Walking in the Amazon Jungle

On our second full day in the Amazon area, our morning tour consisted of a walk through the jungle, with our boat driver, Helder, demonstrating the ways in which local people (Cristovão consistently used the term “natives,” which made us a tad uncomfortable, because it came across with a somewhat negative social connotation) use the products of the jungle and Cristovão explaining.  Much of the discussion took off from the fact that the Brazilian army has a major training operation, based in Manaus, focused on survival for jungle warfare.  Military units from all over the world come to Manaus for this training, which begins with school room lessons but culminates in trainees being turned loose in the Amazon jungle with nothing but a few basic tools, to see whether they could successfully implement their training.  Local people, Cristovão asserted, routinely learn these skills growing up, but only a small fraction of trainees pass the survival course with flying colors.

First, Helder showed us how the bark of a local tree produced a sap which, when melted into a tar, which was dried and then ground up, produced a form of gunpowder.

Next, we were shown the sorba, or bubblegum tree, whose trunk, when pierced with a knife, produces an edible milk

Throughout the walk, Helder showed us a variety of ways in which palm fronds could be used

including making a circular device into which he could place his feet to enable him to climb trees to reach fruits

Although, in the end, the recent rains had made the tree trunks too slick for us to see the device working.

and turning the individual leaves on the palm fronts down so that fronds could bve combined tp make roof thatching – after he showed us a few times each of us got to try our hands at turning down the leaves

Helder also wove the palm fronds into gifties for each of us, such as this grasshopper

This is the vine from which curare is made,

while this one is a vine from which someone struggling to survive could obtain drinking water – when a cut is made in the vine, potable water rushed upward; so the trick is to make a cut at one place on the vine, then a second cut below that, which makes the water rush upwards and out the first opening

This nut had three holes, each of which was holding a “coconut worm,” an edible worm that could enable someone to survive in the jungle.  I had one myself, and indeed it tasted a bit like coconut.

Helder also pointed us to two tiny frogs that were hiding in the folds of a tree trunk, such as the kapok tree: this somewhat innocuous brown frog

and this highly toxic poison dart frog.

After we got back to the lodge, we took a short jungle walk of our own, beginning the exploration of the “eco-track” whose entrance was between our chalets and the river chalets.  Before it was time to turn back for lunch, we had walked twenty minutes in, and the trail seemed to have a ways to go.  Other visitors told us that they had seen howler monkeys that morning, and we resolved to get up early one morning to try to see them ourselves.   Indeed, the posted schedule suggested that a guided walk on the track was a standard early morning activity.  Never did, though.  

We did see these nice red flowers on the jungle floor

and this bright butterfly

Seeing the Amazon Jungle from a motorized canoe

On our first afternoon at the Turtle Lodge, we were taken on a boat ride upstream, where we saw many familiar birds roosting on the banks and swooping for fish, but also a few new ones:

The jackana or river chicken was easiest to locate because of its loud call; it could usually be found flitting around in the tall grasses along the river banks.

The white-headed hawk was to be found on bare tree limbs high above the river.

My favorite, though, because it was so strikingly colored, was the king heron: its body and wing a pale yellow, but its face and beak a bright blue.

We saw king herons almost every time we were out on the river.

We came across the hoysen, or paradise bird, only once, on the introductory afternoon cruise


 We saw the yellow and brown rinkasee  a couple of times, but the only time I was able to get a half-decent show, or the bird in its nest, on the first afternoon


We never found out the identity of this small bird

Or of this two-toned blue heron.

We also saw several black heron, but I never got a chance to photograph it

After the precision and depth of the knowledge of birds of our Pantanal guide, Djalmas Santos, Cristovão’s more general knowledge on that subject was a let-down at first.  But as we learned on the later days of our time in the Amazon, his sophistication about social and political issues in Brazil made up for that.  In the end, our Amazon trip had a broader focus than the tour of the Pantanal, which was singularly focused on wildlife which, indeed, was more visible because the landscape was more open.

We often saw ducks in flight

We got used to identifying toucans and parrots flying far overhead (too distant to photograph); every time we were on the water, we saw grey river dolphins, and once there was a pink dolphin.  The touring plan called for guests to be taken on a special boat ride to find river dolphins on their last afternoon at the lodge; but we had seen so many dolphins on the way to doing other things that there was no point to such a trip for us; instead, we were treated to a special day visiting a local family which, so far as I could tell, none of the other guest got to do.

The best time for spotting wildlife can be in the dawn and sunset hours, as well as after dark.  So it was a bit disappointing that there was only one tour before breakfast, unlike the Pantanal where we were out before breakfast on three of our four days down there.  And the focus of the pre-breakfast boat tour was getting to a place where we could watch the sunrise – a very nice view, to be sure. 

