Llama for Lunch (24 page)
We were now in Amazonia, the world’s densest and greatest tropical rainforest. This three hundred and fifty millionhectare basin that encompasses West Brazil, East Peru, Ecuador, South Colombia and North Bolivia has been called ‘a vast unspoiled tribute to the abundance of the Amazon River’. It is mostly a trackless jungle of fast-disappearing primary rainforest, where river steamers still sink or get lost on dead ends of the great rivers. Its natural resources are a vital reservoir for plants, animals and peoples that are found no where else on earth. The Spanish tried to conquer it, believing that it hid El Dorado, but their explorers ended up dead, insane or captured by Indians. Deep and mysterious, Amazonia is both a scarcely inhabited Eden and a green Hell, a frightening place of isolation and lawlessness that has long been a magnet for adventurers and dreamers.
The word Amazon, evocative of mystery, means ‘breastless’ and was the name given to the fictional female warriors of Greek legend who cut off their right breasts to help them in shooting bows or throwing spears. In 1541 a Spanish expedition entered the jungle. At one stage it was attacked by a tribe whose women fought with the men, and they were told by other Indians that there was a tribe of women warriors nearby, hence the name Amazonia was given to this region.
The boat stopped, then spent an hour outmanoeuvring a sandbar and some shallows. We had left Porto Velho accompanied by a dinghy with an outboard motor and now I learned its main purpose. The dinghy went ahead to lead the way over the shallows. A few more grinds and bumps and swinging around with the engine off and eventually we were over the sandbar. At midday we came to a town where wide concrete steps led up to a miserable collection of stone and adobe buildings and an imposing pink church that looked downriver. Ten or more people with baggage – including an airconditioner – came aboard. We departed with the usual three long blasts of the boat’s horn.
Lunch was great considering the cooking facilities. You had to wait for a seat at meals. Children were fed first, then the adults lined up for several sittings of sixteen to the table. There seemed to be a shortage of utensils and plates and each sitting had to wait while they were washed by the grumpy Dragon Woman. This meal was meat, beans, spaghetti, rice and salad, which I mixed together and loaded with chilli. It was difficult to linger at the table when other hungry passengers stood hopefully behind your chair willing you to finish.
Small children pounded constantly about the decks. There were a great many in this predominantly Catholic country. Two handsome, devilish little boys in the cabin next to mine played hide-and-seek and peek-a-boo with me around the cabin door. Mum looked very young. Another very young mother did embroidery sitting up in her hammock with a baby at her breast.
Late afternoon saw us again slowed down by shallow water. A very smart, blue-and-white pilot boat, its bridge topped with a satellite dish, came out from a town and guided us through. We passed two barges, each one pushed by a tug. They carried semi-trailers, one of which had refrigeration units on it, and a couple of other barges passed bearing tarpaulin-covered cargoes. We pulled to the riverbank where there was not much to see except the usual high, steep steps of mud and here we took on another big load of bananas. At the water’s edge wallowed a large old semi-sunk wooden outrigger canoe with a thatched roofed cabin. It had been there so long it had plants growing out of its wood.
Dinner was good – spaghetti, salad and fried chicken. The motor boat was launched at about ten and I was aware of the boat feeling its way through more shallows. A terrific grinding crunch woke me at two. The boat had pulled into the bank. I had no idea why – was the captain asleep and had we run aground? Apparently there was no harm done, as we soon continued on and at first light we came up to Manicore, almost halfway to Manaus, and a sizeable town. Passengers got on and off here and I pinched some bananas for breakfast – it wasn’t difficult and there sure were plenty.
At Manicore a big, red-and-white church with twin towers overlooked the river and there were dolphins in the water as there had been at most places. The weather was warm when we were in port, though the sky was still grey. Out on the river it was cool again. The banks looked much the same and so did the river – it was still a dirty brown.
Later that day I noticed that some of the banks and surrounding country had been cleared, but this didn’t last for long. A huge barge with a massive pile of logs passed and another followed with more semi-trailers and containers.
