An Amazon Primer

In the primary forest of the Amazon, the bugs are relentless. Every time I stopped, to marvel at an ancient tree as fat as an SUV and tall as a building crane, or to watch a pair of toucans whistle back and forth before zipping off into the dense foliage, or to observe a colony of wasps dive-bombing an ant hill, or to examine a hopping leaf that’s actually a frog camouflaged as a leaf, or to engage in a staring contest with a small white monkey-thing who looked more like a cat than a monkey, or to stand and soak in the unceasing cacophony of sounds, buzzes and chirps and whistles and hoots, never-ending in their droning but reassuring in their celebration of life, every single time I stopped, bugs assaulted my bare skin. I had lathered DDT on every exposed inch, despite the bottle’s warning to not apply directly to the face, and I soon learned why as a chemical burn tingled the skin on my forehead, cheeks, and neck, and my eyes stung from the potent mixture of salt and DDT that was my sweat. And still the bugs came on, wave after wave of fanatical warriors hell bent on getting a taste of my exotic gringo blood no matter the obstacles.

I was following a trail in the rainforest, and on my frequent stops to observe jungle life I would wave my hands back and forth in front of my face in a vain attempt to keep the tiny beasts away, though I don’t believe a beekeepers suit could have stopped the bugs in that jungle. If anyone had been there to see me, I’m sure I would have made an excellent impression waving my arms about like a madman and muttering curses against the most annoying class in the animal kingdom. However, there was not a human soul around, though I bet plenty of animals that saw or heard me wisely chose to keep their distance from the strange-smelling white-skinned visitor to their native homes. Except for the insects of course.

Why was I all alone in the Amazon jungle? Well, that is a question not easily answered but I shall do my best.

When people asked me why I was going to Brazil I said to see the world cup, and they smiled as everyone knows about the World Cup and who wouldn’t want to go. After the world cup I went to work on a farm and people understood, as farming is respectable work that all of our ancestors did and we all need to eat. But after the farm I said I was going to the Amazon and people would ask why and I joked that I wanted to see the heartbeat of the world, man, or that I would journey all the way up it to its source, or that I was going to save the rainforest. But the truth is simply that I am a nature geek and the Amazon is probably the largest, wildest, most teeming with life place left on our civilization-succumbing planet. And I did want to see it.

As the plane descended into Belem, a port city 100 kilometers from the ocean, I had my nose squished against the glass like a fat kid waiting for the candy store to open. A flat deep-green sea expanded for miles in all directions, broken up by the occasional homestead and the snaking curves of dirt-brown rivers. I had chosen the window seat for this descent, and with each declining minute my giddiness increased, as I got closer to the moment when that door would finally open.

I stepped out of the airport and a million beads of sweat sprang into dank existence upon my body. This shedding of water and salt would continue daily for the rest of my time in the Amazonian basin, where its always hot and its always green and there’s no way to escape but to flee to the ocean to the East or the mountains to the West. The cab I grabbed was blessedly air-conditioned, and I guess that’s another way to escape, but you can’t spend your whole life inside cars and buildings…or at least I can’t.

Belem from the other side of the very big Amazon river

Upon arrival my couchsurfing hosts informed me that there are two seasons in the Amazon, poco chuva and muito chuva (little rain and lots of rain). In keeping with the overbearing insistence on consistency, there are also two temperatures: quente (hot) and muito quente. I knew it was the season of poco chuva/muito quente when I booked my flight to Belem, but I figured that I’ve always liked heat and hated cold so I would be ok. However, my Northern European blood rebelled against my African upbringing, and I repeatedly found myself shirtless, arms spread, lying in front of a fan, and still sweating. Eventually, you get used to the heat, or at least learn to stay out of the sun between 2 and 5pm, and drink ice cold beer, and shower multiple times a day without drying off, and take off your shirt whenever the social situation allows it, which is often. I’ve never seen so many shirtless men in my life. They eat, work, shop, and drive with their nipples out and no one bats an eye. Unfortunately, the women do not follow the men in this regard.