We saw a couple of nice sunsets, on the way back from boat trips taken for other reasons

Because we were traveling on the cusp between the wet and dry seasons, we had more than our share of rain; it was often raining while we were out on the boat, and the rain was sometimes followed by some very fine rainbows, including double rainbows that spanned the sky from one side to the other

including this striking triple rainbow

The most common tall tree along the rivers was the parana tree

but there were occasional araratucupi trees, with their distinctive flat tops

When walking in the jungle, we knew the kapok tree largely by its huge walking folds of trunk (in the next post, the tiny frogs shown in photos were noticed enveloped in those folds near the ground), but from the river we could see a younger tree with its hanging fruit

Our one nighttime tour took us out on the river again.  This was a clear night, although we could see lightning in the distance, and clouds beginning to move in (it was pouring rain later that night).  Because there were so few lights within scores of miles, the sky was amazing sky.  The Milky Way was bright, we could see constellations as the Southern Cross, a backwards big dipper, Cassiope, Orion’s belt.   We were loooking for caiman eyes along the banks, but did not see many of them.  We rode up to a set of grasses and Helder, our motor boat operator, moved to the front of the boat, shone a large torch into the grasses, and quicky pulled a small caiman into the boat, which he handed to Cristovão, who proceeded to discuss its anatomy.  He pointed to the horizontal and vertical eyelids; the eyes are like mirrors, and the animal is frozen when light is shined into its eyes, and so can readily be grabbed. It was waving its legs as Cristovão grasped it; he pointed to the  five toes on forepaws and the four on the hind legs.   The caiman strikes its prey (such as piranha) with tail to stun it, then grab with mouth; 5 muscles to open and 15 to close.  The best meat is in the tail, which the locals eat grilled or fried.

Late one afternoon, we tried our hand at piranha fishing (all the Amazon tour web sites feature this fishing).  I am a minority in our family in that I don’t enjoy fishing, but it was our activity, so there I was.  Instead of fishing rods, were were handed small spools with fishing line and a baited hook, told to unwind about 2-3 meters, and cast.  Although we tried several fishing spots. mostly, we caught branches, or had our bait carefully nibbled off.  Helder caught one small piranha, and Joe caught a mid-sized one; Cristovão pulled the hook out of its mouth and showed us the teeth.

But even this was too small to eat, so we threw it back into the river cove.

Another family that left for fishing about an hour before we did had much better success, catching a dozen.  Their catch was fried and they had it for dinner; and they had so much that there were two to share with us.  Not much meat on them piranha, and many bones; but the fresh fish meat was delicious

Four Days in the Amazon Jungle – Part One

We left Manaus first thing in the morning on June 26, having made arrangements with Maia Expeditions LINK to spend four nights at an ecolodge in the Amazon region.  Maia arranges expeditions throughout Brazil, but in particular the company owns the Turtle Lodge, about 100 kilometers from Manaus on a tributary of a tributary of the Amazon River.  Our tour guide, João Cristovão Egas, was at our hotel well before the 8 AM meeting time; a minivan came by shortly after 8 and picked us up with our luggage.  The van delivered us to a riverboat facility at the edge of the Amazon, where we and passengers from another van were loaded onto boat with our luggage, and we set out across the river.  We had been urged not to bring more than 10 kg of luggage per person, with the rest being taken to Maia’s office for storage pending our return to Manaus. 

The Amazon is a huge river, still miles wide at Manaus, and deep enough to accommodate ocean liners, as can be seen in this photograph. 

There were floating gas stations on either side of the river, as can be seen here:

The surface of the river had waves as choppy as the ocean near land. In the middle of the river is the location called the Meeting of the Waters, where two separate rivers from upstream, the Rio Negro, which is relatively clear, and the Rio Solimóes, which is relatively muddy, come together to form the Amazon proper.  The two rivers were running side by side where we were crossing, with both the colors of the two sets of water and the nature of the waves being noticeably different (less apparent than in these photos, but the differences were very real to the naked eye)

Meeting of the Waters: Rio Negro and Rio Solimóes

Our visit to Manaus: Switzerland v. Honduras

After an acceptable breakfast at Pousada Ecoverde, we shared a taxi to the Cuiabá airport with another guest, and the flight to Manaus was uneventful.  On arrival, I had thought to take the inexpensive bus into town, but I was worried that our maps might not be good enough to enable us to walk from the bus drop point to the Hotel Ideal, where we had our prepaid reservations, so we took a taxi instead.

