as our boat glided alongside the dock.
Monkeys!!
Monkeys were everywhere. They crawled all over the place. You have to keep an eye on your belongings, as I found out when the monkeys stole my cookies. Then they took my water bottle. It gave a real feeling to the place. Scores of monkeys lounged on the deck, on the tables, in the trees. They chased each other and jumped on people lying in hammocks.
Look! Aunt Christine climbs a vine, just like a monkey!
The vine I’m climbing is called a ‘monkey ladder’ by local Indians. The monkeys use it to escape being killed by the jaguar. Since the jaguar can climb a tree as fast as a monkey, the monkeys use this vine because they can climb it faster than the jaguar. Three or more monkeys will climb down the monkey ladder to look for food. One of the monkeys will be on the lookout for the jaguar. If a monkey sees a jaguar, a shout will warn the other monkeys of the danger and they will all run up the monkey ladder to escape death.
The jungle is a dangerous place. You don’t realize how dangerous until you are there. There is no such thing as animals peaceably hanging out. Each creature has to fight for its life daily. You don’t think of monkeys and their lives of danger. So much can kill in the jungle. A person couldn’t sleep on the ground. How did the first human inhabitants figure that out? How long before they invented the hammock? The Amazon Indians are short and slight. All the big ones, who would be slower and require more energy to live, were phased out of the gene pool.And Birds!!
There were plenty of exotic jungle birds, too. The hotel puts out food to encourage the birds to hang around. They strategically placed the catwalks so the birds could eat in peace, away from pesky tourists.
The Rio Negro
The water is very dark, and piranhas and Anaconda snakes live in the water along with weird amoebas that swim up your urinary tract. If you put your hand in the river up to your elbow, you will barely be able to see your hand.
This dark river water results from dry leaves mixing with river water heated by the sun to form a sort of tea. A few miles from the location of the photo above the Black River will merge with the Amazon River and the two will be visibly different colors for eight miles, although they share the same river bed. The Black River moves more slowly than the Amazon and the waters don’t mix for eight miles.
The darker water is highly acidic, keeping down the local mosquito population and the incidence of malaria. The Brazilian government has taken steps on behalf of the health of the local Indians. There hasn’t been a case of malaria in that part of the jungle for six years.
Jungle Walk
For the jungle you wear long pants and hiking shoes to ward off the mosquitoes and other bugs. I wore a long-sleeved cotton shirt and a hat to prevent sun poisoning.
To the annoyance of the rest of my expedition, I also used a cheap umbrella as a parasol. Drifting in the canoe with my parasol and generally irritating those around me, I felt very much like Katherine Hepburn in “African Queen.”
Of course in my excitement to prevent skin cancer, I used a lot of sun lotion, which leaked into my eyes when I sweated. Then it looked like I was crying just in time to meet the canoe maker in the village. Naturally I did the same thing again the next day.
We looked at trees that are used as medicine. The tree bark of native Amazon trees is used in making Pine Sol and Vicks VapoRub, and in fact was ‘discovered’ in the Nineteenth century. This fact about healing was learned by European explorers stomping through the jungle from the natives. The sap from the trees provided healing properties and they took the roots and made a business from it. The entire story reminds me of movies whose plot details how the cure for cancer or AIDS is dying right now in the jungles that are being savagely cut down by evil corporate interests.
Spider Lady
A local young woman ran the hotel’s museum of dead dried creatures from this area of the rainforest. It was only a small room with cases of dead piranha and spiders and bugs. I didn’t really hang out there. I guess the purpose of the display was so all of us eco-tourists could tell stories later of the large spiders we saw even though they were dead. We could then snort with derision at untimely roaches making appearances at fundraising cocktail parties. “Oh, is that it? I became immune to such things in the Amazon,” and we urbanely finish off our scotch and change the subject before being asked for too many details.
The management of the Jungle Lodge certainly chose the right woman to stand watch over the insects and arachnids in the display case. Her affinity for deadly spiders was compelling. Her space was an unofficial healing place for big hairy tarantulas. You had to look closely, though, to see the patients crawling on the ceilings and the floors. The spiders hid in the corners of the display room that showcased their dead brethren. I wonder how they felt about that? Several of them had pieces of legs missing. She had names for them. Spider Lady rescued the injured spiders, fed them, and generally nursed them back to health. Maybe so they could bite one of the guests. She was a cold woman. When they were strong enough, she let them loose into the jungle again. I wonder how many come back to visit?
“People think they are mean, but I don’t think so. To me, they are nice. They are my friends,” she explained to me.