My host Claudio and his roommates Edipo and Sara were about the best introduction a man could get to the world of couchsurfing. They are all graduate students pursuing PhDs in the study of dragonflies, fishing engineering, and birds, respectively. They welcomed me with open arms by donating their living room and the contents of their fridge to my use, and introduced me to all of their animal-studying friends, who also turned out to be friendly excellent people. Not sure if this is because nature-lovers are generally nice and easy to get along with, or that Brazilians are welcoming and open by nature, or that these people simply had an awesome group of friends, but I ended up staying for a week instead of the planned three days. Of course, this was partly because they insisted I come to the Axé concert/dance party on Saturday night, and I’m not one to turn down concert/dance parties on a Saturday night.

Axé (pronounced a-shay) is a type of Brazilian music that fuses Afro-Caribbean beats with jazz solos and throws in some reggae and rock and samba for good measure. It was popular in the 90s, and like all things popular in the 90s it is bright and unashamed and insanely happy. Also, many of the popular songs have choreographed dance moves that all the Brazilian 90s babies know. Remember the Macarena? It’s like that but every song has its own dance, and the moves are more communal and much more suggestive, this is Brazil after all. If you’re interested, requebra, which translates as shake your booty, is a good example of the music. So my Saturday night had choreographed dancing and plenty of drinking and a bit of laughing at my expense as I did my best to shake and wiggle along with the more coordinated revelers.

At the dance party with my more photogenic and coordinated friends

After my hangover abated, I boarded a cargo boat for a three-day trip up the river to the city of Santarem. The deck was adorned in hammocks of every color that hung above the piled up baggage, gently swaying with the weight of their owners. About ten gringos were on the boat headed to either Santarem or Manaus to get deeper into the Amazon. In Brazil, gringo is a positive word and refers to anyone who is not Brazilian. The rest of the 200 or so passengers were Brazilians, native to either Belem or Santarem or the many villages in between, and traveling for work or to visit family.

The placid days rolled by, each one broken up by at least one nap. I passed the time with reading, listening to music, working out, talking, and swinging back and forth, and back and forth in the hammock. Also, a lot of watching the riverbank as we glided by, looking at birds or dolphins or the many houses dotted along the river. All the houses were on stilts, all were made of wood, and all had at least two boats docked at their piers. The river is everything to these people, their source of food and money and clothes, their means of transportation, and even their sewer system. Children are also a fixture at every single house, and they would stop their swimming or fishing or paddling to watch us go by. Some of the Brazilians on the boat had bundles of clothes tied up in plastic bags, and at the more remote houses, miles from any town, they would toss these bags overboard to the people who plucked them out of the water.

Throwing clothes to the river people

An hour before sunset the gringos would gather at the back of the boat and, using a drink shaker someone had wisely brought, make and drink caipirinhas. This helped pass the time and loosen the reservations so that more honest things could be said about more taboo subjects. For the most part, the Brazilians did not join in, except for the group of sixteen-year-old white-water kayakers who had no problem drinking the free booze. I met some good folks on that boat, and after three days we thankfully disembarked and boarded the bus to the small beach town of Alter-do-Chao.

Close sleeping quarters

That’s right, there’s a beach town in the Amazon, but its beaches are only above water during the dry season. It’s a sleepy place with no big supermarkets and the only Internet connection is in the town square. The beaches are white and sandy yet dotted with shade bestowing trees, and the water is blue and clear, as it sets at the edge of the Tapajos river, which is not murky brown like the Amazon. I spent a good day swimming in that river and drying on the sand, waiting for the sun to set over the distant trees on the far side of the river.

Alter-do-Chao, despite its beach town atmosphere, is indeed in the Amazon and has the requisite jungle tours to see the animals and forest. Actually, there are two main tours, one to the “wildlife rich” Canal Jari to look for animals, and one to the national park on the Tapajos to see big trees and local villages and walk in primary Amazonian rainforest, a rarity in many of the areas inhabited by people.

An Amazonian beach, not what I expected to find there.

My friends from the boat and I agreed to do a tour together as the price gets lower the more people you have. The Dutch Edwin and Charlotte wanted to do the Canal Jari and Tim the German wanted to do both. From my African safari days, I know what a crapshoot seeing animals can be, and since trees rarely move, its much easier to see and observe them, though I will admit it’s not as exciting. I tried to argue for the primary forest, but not very strongly, as I do not relish conflict. Instead I chose the easier route and agreed to go on the hunt for animals, armed with my trusty digital camera, unsure if I would even get the chance to use it.