The weather became warmer, even out on the river, and there was a pleasant breeze, but I didn’t see a patch of blue sky until after four o’clock that day when we left Novo Arequipa. This was a well-kept town with a neat landing of stone steps with blue-and-white railings and a row of blue-and-white buildings on top of the riverbank. Many river boats were tied up here and kids and dolphins were swimming in the water that was now greyish-green and looked much cleaner.
About this time I created havoc in the toilet. I pulled the cord for the flush and the whole damn kit and caboodle fell down off the wall on top of me. The pipe broke and water shot everywhere. Dragon Woman was not amused – she knew I was a trouble-maker.
During the evening the boat slowed and the dinghy, loaded with boxes, roared to the shore to make a delivery at an isolated hacienda. The boat sped off and the dinghy caught us later. Finally the weather was brighter, and there was a beautiful sunset of gold and amethyst painted on the dark retreating clouds. On the other side of the river a full moon, bright white like a hundred-watt globe, rose in the fading blue sky. Later the moon re-appeared from behind the black clouds that had covered it and painted their edges silver.
The Brazilian flag fluttered in the breeze from the rear of the boat and the moonlight lay on the ripples of the water, turning them into silver fish scales. The dinghy, bobbing on its rope, chased along behind us on the foaming wake. Markers winked at us from the bank, red on the port side, green on the starboard. Children played on the slide and rode tricycles round the deck, while thirty or so adults were glued to the soccer on the TV.
On the morning of the third day, the river was boot-polish brown and very wide as we came to the point where the Mamore River meets the Amazon. Then we turned around and went up the Amazon towards Manaus, the heart of the province of Amazonia. At last I was on the legendary, 6700-kilometre long Amazon, the most famous of the three huge river systems that make up this area. The Amazon was first sighted in 1541 by Francisco de Orellana, a Spanish conquistador. He called it the ‘Rio Mar’, River Sea. It has seventeen tributaries, each over fifteen hundred kilometres long, plus eighty thousand kilometres of navigable trunk rivers that ocean-going ships can travel as far as Iquitos in Colombia, 4300 kilometres further upstream from Manaus. One-third of the world’s oxygen is produced by the vegetation of this area, which is also rich in gold, diamonds, lumber, rubber, oil and jute.
Now the river banks were low, flat and very green. Buffalo, brahmins and cows of mixed ancestry – a motley lot – grazed on the sodden land. We passed a couple of wooden houses on stilts, then the banks became higher and covered with even lusher jungle. We drifted by a stone house that appeared deserted, then a similarly lonely church; it was blotched with mould and had jungle encroaching on it. More wooden houses, each with a canoe or two tied up at their banks, came into view. One canoe held a fisherman who was hauling in a good catch of silver fish that shone in the glistening net. Stone steps ascended from a two-storeyed wooden boathouse and jetty at the river’s edge to the top of a neat green bank, where a village of white, wooden houses and a church nestled.
Then the middle of the Amazon river was strewn for many kilometres with islands covered by almost drowned trees. Now that the boat had swung around, the current was bucking us and we pitched and rolled as we battled upstream. Waking from my siesta, I found the river again wide and open ahead and the banks no longer close together. But we rode close in to one bank and I could see that the foliage was impenetrable and brooding. The Amazon had an air of watchfulness, a tense stillness. The trees were mahogany, cedar, palo sangres – so heavy it won’t float and with blood red wood, huacapus – so hard that nails won’t penetrate it, giant sumaumas, tall lupanas, called the river lighthouse because boats use them as landmarks, rubber trees and chonta palms, whose long hardwood shafts are good for bows and arrows. There were also bromeliads, vines, mosses and mushrooms.
Now instead of an occasional house and a few cows, I could see buffalo dotted on the land and in the water. Steep, beige-yellow cliffs came down to the river’s edge, broken now and then by a little sandy beach with palms, and occasionally there appeared wooden houses on stilts with glassless windows, some of them right on the beach.
We arrived in Manaus just as it was getting dark. Following a brilliant sunset, the milk-white full moon had sat for a while in a lone patch of icy green-blue sky before the night enveloped it. The water rushed at us, demonstrating the strong pull of the current. Passing many lights on the bank, a big refinery and many ships, some ocean-going, the captain negotiated through a tight space and squeezed his boat between two other riverboats. He nosed the prow up to the dock and the passengers had to alight up and over it, no mean feat while clutching your baggage.