Completely unaware that all the furry spiders in the room were not dead, ecotourists from many lands tapped at the glass cases. Spider Lady answered their questions politely. She works every day for a few weeks and then gets about a week off. She likes it.
The Village
We stopped at an Indian village. One of the Indians makes canoes out of trunks of jungle trees. He is a famous canoe maker and people buy his canoes from very far away.
Village children are taught jungle survival skills from early childhood. A six-year-old from the local tribe could survive alone in the jungle for a few days. There is so much to know: which plants are poisonous, where to sleep to be safe from snakes, what plants act as a balm, what animals are edible and which ones will eat you; the list of necessary information a small child must know is as formidable as it is critical. On our canoe rides on the river, we could see little children diving for fish in the river. They are taught to swim as soon at they can walk.
The economic dynamics of eco-tourism are pushing the natives towards a career in kitsch. Small and obviously fake trinkets were on display as samples of the native craft. “Come, look, the villagers make crafts.” Our guide was very invested in the fate of the villagers. He was a wild jungle boy himself before the Jesuits educated him. So he relates to them and is just a little annoyed at the tourists who point and stare, much as he is dependent on them.
The villagers are fourth-generation descendants of native Indian, Dutch, and English people. After the American Civil War, some unhappy southerners came to the Amazon to settle also. Slavery was still legal in Brazil. Most left rather quickly.
The hotel is teaching the local Indians English to eventually hire them as guides for tours. Our guide takes credit for starting this program and goes to the village several nights a week to teach.
My tour group featured some soon-to-be MBAs from MIT who immediately began talking about case studies and economic models. Bastardization of a culture didn’t enter into the discussion.
“I guess we could make a business case study,” they chortled to one another.
“Here is the supply chain.” The boat maker ignored all of us.
“And this would be the economic model.”
In all the analysis, none of them saw what was really going on. The culture was on display as a freak show for the tourists to pretend that they got an authentic display of ‘life in the jungle.’”
Many of the workers at the jungle hotel, and there were lots of them, were from the local jungle villages. The success of the hotel has been a boon to the living standards of the local Indians. Our guide encouraged the Indians in tourist trade, and encouraged us to buy from them. He was a one-man economic development machine for the locals. It was clear that he felt we could easily be parted from our money, and was going to show the villagers how to do it. In other parts of the world, I would suspect that he was getting a kickback, but not this guy. He was a true believer. At every stop in the village, the seeds of his personal economic program could be seen: trinkets in a tent beside the river, the mud huts the Indians lived in, a bar in the center the village that sold water with a toilet that was a hole in the ground, and toothless men sitting at broken tables. The guide was determined that the local population would reap some of the money made on their culture, land and cache. So the tour was peppered with stops at the local village to buy hand-crafted trinkets that didn’t presume much authenticity. Everyone knew it. But we equally saw the mud huts, bare feet and poverty. So we bought stuff. I shudder to think what a little marketing sophistication will add. It will become like the American side of Niagara Falls.
On the first night of my stay, the guide assigned to our group told us of a rare opportunity to watch a jungle tribe’s ceremony celebrating the killing of a jungle animal in the hunt. For a small fee, we could watch this ceremony. I declined, but everyone else went. My stay at the Jungle Lodge was four days and the average stay was two days. So the rest of my tour group had completely changed when - what do you know – there was ANOTHER jungle tribe ceremony. Another beast had been caught in the jungle! This must be a regular racket. Not that I resented it. One look at the insufferable poverty they were living in cured that. I am sure that it is only the beginning of an empire. I wonder if any of them feel like throwing up afterwards?
The houses are built on stilts to avoid the high water in the rainy season. Their clothes, when they were wearing them, were tattered cast-offs from other places that never knew this humidity. They swam in the dangerous water to catch fish, risking piranha fish bites, vicious little organisms that attack the urinary tract, and just plain drowning. No one was overweight.
The hotel paid for a village nurse whose supplies were aspirin, bandages, ointment for rashes and saline water. With my eyes watering from melting sun block, the guide took me to her. She really only had a first aid understanding of health and proceeded to almost stick her fingers in my eyes. The guide was very insistent that we go to her so that I can get healed by the local village nurse. “See” he said, “She heals you with the medicine of the jungle.”
