Authors: Robson Green
Manaus, which means ‘Mother of Gods’, is home to 1.5 million inhabitants and was created in the late 1800s by wealthy businessmen in the rubber boom. Latex was discovered in the sap
of the rubber tree and you don’t need me to tell you how revolutionary the natural material has been to all our lives: fewer babies and nicer cars. It’s an ornate city and I only need
to look at the opera house, Teatro Amazonas, to comprehend the opulence of the rubber magnates. It’s quite beautiful in an over-the-top neo-Classical fashion. We walk into the main
auditorium, where the Manaus Philharmonic Orchestra happens to be rehearsing the
Bolero
(think Torvill and Dean). It’s hard to get my head round the fact I am in the middle of a
theatre, in the middle of Manaus, in the middle of the Amazon rainforest.
Outside it’s seriously hot and the humidity is 100 per cent. After looking round the opera house we drive to our hotel, which is again very ornate in its décor – even the
tea-making kit in the room is very proper, with fine bone china cups and saucers and hand-painted tea caddies. It’s a reminder of how things were during the boom times before the inevitable
bust, when the British Flashman type Sir Henry Wickham smuggled rubber seeds out of the country and used them to cultivate plantations in Malaysia and Sri Lanka. Thus the British Empire took
control of the rubber market and the barons in Manaus faced financial ruin.
I’m feeling rather Flashy today. Full of the yearning for adventure, full of bluster, and trying to keep the inner coward under lockdown until it’s strictly necessary to run. The
china teacup rattles in the saucer as I take it over to the window. I look out over the city and at the green canopy beyond but it’s no good: I really don’t feel in the mood for piranha
fishing. Jamie bangs on my door. It’s time.
Piranha 3D
Waiting for me at Lake Balbina, as well as the legendary shredding machines, is a man with a round face, grey hair, a handlebar moustache, not to mention moobs and a tummy
to rival the average darts player. I choke when he says his name: ‘Tarzan? Like the bronzed hunk who swung through the jungle?’
‘Yes, Tarzan,’ he beams.
He looks more like Bernie Winters to me.
I set out with Tarzan in his boat, and, no, he doesn’t have a wife called Jane nor a chimpanzee – I did check. Balbina is an artificial lake created by flooding part of the forest in
order to provide hydroelectric power to the city of Manaus. It’s an eerie place. We quietly meander through lifeless trees sticking out of the water, haunting and rigid, as if marking the
spot of a horrendous atrocity or meteoric event. The water is jet-black, and there is silence. The lack of wildlife or any life whatsoever makes what is below all the more menacing. We continue to
gently motor in between the ghostly pale trees. It is a vast lake and I ask Tarzan how he finds his way back. He says he orientates by the trees – he knows and recognises them. Some look like
pillars of salt.
We sail for forty-five minutes, more than enough time to let my imagination run away with me. We are after red-bellied piranha (
Pygocentrus nattereri
), the one species (out of
approximately twenty in the region) that has a particularly vicious streak and has attacked humans on several well-documented occasions.
‘If I swim naked, will they strip me to the bone, Tarzan?’ I ask with wild eyes.
He tells me it’s doubtful. Apparently, in order to attract the fish, you have to be bleeding profusely or have a chunk of flesh hanging off.
‘Blood in the water excites them to madness,’ wrote President Theodore Roosevelt in
Through the Brazilian Wilderness
, the account of his epic trip to Amazonia in 1913 with his
son Kermit (I kid you not, he shared a name with the world’s most famous frog). To test the theory, some local fisherman blocked off part of the river for several days to starve a school of
piranha. They then pushed a cow into the river (quite possibly with an injury they inflicted beforehand) and observed as the ravenous piranhas tore the poor beast apart in a state of frenzy. I
wonder what Roosevelt’s holiday snaps looked like.
I certainly wasn’t going to put my feet in to test the blood-excitement theory on the bunch of marauding meatheads below. I’d already tried a fish pedicure in the Philippines and
I’m not up for trying the piranha version, particularly as I have athlete’s foot. According to some experts, if the fish are hungry enough a fungal foot infection or a pimple on your
leg is all it takes to become skeletal in seconds.
