Sunday, November 25, 2012

manaus 2012

Sailing north on the Atlantic for four days and west on the Amazon River for two, we eventually docked in the city of Manaus, the most populous area in northern Brazil. Most of us had no idea what to expect. Even the trip up the more than two-and-a-half million square mile Amazon was full of surprises, not the least of which were schools of pink dolphins.

Also, even though the river accounts for nearly one-fifth of the world’s total river flow and spans up to thirty miles across during the wet season--which this is not--we sailed close enough to shore to see it. I’m actually looking at land right now because we’re on our way back down the Amazon, out of the largest drainage basin in the world.

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So let me just say, forget what you think you know about the Amazon River, jungles, rain forests, and yes, even piranhas, because what I learned these past few days is that most of what I thought about the above came from, can you believe it, films, including but certainly not limited to You Only Live Twice, The Jungle Book--yes, I know it takes place in India--and Fitzcarraldo.

I can definitely say that most people on the ship enjoyed the port of Manaus. I heard a lot of crazy stories, but most of them ended with, “Still, this was the best experience I had on the voyage.” In looking back over my photos--at this point, to create space by eliminating the blurry ones--I can easily recall where I took them, what the day was like, and how each experience felt: each hike, each view, each cloud, moon, star, wave, sunrise, sunset, person I met, street I explored. Even each push-up, each pull-up, each time I walked up or down the ship’s stairs. This trip, I’ve found, allows space for me to feel around in the moment for whatever the moment is going to be. I don’t have a single “best” experience here; I have a voyage full of them.

I said to someone last night, “I’m having an organic reflection.” What I meant was that while we have opportunities built into ship time, such as “post-port reflections” in which we’re consciously thinking about the trip, I’ve had an increasing number of moments lately when I think something along the lines of, “I appreciate this, I’m going to miss this, I’ve grown because of this, I look at this differently, I am more because of this.”

This entry isn’t a round-up, however, so let me get back to Manaus. I spent the first day in port walking around the city center, the area relatively near the dock. Manaus is fairly large--4,402 square miles--so it’s not like I covered all that much of it. In addition, it was hot. Not hot like the desert hot; hot like a tropical inferno hot. In other words, moist. Sticky also comes to mind. Staying hydrated involved replenishing not only hydrogen and oxygen in that magical combination known as water, but also glucose. Two fruit drinks got me through about four hours.

The city center was an area full of twists and turns, with a map that was grossly out of scale. Street vendors lined the sidewalks selling soaps, auto parts, watches, and of course, sunglasses. We watched as people boarded river boats, which get used as landlocked people use taxis, and stood amazed as a line of men tossed watermelon after gigantic watermelon from a truck into a market. We passed other men carrying at least a hundred pounds of bananas on their backs. These were not football players either. Unlike in northern Europe, I didn’t feel like the shortest person out there.

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Watermelons and bananas are common enough in the U.S., but there were other fruits in the Amazon that were new flavors in my mouth, at least in so pure a form, fruits such as açaí (ah-sigh-EE), guaraná (gwer-ah-NAH), and cupuaçú (cuh-pooh-ah-SUE). All great flavors, all really good for you.

That night, a large group of us went to the 700-seat Amazonas Opera House to hear the house band, aka the Amazonas Philharmonic Orchestra. The theater was built between 1884 and 1896, during the rubber boom, a time that was great for rubber barons and unsurprisingly bad for the indigenous people forced to work on the plantations. We learned more about this on a later trip in Manaus, where we got to see and feel the latex sap harvested from a rubber tree. These trees can reach 100 feet in the wild, so I think the little ol’ ant would have some problems moving it, no matter how high his hopes.

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Like the ant, the town had high hopes for the theater. In addition to its 198 Italian chandeliers, its European bricks and French glass, the opera house features a roof decorated with 36,000 painted ceramic tiles, which the mayor promised to replace with gold. The continued profits from the rubber boom, however, went bust not long after Englishman Henry Wickham smuggled seeds back to the Royal Botanic Gardens, where they germinated. Nevertheless, the roof of the opera house is quite stunning as is. The concert was amazing, too, definitely worthy of the standing ovation we gave the orchestra and conductor at the end.