I read an old book written by a 19th-century adventurer named James Orton. He described the local population of the area I visited in not very glowing terms. “The Andes and Amazonas,” published just after the U.S. Civil War. He declared the Amazonian Indians surrounding Manaus, the nearest city, as lazy and insolent and altogether unfit for work. He described an incident which is amusing for his misunderstanding of it. He and an American friend were suffering in the shade and oppressive humidity, sitting in chairs. His friend called to one of the local Indians and the man didn’t come over. His friend continued and eventually the Indian came. The American told the Indian to get him some water and he would give him fifty cents. The Indian replied that he had a better idea. “You get me some water and I’ll pay you a dollar,” said the Indian. The rest of the paragraph chortles about how this poor Indian didn’t have a dollar and how the local population was not only incapable of work, but also of understanding basic economics.
The village has a church built by missionaries. In fact, every single tribe in the Amazon has at least one team of missionaries associated with it, and often more than one. So the Amazon is teeming with people helping the Indians. Sometimes there are more missionaries than people in the tribe they are trying to help.
The major religions represented are the Assembly of God, the Mormons, and some Catholic nuns. When I was back in the city, Manaus, a tour guide told me that he would want to be a Mormon missionary because many of them are pretty young women.
Pyramids and Space Aliens
For reasons I will not go into here, I have a sneaking feeling there is intelligent life on other planets. And, yes, from time to time they drop by. Wouldn’t you? “I wonder what those hairless monkeys are doing now” they must ask each other, while making bets on when we will lose the evolutionary battle with the roaches.
The space alien landing pad has the infinity sign in the middle, with greetings written in four languages. How can the creator of this monument be sure that it is not instead a declaration of war to our intergalactic visitors? We certainly will lose to the roaches if we offend them too much. Suppose these beings believe that several centuries of protocol must precede a greeting? The presumption of a greeting written before actual introductions could be seen as highly aggressive.
If we take the leap in accepting that there are alien visitors we must also accept their superiority in commanding and harnessing the elements. Put another way, when’s the last time any of us visited them? Then we are immediately faced with a power imbalance not in our favor with an entity who may or may not have our best interests at heart. Or maybe they do but their idea of that is the European colonialism of the 17th, 18th and 19th centuries. About the worst we could get are more powerful adversaries as bad as ourselves.
Underneath this “friendly space alien” logic is a fatal pessimism about humanity I can’t quite shake. Are we that bad? Of course we are, but that’s not the whole story. Is there so little to redeem us that a crap shoot with space aliens offers more hope? No. Humanity is a collection of evolving beasts. We are growing, one Black Plague and Truth and Reconciliation Commission at a time. We are inherently self-interested. The evolution of our evil ways is necessary to survival. If there’s one thing that gets us to move it’s that. Our philosophies and theories will bend to accommodate, and later our practices. Can you imagine Genghis Khan being captured and dragged to The Hague to account for his war crimes? Or Alexander the Great?
The pyramid was the one place where air conditioning didn’t cost extra, and so it was there I spent my early afternoons. It was a great place for meditation and reflection. The idea of air conditioning in Brazil differs from the US. There, the goal is forestalling heat stroke. Here, we recreate Fall indoors.
Curiosity-seekers came and went in the pyramid. Few stayed since adults could not stand up inside it, except in the very center. The Amazon is a great place to go to be utterly disconnected from anything familiar and comforting. Any home base of safety outside of oneself is removed. No T.V., no newspapers, no familiar food. Then you are forced to look inside. How am I safe? Why am I here? Why are you here eating my sandwich? It goes on and on.
Specifically, what on Earth would possess me to go to some of the most dangerous wilderness in the world? And spend good money to do it? So the pyramid is an area of disconnectedness within a geography of disconnectedness. The inside of the pyramid under the heat of the Amazon sun was a room with white glowing walls and gentle chimes as musical backdrop. “Why am I here in the Amazon?” leads naturally to “why am I here on Earth?” as opposed to Alpha Centari, I suppose. The inside of the pyramid was as familiar as a space pod from a sci-fi movie. The familiarity served as my link to the world and life I knew.
Deep Waters
In the rainy season, the water gets so high the river water gets near the tops of trees. And if you are in a boat, you can sail around and touch the tree tops.
Jungle Hut
Aunt Christine stayed in a jungle hut with no phone, no T.V., no air conditioning, no hot water, and one dim light bulb. This is what the hut looked like.
It was hot like I’ve never felt hot before. And that includes the Saudi desert. I felt my skin every minute. And no flip flips or open toed shoes. The spiders on the catwalks were dangerous. Strange and deadly animals ate from the bird feeders. In our culture we are so used to being insulated from our own stupidity. Not every country lets people sue at the drop of a hat. The whole jungle hotel was on stilts because it was the rainy season and the water was very high. All the buildings were connected by catwalks like these.