Tarzan places a big chunk of raw meat on a ruddy great hook, considering the size of the fish. The leader is wire. I’ve never used one before and it’s bringing home how deadly their
teeth are. These fish can grow to up to eight pounds with gnashers to match. They can cut through wood and leave bite marks in metal, so it’s no wonder their teeth and jaws were used by
Amazon tribesmen for hunting tools. I cast the bait by the side of the boat and lower the meat to twenty feet. Tarzan splashes the water to mimic the sound of a struggling fish . . . or actor. Bam!
Thirty seconds and I think there’s a take. It’s a split-second sensation. I bring the hook up – all the meat is gone.
‘That was like a hit and run!’
No fish comes close to the pace of the piranha so all I can do is hope that when the fish strikes the bait, it will take the hook with it. This is a matter of luck, not skill. Over the next ten
minutes I experience some violent takes, the line twitches, the rod is yanked frequently up and down, up and down, in a matter of milliseconds, and each time there is neither meat nor a fish on the
end of the line. After another strike I reel in half the bait; it looks as if it has been carefully sliced by a surgeon’s hand. It must be terrifying to be a bait fish down there – like
a permanent
Saw
movie. You pop out in morning to get the papers and wham! You’re a toothpick in a matter of seconds.
Tarzan tells me I will catch a piranha after fifteen minutes. He’s dead right: I carefully reel in the piscatorial pitbull and take a look. I let Mike hold the piranha first. The
red-bellied fella is short, stubby and compressed with a jaw area packed with razor-wire teeth, the type that would keep trespassers out of a military camp or a top secret nuclear facility, all
tightly packed and inter-locking to puncture and shred their prey. I put a knife between the fish’s teeth and it clamps down hard. I remove it and show the scratches to camera. It’s my
turn to hold this fish and it’s a bit like trying to pet a rabid dog. I take hold of it by the caudal peduncle, the narrow part of the posterior end towards the tail fin, where there are
fewer spines and more importantly fewer teeth. Its armoury is all at the anterior end (front).
We catch a total of four piranhas and grill them back on land. It’s definitely a fish you don’t associate with eating, more with
being
eaten, but they taste very good, with a
surprisingly delicate white meat. I’m not sure if the taste measures up to the risk, however.
Fish Market
The next morning, at 4 a.m., we go to the bustling local fish market in Manaus to introduce ourselves to the other ferocious predators we are hoping to meet on this
adventure. The market is on banks of the Rio Negro (Black River) and is alive with fish, fish sellers and the ugliest transvestites in the business, still plying their trade. It is a case of fish
and very foul. Honestly, these two blokes are so hideous they look like Harry Redknapp and Avram Grant in wigs and thongs. Think about that for a moment, then add the smell of fish! It is wrong on
so many levels. The gathering crowds jeer and shout as they pass through.
As well as the trannies on display, there are catfish, piranha, peacock bass, arowana and arapaima (like the one I caught at IT Lake in Thailand, known locally as pirarucu), one of the largest
freshwater fish in the world and the largest in the Amazon basin. I examine the serpent-like fish. She is nightmarish in her looks and proportions but perversely I still want to pull one . . . out
of the river. She is an air-breather and has a lung-like labyrinth organ that allows her to survive in oxygen-deficient oxbow lakes or even in mud, in times of drought. A fearsome predator, she
uses her bony tongue to crush her quarry against the roof of her mouth, be it fish or foul, she’s not fussy.
And, by the looks of it, neither are some of the men from Manaus, as the trannies trot past again. They want to be on camera and start peering over my shoulder. Another bloke wants to sell me an
armour-plated catfish. I don’t want an armour-plated catfish but he’s desperate to be on TV. We turn away from him and move off. Undeterred, he runs after us, sticks a live fish in his
mouth and does a dance, the tail still swishing. He makes the cut in the final edit; it’s too weird to miss. Perhaps he could be a contender for
Brazil’s Got Talent
? It beats the
dancing dog act.
Rainforest Digs
As if the market wasn’t strange enough, we are booked into a Fawlty Towers, Amazon-style. To get there we head up the Rio Negro for two hours by boat. The Rio Negro
is one of the biggest of the Amazonian tributaries and the largest blackwater river in the world. Blackwater rivers are coloured like strong Yorkshire tea by all the tannins leaching into the water
from decaying vegetation. I look across to the horizon and cannot see the other side of the river. It looks like a dark, foreboding sea.
As we arrive at the rainforest hotel, we see pink river dolphins leaping alongside of the boat. It’s a heart-warming sight and I wish Taylor could be here to see them. Maybe I’ll
take him swimming with them one day. I catch Jamie staring at me. His eyes flicker with the flame of a cunning plan. I shake my head – me and them in the drink together, no way. He nods with
a sadistic smile. Thankfully we don’t have time in the schedule.