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The next day, I was ready for a trip to the town of Presidente Figueiredo, about two hours north of Manaus. We began at Cachoeira do Santurário, where our guide somehow spotted a small brown frog--yes, I got to hold a frog in the Amazon!--and we hiked to a waterfall. A bunch of us jumped in and swam right up to it. Obviously, this waterfall had nothing on the huge Iguazú Falls, part of which is also in Brazil, but the current was strong enough that I had to work to keep myself underneath it.

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Thanks to Ali Guglielmi for taking the shot of me under the waterfall!

After the falls, we walked into caves and hiked through water that was almost up to our knees.

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After the caves, we had an amazing lunch at a local restaurant and then went zip-lining over a river. It was my first time on a zip line and one of the students told me how to flip myself upside down, which more or less, I did.

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The guy below was charged with stopping us before we zip-lined onto shore. It looks much tamer on his side. Going the other way, the guy usually wound up jumping into the water to jerk the rope when our leg-dragging seemed like it wasn’t going to stop us in time to avoid a spectacular crash into a wooden dock. Everyone made it just fine and we then took a swim in the river, drank coconut juice, and ate açaí ice cream before taking a nice, wet, air-conditioned bus ride back to Manaus.

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The next day, we’d thankfully planned a more mellow adventure: the Meeting of the Waters, an almost four-mile section where two rivers—the Rio Negro and the Rio Solimões (Sah-lee-MOJS), which is what the Amazon River is called at this point—run side by side without mixing, a phenomenon that occurs because at 1.2 mph, the Rio Negro runs half as slowly and at 82 °F is 10° warmer than the Rio Solimões.

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Boarding a river boat, we headed down the Amazon, a sight in itself. Along the way, we got to see palafitas, houses built on stilts to accommodate the water level rising drastically during the wet season.

Fortunately, we didn’t have to stop at one of these, which may look like just another boat but is actually a floating gas station. There were a number of these on the river.

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Our next stop was Terra Nova, a very small fishing village and rubber plantation, where we saw a rubber tree leaking its sap-like latex, the primary source of natural rubber. We also got to watch a demonstration of the transformation to rubber, and when our guide threw the vase-like object--which one of the students, Jean Ouye, is holding--to the ground, we were all surprised when, instead of shattering, it bounced!

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The village also depended on visitors buying locally made crafts. Our group gladly purchased a lot, although blow darts, knives, and mounted piranas are not on the list of items that pass security on the ship. Students in other groups learned this the hard way: the ship’s crew incinerated many a blow dart and fish head before we left the port.

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This does, however, give me a perfect opportunity to dispel the myth about piranhas. Locals swim in areas teeming with piranhas. No one gets eaten; no one even gets bit. If you’ve got a large gash, made by say, a slippery machéte, then yeah, maybe you want to stay out of the water, but for the most part, it’s live and let live. For the most part. I didn’t need to test it out, believe me.

After all this, the morning still wasn’t over. We took a hike to see some giant lily pads and I got to hold a baby sloth, which I can only hope was returned soon after to his mother. As soon as I reached for him, he turned right into me and held on for all he was worth. He screamed when I had to pull him away. It was heart-wrenching, actually, and days later, I still think about this little sloth, who moved, sure enough, so slow I could have floated across the river on a lily pad before he completed a head turn.

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Finally, here are some other honest-to-goodness real Amazon crawling and flying things.

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As we close in on the Atlantic, we’ll exit the 50-mile wide mouth of the river and enter a 150-mile wide estuary that’ll put us back into the ocean and on course for the island of Dominica (Doh-men-EE-kah). Final port before the United States. Really? Already?! I’m sure I’ll have more to say then. Meanwhile, as usual, I’ll let the sun, clouds, ocean, and another flying creature do the talking.

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Yes, I really was this close to an albatross.

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