Chasing Aphroditie: Manaus and Our Amazon Adventure 5/13/07

Hello again. We arrived in Manaus one day at 2 in the morning. After getting much needed sleep on the airport floor, we hit the streets hard. Manaus is a bustling city of 1.6 million and is the largest city for about 1000 miles in any direction. Its in the middle of the Amazon rain forest, though if you're standing in the city, you will never know it. As a matter of fact, Manaus is pretty dirty. On the other hand Manaus has a pretty interesting history and is one of Brazil's largest manufacturing cities. Due to a falling economy in the late 1960's, Brazil's government declared Manaus something like a tax-free zone as an incentive for companies to move here. Now, Manaus is home to plants that manufacture everything from motorcycles to cars to TVs and so on. The streets in Centro (downtown) are overflowing with street vendors who sell everything from nail clippers and remote controls to everything you've always wanted but were afraid to buy. As a matter of fact, it is impossible to avoid people trying to sell stuff or get something out of you since you're an evident gringo. That's Manaus below:

So as not to leave you without any history of the city, here's some knowledge. Just under 150 years ago, Manaus was just a small trading post named after the Manaos Indians who resided in the area. Then happened the rubber boom. If you didn't know, rubber comes from sap, "latex", of a tree that grows in the Amazon. Brazil was the only place where the rubber tree grew and they were making a lot of money from it. Manaus grew into Brazil's 2nd richest city behind Rio. And so, everything was going great until the Brits stole some rubber seedlings and started growing their own thus breaking up Brazil's monopoly. So, after that everyone was dead broke again. Now, Manaus is very similar to just about any big city, but with the lure of the Amazon. The Amazon! The reason we were here in the first place.
So after being accosted by a lot of jungle tour operators who would bad mouth about their competitors, we chose one who didn't and who was in fact an awesome salesman, Rafael. We were sold and we embarked upon our jungle tour...

Our first morning, we met our guide and jumped on a boat to cross the Amazon and see "The Meeting of the Rivers". Right now I will have to go on a tangent. During our travels around Brazil, almost every city or town we would visit would have the main square or side walk tiled in a very cool pattern of black and white. Most of the time in some form of wavy lines creating beautiful flowing designs.

All that time, while we admired the streets, it never dawned on us that the design was an interpretation of "The Meeting of the Rivers", The Rio Negro and Rio Solimoes. Both of the rivers meet in Manaus and create the Rio Amazonas that flows for another 1000 miles or so before it empties into the Atlantic. And the meeting is beautiful. The Negro is black while the Solimoes is a brown sandy color, and when the meet, they run together for about 10 miles before mixing at all because of the different densities of the waters. Really cool!

After some more traveling we arrived at our Jungle Lodge, which really is nothing more than a house on the shore of one of the Amazon's tributaries. There, we met Chico, a little monkey who after playing with us, shit on my shoulder. But he was a cool monkey nonetheless.

Everyday, we went out on numerous boat trips through the jungle to watch wildlife. You see, for about half the year the Amazon is flooded and the only way to get around is by boat, so we would pass through flooded forests where the trees are accustomed to being submerged for a long time. Like this one here:

Fishing for piranhas was fun though we couldn't catch none unlike our guides. As a matter of fact, there was all kinds of fishing going on with spears and bows and arrows. It was amazing to watch our local guide, Romero, hunt for fish. That's him with a piranha he caught.

And that's me with a sardine that accidentally jumped into the boat just in time for me to spear it through the heart. That was the only fish I caught.

Have you ever looked into mouth of a piranha and lived to tell about it? We did.

So gun-ho I was that it earned me nicknames like Jungle Boy, Crocodile Dundee, Cowboy, and many others. I remember this one time I caught a live alligator with my bare hands...

He looked me right in the eye and said, "You won, Jungle Boy!" After that I couldn't help but let him go. And so did my honey, the jungle queen, Sasha.

Here is the Jungle Queen in all of her glory...

Here is Moiya Lesnaya Feya with a sloth. They are so amazing, the slowest moving creatures I have ever seen. And they always smile. Really.

Our final whole day and we spent hiking through the jungle after camping in hammocks the night before. The rain forest is so incredible. It seemed like every other tree, leaf, shrub, or piece of twig had some kind of medicinal quality. A bark of one tree would prevent Malaria, burning a termite nest would deter mosquitoes, eating a leaf of another tree would create more milk in nursing mothers. "How did the Indians discover these medicines?", I asked my guide. "The forest told them", was the answer. Sounds crazy, right? But on the other hand, it doesn't. Some of these plants have to go through numerous processes before they become medicines. I wondered, did an Indian who just got bitten by a snake start to frantically run around the forest smoking unknown leaves, biting the bark off trees to coincidentally find some cure or was there something else? And why is it unthinkable to have a spiritual connection with your environment? At the same time, so much of the forest has been cut down to create farmland for cattle and crops. Its sad.

We spent 5 days in the jungle and got back to Manaus. The trip was cool even though there was a pre-packaged feel to it. And my imagination was a little disappointed since somewhere in the back of my mind, I expected to be racing through the jungle, dodging poison darts, and saving some treasured artifact from evil mercenaries set on using the power of the artifact for their own dark purpose. Maybe to rule the world. I don't know what I expected. But after coming back, I've learned that it is possible to have really unique trips to see Indians almost untouched by our "great" civilization and go into parts of the jungle that few white men have seen before, but it takes a lot of time and a lot of money. The only thing is . . . you can cause a lot of harm by doing that. There are many cases of Indians dying from being exposed to curious travellers' diseases like the common cold! These are very healthy people who have lived one with nature (unlike us). I'm sure you've read about biological warfare like blankets with small pox given to the American Indians. Right? So lets leave them alone...please. Hey, the Amazon is incredible without seeing those guys anyway!