Our tour started with an hour and a half boat ride across the Tapajos to its confluence with the Amazon. The rivers here are humongous, more akin to lakes or even oceans, and you don’t quite realize their scale until it takes you almost two hours to get to the other side in a motorboat. But we finally made it and entered the Canal Jari, the last spit of flooded land before the Amazon meets the Tapajos. The bigger river wins, and the water morphs from a nice clear blue to a more ominous brown. Trees jutted up out of the murk, and birds roosted among their solitary branches, one eye on the fish-filled river, though it baffles me how they manage to catch anything. Along with the birds and fish, people live in stilted homes along the Canal Jari, making their living by fishing and milking their skinny cows. Where the cows go when the waters rise, I do not know. Perhaps to the stone church whose white and blue painted façade was a surreal sight in the stark landscape of sunburned water stretching from horizon to horizon.

Surreal stone church

After 30 minutes cruising up the canal we got our first real proof that our jungle tour may not be so jungly, as we docked at the captain’s house and he got off and disappeared into his home. We wandered around the run down farm and looked at the dogs panting in the shade under the house and the chickens pecking in the dirt. Not exactly prime “wildlife” viewing. Depressed and more than a little angry, I retreated to the boat and took a nap. Our guide Mario, who seemed like a nice guy, told us this was a great spot to fish for piranhas and got Tim and Edwin and Charlotte to cast lines off the side of the boat while I slept. Tim woke me up with a shout having quickly snagged one, and he grinned at the toothy beast while I snapped a picture. They tossed it back into the river, and this seemed like a signal. The captain emerged from his house and we pushed out into the river and went back the way we had come. I am still not sure why we stopped at the Captain’s house, but I do believe angling for piranhas was a fishy smokescreen to distract from whatever reason merited our unwanted stop.

The Captain's house

Three hours after we left Alter-do-Chao, we made our second stop at another man’s house and canoed up to his front porch. Here too, dogs and chickens puttered about as well as a couple of pigs, and I feared that this might be the extent of our wildlife sightings. The shirtless owner of the house, his sizable pot belly swaying with each step, brought us to two trees in his backyard and began to walk under them, craning his neck up to look into the leaves. Mario soon joined, and after two minutes they spotted a sloth hanging between two branches near the top of the tree.

This considerably brightened my mood, as the two animals I really wanted to see in the Amazon were sloths and toucans. Sure I’d love to see a jaguar or an ocelot, but I knew that wasn’t going to happen. I stood in the mud under the tree and watched the sloth for fifteen minutes while everyone else lost interest after two and wandered further into the backyard.

Sloths are amazing creatures. If you ever slowed down a home video or movie as a kid and laughed at the exaggerated movements and expressions of life in slow motion, then you might find them as fascinating as I do, for their life truly is in slow motion. To eat they leisurely stretch their arm out, touch the leaf, grasp it, pull it off the branch, and look at it for a second. Then they slowly pull the arm back to their face, inch open their little mouths, push the leaf in, and eat like a cow chewing cud in the dead of summer. After swallowing, they repeat the process. Once it has had its full from leaves in one area, the sloth disengages one of its limbs from a branch and lets the arm or leg swing down. Why do the work when gravity does it for you? Then it reaches for another branch, resembling a NFL player making a one-handed catch in super slo-mo replay. Once it has grasped a new branch another limb swings down and repeats the process, and eventually the whole body has shifted three feet in the amount of time it takes me to run a mile.

I watched the sloth and contemplated how an animal had evolved to be slow, and it worked. Sloths are the most populous large mammal in the Amazon, and do not seem to be in any danger of decline. If not resting, most animals are constantly moving and rely on fast-twitch muscles to catch prey or escape predators, but not the sloth. It just chills in the tree hiding from bad guys and chomping on leaves all day long. Once it’s had its fill of one tree’s leaves, which is never enough to harm the tree, the sloth moves through the canopy to the next tree. Sloths also let fungus and bugs grow in their fur, providing a home and habitat for thousands of other organisms. In fact, some of those organisms are only capable of living in the hair on a sloth’s back.