I took a taxi through the seedy-looking area around the docks to the hotel I had selected. Near the wharf I saw a hotel displaying a big sign that said, ‘One hour, Five Reals. Two hours, Ten.’ Happily, my hotel was in a more salubrious area, near the centre and the main streets. It was not a nice hotel, though. A lady who was more interested in the soaps on the TV sent me to my room with her young assistant. I was led out the back, down stairs, up stairs, along corridors and outside again. The place looked like a bomb site. It was actually a construction site. The hotel was being extended at the rear and I had the very end room. I could live with the bomb site but it was a grubby room and the only window opened onto the walkway outside and had no flyscreen on it. There was no furniture apart from two beds, a rowdy air-conditioner and a metal rack, of no use whatsoever, that was completely covered in grit. So was the floor. The builders were still welding and hammering at half past nine at night. The bathroom was filthy, there were old pieces of soap on the floor of the shower and the bin was full.
As I went out to eat, I told the television fan at the front desk that the room was dirty. This had no effect. No one came to clean the room, so I did what I could myself with toilet paper. The good free breakfast in the morning atoned somewhat for the proprietors’ sins of omission, but immediately after eating I moved two doors down to the Paradise, which it wasn’t, but it was better and cleaner than my previous digs, even though there was still no hot water. This was not too hard to bear as Manaus was very hot, around forty degrees Celsius at this time of the year.
The Paradise’s desk was presided over by a cheerful little man who was round all over, even to his smiling round eyes. My room had three beds and a chest – this was getting better – and a window that opened all the way along the room. There were still no screens, but at least the window had bars. I eventually worked out that the sign above it said, ‘Don’t throw your rubbish out of the window.’ Nice sort of people they expected here. The evidence proved that guests heeded this sign – they threw the rubbish under the chest. There was a waste bin in the bathroom but I presumed it was only for toilet paper. The sewers were obviously still unable to cope with it.
I went out to see Manaus town, the splendours of which I had read so much about. Here, isolated in the densest part of the jungle, the wealth from the rubber boom had provided a customs building and lighthouse that had been imported piece by piece from England, stately mansions, the first street-cars in Latin America, and docks built on hollow iron tanks eight metres in diameter that float up and down with the flood. A scale built into the escarpment of the harbour shows variations of fifteen metres in level between wet and dry seasons. Then there is the famous opera house, the gem that I most wanted to see.
Manaus, the capital of Brazil’s Amazonia, was a rubber-boom town that became unboomed due to a shifty piece of work by a sly fellow who, early in the twentieth century, smuggled some rubber seeds out to Malayan growers who were soon competing with Brazil.
Walking down the street from the hotel I came to the commercial centre and main shopping area, where lots of tourist rubbish was on offer. Further on, backing onto the wharf where dozens of riverboats bobbed on the water in a row and near where I had alighted the night before, was the marvellous market. This was more to my taste. In a fabulous nineteenth-century building of cast iron I found seeds, spices and exotic food. I needed fluids by then, so I tried the local drink, guarana, which seemed to perk me up. I wondered what was in it – probably something highly illegal.
I made it back to the hotel at four, having walked my feet off. Near my hotel I had passed a new building with a sign that quoted, I thought, a ridiculously low price to stay in such an illustrious-looking establishment, so on my evening foray out for food I wandered in its door for a look. It was a very posh building with little balconies protruding from the face and sides of its eight storeys. A charming young Brazilian man struggled with my limited Portuguese and took me to see a room, assuring me, I think, that it was twenty real – about twenty Australian dollars – a day for as many people as I chose to pack into it. I still wasn’t terribly sure this was correct but I booked a room for the next day.
I walked a long way that evening looking for a place to eat. Once again it seemed to be usual only to eat out for lunch. The outdoor cafes were all drinking or hamburger places.
The next morning was Sunday and a huge street market was in progress in the main street. I strolled down through the hundreds of stalls to the port and the wharves, which were piled sky-high with containers. Accosted by a tour tout at the port I negotiated a four-hour trip to the Meeting of the Waters, the place where the Rio Negro, whose billions of decaying leaves turn it into black tea, meets the milk coffee of the Amazon.