Dark water was high on either side of the catwalks because it was Winter and the rainy season. If someone fell into it, they would not be found until the waters receded in Spring. Catwalks connected the various huts that comprised the hotel complex. Once I was startled on the catwalks to see an Indian woman with a small child, holding her hand. It was then that I realized that I hadn’t seen a child since I got there. Of course it would be too dangerous to let any child run around since there were so many deadly creatures.
My Brush With Death
The thing about being in the jungle is that the jungle is with you. So all of the fun - and mean - creatures don’t know about keeping a respectful distance. My brush with death was something I was made aware of hours after the mortal danger passed.
In the early hours of the morning I was awake before anyone else. Having accepted my place in the universe at that moment as being irretrievable in the Amazon jungle, I decided to brandish my acceptance of this fact and walk around the catwalks to observe the jungle waking up. I took my camera and saw monkeys and birds and even spiders. I took pictures of the monkeys, even though the flash upset them. It was in those pre-dawn hours that I almost lost my life.
I was walking through one of the huts in the early morning hour and paused before going on to the catwalk. I saw four animals I didn’t recognize. They were the size of muskrats and had rings on their tails. I weighed the situation. Here I am in a wild that I do not know. That alone is an unusual position to be in because I was raised in the Appalachian Mountains and grew up learning the animals and plants around me. Part of all that was how to track animals through the woods. But I immediately recognized that relying on my previous experience wouldn’t work in this context. So I decided to be cautious and wait for the creatures to crawl away. One by one, they climbed up into the trees. When the last one was about to climb into the branches of a tree I decided I had had enough of caution. I was feeling silly anyway. So I opened the screen door and started on the catwalk. Only when I was fully outside did I see another one of these creatures on the rail of the catwalk. I froze.
The beast looked at me and I at it. Our gazes didn’t move. Then I got the strange feeling that this jungle creature was saying to itself, “Nah, I’m not going to bother.” I held my breath and decided to dash past it, and I did.
Later that morning, our guide pointed out the same animals. “Stay away from them. They are very dangerous.”
Only about half the group paid attention. The guide had our boat stopped and he repeated his warning, louder and little angry. “Don’t get near these things,” he said again. “They are very dangerous. They can jump far and when they attack humans they bite the throat with very powerful teeth. You have to break their jaw to get them to let go. By then, the person is dead.” I told him I saw four of them earlier in the day, and relayed the details, including how I ran past the last one. At that part, he rolled his eyes. “It is sudden movement that causes them to attack,” he told me. Then he turned to the other locals in the boat and repeated what I had said. They all shook their heads.
So that stupid animal really did decide it wasn’t worth its time to kill me.
Crocodile!
At night, we went crocodile spotting. In a motorized canoe, which was the only means of transport out of the hotel, a guide would show us where the crocodiles lived. They shone a spotlight over the water and we could see the gleaming of the crocodiles’ eyes. Their eyes reflected light like a cat’s would and we could see them 35 yards away. Then the guides paddled us to where we saw the reptiles and turned the spotlight into the water. The night was very dark because there were no artificial lights anywhere. Only the moon and the stars. To get to this crocodile spot, we had to canoe through the “flooded forest” where we had to duck to prevent branches from knocking us into the water. It is called the “flooded forest” because during the rainy season the water level rises so high that all but the tops of the tallest trees are beneath the water. During the dry season, the branches we were avoiding would be fifty feet in the air.
One of the guides reached in the water and pulled out a baby crocodile. It was only two and a half feet long but I got to hold it. The guide showed us the double eyelids of the reptile. The inner eyelid was clear so that it could see underwater. He wanted us to touch the inner eyelid, but none of us would. After naming the crocodile Pedro, we released him back into the wild. Now I will always have a friend in the Amazon jungle.
Jungle Rehab
This sign talks about how animals that belong in the jungle are found in the city and brought to the Jungle Lodge. Then they are kept in a cage until they get used to the jungle again. After 90 days, they move back into the jungle.
The End
In going to the Amazon, I’ve lived one of my life’s dreams. I want to live on the outer limits of what is possible. Only after I returned did I begin to realize that what I was recording was a dying way of life. The return boat trip to the four-star hotel allowed us to see at least four other ‘jungle hotels’ in the area, and more under construction. Soon they will all be bumping into each other and waiving, like bus drivers on I-95. And to think I helped make that possible.