The sloth chilling in the leaves

Basically, sloths are the hippies of the animal kingdom. They’re uber-vegan, they provide a free place for their buddies to crash, and all they do is hang out in a tree all day while everyone else runs around like crazies trying to sustain themselves. About once a week, the sloth descends from his tree in the dead of night. He digs a hole at the base of the tree, poops in it, and covers his tracks. Then he climbs back up the tree. Sloths don’t even dirty up the forest with their shit! It would be much easier, and safer too, for the sloth to let loose from the tree and splatter anything below, but they have the manners or good sense of hygiene to not do that. Scientists and nature people have no explanation for why the sloth engages in such strange and risky behavior, but I know why. It’s because the humble sloth is the nicest dude in the rainforest.

After craning my neck up for fifteen minutes it had developed a nasty ache. I wanted to climb the tree to get on the same level as the sloth and continue observing him, but I figured tree climbing on jungle tours is frowned upon. So I trooped over to the others who stood on the edge of a belching mud field, the forest beckoning from the other side. Usually, the mucky field was water and you could take a canoe through the flooded forest to look for monkeys and caimans and whatnot. During the dry season its land and you can walk over it doing the same. But the water had just dried up and left the stinking swamp of quicksand like mud that our flip-flop wearing guide was obviously not going to walk through. On the other hand, I had come prepared for a freaking jungle tour properly dressed in safari hat and pants and hiking boots. Feeling happy and adventurous after communing with the sloth, I squished through the mud into the forest beyond. Tim, being a good German, had also come prepared and he followed me. We walked for a bit until we lost sight of the others and then stopped and peered into the breathing labyrinth of green surrounding us. The sound of life bounced all around, birds flapping and singing, monkeys rustling and hooting, and bugs buzzing and cricking. Nothing could be seen but green and brown and a sliver of blue way up far away. We continued onwards, but soon had to turn back as we reached a little lake that would have been quite unreasonable to walk through.

When we got back, Mario had sensed the group’s disappointment and arranged for us to borrow two of our host’s canoes so we could get a glimpse of the part of the forest that was still flooded. We hopped into the canoes, one of which I almost flipped due to my now impractical hiking boots, and set off. After a brief paddle along the mighty Amazon, which seems all the mightier when you’re sitting in canoe, we floated under the canopy into the darkened confines of the flooded forest.

In a canoe on the Amazon

The still water and whispering trees deadened the sounds of the outside world, and amplified the ones around us so that each stroke of the paddle sounded like a whirlpool. It was eerie and primordial and straight out of Jurassic Park. We saw a big iguana thing scurry through the trees and dive into the black water, its splash echoing for a full five seconds. Birds flitted from branch to branch above our heads, warning their friends about our intrusion. Mario somehow spotted another sloth way up in a big tree. It was big and well camouflaged and didn’t move a muscle while we watched. A troop of monkeys came down to investigate us, deemed us unworthy of their time, and leaped away, shrieking all the while. We pulled up our host’s fishing nets, which were chock full of fish, confirming that life teemed below as well as above. Unfortunately, the flooded forest was none too big and we returned to the harsh open world after only 45 minutes in its opposite. I wished it had been 4 days in that forest, and if I ever come back to the Amazon it will be in the rainy season and I hopefully will have the funds, or friends, to embark upon a proper expedition deep into the watery world hiding beneath the canopy.

Mario leading me into the flooded forest

We returned to Alter-do-Chao more than a little disappointed that the time looking for wildlife had barely clocked an hour. I felt a bit better than the others due to the discovery of a new favorite animal and the validation I felt when Charlotte told me we should have done the other tour. Luckily, Edwin and Tim don’t share my fear of conflict, and we marched to the agency and complained about the lack of wildlife on our wildlife tour. The tour operator seemed genuinely shocked that we had not enjoyed ourselves, but not shocked enough to give us substantial money back, and after ten minutes of back and forth we agreed on free pizza and caipirinhas at his restaurant that night. At least he knows what gringos like when it comes to food and drink.

The next day my friends all left but I decided to stay in Alter-do-Chao for the upcoming festival and because I still wanted to see the big trees in the jungle. However, I was now convinced to do it on my own, and I caught a bus to the national park where the primary rainforest has existed since before Europeans touched down on Brazilian shores. The four-hour bus ride bumped past miles of dried out cornfields and dusty thatched-roof homes. The setting was about as desolate as you can get in the tropics, as the people were obviously quite poor and it didn’t look like the yields from their crops would change that.