We jump off the boat and hike our bags and equipment up to our mad eco-hotel on stilts. At the moment the river is really low but during the rainy season it can rise up to sixty feet. We march
across the treetop platform to reception and there to greet us is a woman who could have been out of Papa Lazarou’s circus. Except I don’t want her to be ‘my wife now’, with
her coconut-encased boobs, headdress made of green and purple crêpe paper, feathers and all sorts of nonsense going on around her lady parts. She howls ‘Welcome!’, puts a necklace
on me and wants a photo. Bewildered, I am shown to my room. It’s as I suspected: the accommodation is exactly like our coconut-clad hostess, a bit strange and definitely past its best.
Peacock Bass
The man who is taking me peacock bass fishing this afternoon is Mike Cartwright, who looks a bit like Tarzan, heavy-set with a grey moustache, except Mike’s wearing
specs on a cord and a crazy camo T-shirt with a metal chain around his neck. He could be the ageing MC Hammer in a
Never Mind the Buzzcocks
line-up.
We hop into a fifteen-foot fishing boat with a basic prop engine and head a couple of miles upriver to some deserted islands. My tummy begins to gurgle and churn. I inwardly hope it’s not
the prelude of some dire Amazonian tummy bug.
I ask Mike about his name: ‘Mike Cartwright doesn’t sound South American.’
‘I’m from British Guiana,’ he explains, referring to his country (now Guyana) by its old colonial name, as if to help me place it.
‘What brought you to Brazil?’
‘A messy divorce.’
My tummy growls again, but thankfully Mike can’t hear it over the noise of the boat.
‘Ah, divorce,’ I say, knowing one or two things about the topic. ‘The Latin word meaning “to rip out a man’s genitals through his wallet”.’
He chuckles, but his doleful eyes do not share the same merriment.
Mike tells me that, pound for pound, peacock bass is one the most powerful fighting fish in the world. The impact on the lure or bait is superlative.
‘I heard that the greatest fighting fish is the Papua New Guinean black bass,’ I say, my stomach making a loud noise like an industrial drain.
‘No, the peacock bass is incredible,’ Mike assures me.
Because the water level is low we are going to trawl for tucanaré, as peacock bass are known here in Brazil. Lower water levels mean the fish tend to congregate together in a much smaller
area. We are using man-made lures (rapala) that replicate a distressed bait fish. Mike sets four rods. We trawl and cast for hours in the blistering heat and catch . . . nothing. We’ve
brought no umbrellas to shade us and my tummy is now spasming. I let a silent one go and realise that I’m about to follow through. Help!
‘Jamie, I desperately need to go to the toilet!’
We head to the riverbank but nature doesn’t wait and I am humiliatingly forced to let the hydrant gush over the side of the boat. The more I go, the more dehydrated I am becoming and
I’m starting to get in a bad way. Jamie announces, in his typical tyrannical fashion, that we have to catch a peacock bass today because not only is it an iconic fish but also they have spent
a great deal of money on the steamboat accommodation, which we are travelling on to Jaraua for our next assignment.
Hours later and I finally catch a very small peacock bass, but I return him to the water as he is too small. Jamie announces a new plan: ‘We will stay another night at the crazy rainforest
hotel and will fish again tomorrow morning, starting at four a.m.’
We are all pretty miserable about this but Mike’s face looks like he’s back in touch with his ex. Obviously not an early riser, then. On the positive side, at least we’re going
to call it a day: I need to get to my bathroom and fast. I am about to step out of the boat when Jamie puts his hand out to stop me: ‘Wait. I know you’re ill, stressed and in need of a
little relaxation. I have a surprise for you.’
I immediately know it’s not a spa treatment.
‘It’s the bloody dolphins, isn’t it?’
‘Yep.’
As luck would have it Mike knows just the place for me to swim with dolphins at sunset. And, what’s more, his friend Igor Andradis is an expert who specialises in pink river dolphins and
their behaviour. Igor tells me he has such an amazing way with these creatures that if he calls them they come to him. Well, most animals would if you wave a big bucket of sardines in their face.
Unfortunately, I am blissfully unaware that Igor a) isn’t a marine biologist and b) has been feeding the dolphins swimming in front of us. I hang off his every word.