Most people assume that because there’s such a large variety and quantity of plants thriving in the rainforest, it should be a great place to farm too. But the opposite is true, as almost all of the nutrients needed for sustained agriculture are in the trees themselves and get cycled back into the forest when a tree falls and rapidly decomposes. But when you cut down a tree and burn or take away the wood, those nutrients leave forever. So after one or two seasons of monoculture farming, the soil becomes quickly exhausted and the farmer is forced to cut down more trees and start the cycle all over again. The worst part is that the rainforest doesn’t reclaim the abandoned plots, as there are no nutrients left in the soil to support the big trees, and the former rainforest becomes scrubland barely suitable for cattle grazing. Talk about a lose-lose situation.

There are a couple villages on the river’s edge in the national park, as the people had been living there since long before the park became established. The government agreed to let them stay as long as they remained sustainable, and they continue to support themselves through old-school rubber trapping and net fishing, as well as feeding and housing the few tourists who wander through. I got off the bus and wandered around the rustic village completely made of wood and thatch. I stopped to buy some food and water from a tiny shop, and I asked the lady where the trail into the forest was. She pointed me in a vague direction, but said I had to talk to some man before I could go there. I nodded and said claro, but had no intention of doing so as I still felt leery of tours and guides and being treated like a gringo. I walked in the direction she had said, and spotted the trailhead. I glanced over my shoulder to make sure no one was watching, and scurried into the rainforest, blissfully alone.

As I said earlier, I meandered down the path stopping when I heard a rustling, or caught a movement out of the corner of my eye, or whenever I felt like it. This is the joy of hiking alone, you are on your own schedule and you can go where you want as fast or as slow as you want. The negatives are that there’s no one to share in the experience with and unless you have an imaginary friend or alter ego, no one to talk with about those experiences. There’s also no one to tell you where to go, and at a fork in the forest path I chose the road more traveled, Robert Frost be damned.

The forest road

After two or three or maybe four hours, time loses significance in the jungle, I was overheated, and running low on salt, and feeling pretty tired. I began to wonder if I should turn back, but I kept saying, “I’ll just see what’s around the next bend, or over that nest rise, or on the other side of that massive tree blocking the path," and so my journey continued. However, I eventually reached a side-path that led to a nice clearing with a log to sit on, and I went there to eat two oranges and rest. Re-energized by food and water and selfies, I continued to venture down the side path. It went up, and down, and then leveled out into tall grass that gave way to a clearing full of banana trees.

I knew from my time on the farm that bananas are not trees but flowers, and the world’s biggest too. That’s why the fruit has no seeds. I realized I had stumbled into a field of wildflowers deep in the forest. Immediately, the sound of music came to mind and I started to sing gibberish about a female deer. Another benefit of hiking alone is that you can sing whatever you want, and it doesn’t sound half-bad...

The wildflower field

Alas, scattered plastic bottles of soda questioned the authenticity of my wildflower retreat, and I wondered if the villagers had planted and cultivated these trees or just came here to harvest them. I prefer to think it was the latter, but regardless it was sad to see plastic bottles scattered about a national park. It’s an unfortunate fact that locals in the Amazon don’t seem to respect the natural beauty of their homes, as I often saw Brazilians tossing empty beer cans and soda bottles into the amazon, or dropping them on the ground even though there was a trash can ten feet away. Of course, this behavior happens everywhere, but to witness it in the Amazon Basin, especially deep in the jungle, is disheartening.

Despite the plastic, I adored my wildflower meadow and considered spending the night there. I checked my remaining amount of food and water, and scouted for ripe bananas and a place to hang my hammock. However, I decided against it mainly because of the bugs. I wasn’t sure I would get any rest and the prospect of staying up all night in the jungle was exciting but also a little scary, and I didn’t think my mom would approve. I turned back and walked the way I had come, a decision I ended up regretting.  My pace was faster on my return journey as I was tired and thirsty, and I really wanted to drink an ice-cold beer while the sun set over the river. The jungle has a lot to offer, but it cant provide everything my heart desires.

In the jungle