To put it bluntly, the Hotel Ideal is not my idea of ideal accommodations.  It was bad enough that the rooms were tiny, but they had no windows, and there was some sort of opening into the bathroom through which mosquitos kept coming into the room.  There was an air conditioner in each room, but Joe’s never worked sufficiently to cool his room — and Manaus is hot and sticky at this time of year.  In the bathroom, there was no separation between the shower and the sink and toilet, so water would spatter all over the bathrooms which when we arrived, had no towels and no soap. And this hotel had the weakest breakfast so far in the trip; there was fruit but some sort of canned ham product was the only protein besides scrambled eggs, and there was no black tea and margarine instead of butter.   I would not recommend this place to anyone; uit is a rare occasion when a place of accommodation recommended by Lonely Planet proved to be unworthy of its recommendation and below the level described,

Aside from the hotel, though, we had a good stay in Manaus.  After we set down our bags, we headed off the see the city’s main tourist attraction, the Teatro Amazonas, built in 1896 by rubber barons anxious for a touch of European style culture.  Much of the central part of the city was built during that era, resulting in many smaller buildings of pleasing design

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Finally, we reached Praça São Sebastian and looked at the outside of the Teatro Amazonas, deciding that we would wait until the following day, after Sam and Nafisa would arrive to join us, to take a ticketed tour of the inside
 

The game of Colombia v. Japan was going full tilt on the big screen, and we watched that for a while.  Then we noticed that, next to a statue, some signers in period costumes were singing opera arias.  Opera with soccer on the big screen seemed just a little bit incongruous

We decided to sit and have dinner at the from Café do Pensador

As we ate, the game continued; there were mostly Colombians in the audience, and each time Colombia scored, they burst into cheers.

We had a nice meal at the Café.  There were musicians performing on the stage, much of the music Colombian – it was announced that there would be a samba demonstration at 7:30.  The fans for the following day’s game came to sit in the square and have dinner.  The Swiss were much in evidence, showing off various flags, but we saw no Hondurans.  For a while, there was a phalanx of police in comouflage informs standing in front of the Swiss flags, as if guarding the flag from Honduran attackers.

Sam and Nafisa arrived in the late evening; the following morning we ventured out to see the Teatro Amazonas; we were told at the ticket window that the next guided tour in English did not begin for another hour, so we got the ticket for an unguided and took the unguided inside tour.  But as we entered the theatre, it was apparent that anm English-language guide has just started recently, so I tagged along.  The guide provided perhaps a bit too much detail, losing well over half her audience, which helped me feel a little less guilty about tagging along from time to time.

Here are some views of the theatre

 

This is what the guide called a dating chair – a young couple would sit on the ends with their parents in between

We did some souvenir shopping, leaving not enough time to see additional sights; wanting to get an early start toward the game that afternoon, considering the amount of traffic we were seeing in the downtown area.   We had an excellent lunch at the lunch at Rancho Bufalo – a churrascaria open only for lunch.  It was much like the churrascaries in the US except that, instead of waiters bringing skewers of meat to us, we had to go up to the counter to get meat from the chefs,

And instead of there being a fixed price for all-you-can-eat, the bill was determined by weighing each diner’s plate each time they went up to the buffet and/or meat counter.  There were excellent meat dishes as well as some good items on the buffet – the Bahian fish was especially nice

Supposedly there was public buses that we could take to the Arena Amazones, but when we can swung by the location for picking upo those buses we could not see any buses going by with the right route numbers, so instead we took a cab, which dropped us about a kilometer south of the stadium.  As we walked, we saw this cool graffiti on one of the walls

The lines going into the stadium were organized very efficiently; a code on the tickets told us which metal detector line we had to use, and the lines went quickly. 

We got this photo of the stadium

 then headed up to our seats.

There was only one significant pocket of Hondurans, but there were a few significantly sized Swiss cheering sections, and more Swiss scattered a bout the rest of the stadium.  And judging bny the facial paint, more Brazilians seemed to be showing support for the Swiss than for the Hondurans – apparently, Brasilheiros favor winners over Latin style.

Most of us were inclined to support Honduras because one of their star players, Andy Najar, had  spoent his teenage years in the DC area and, in fact, had played three years for DC United before moving on to Anderlecht where he is now a starter; we knew several of the Honduran players from their years as strong MLS players.  We were disappointed that Najar did not start!  Still, the Honduras played sweetly, dominating possession, but could not score or even get a good show on goal; Switzerland punished several Honduran mistakes and was winning 3-0 before Najar got into the game with 15 minutes left

    Suddenly Honduras looked more dangerous; on almost his first possession, he dribbled through several defenders and delivered a stinging shot that Swiss keeper parried away.  He set up several other chances, but still no goals were scored, and the game ended with Honduras not having earned even a single point during the World Cup. 

On the way out of the stadium, we saw this great sign comparing the reputed heat and humidity of Manaus (although, in fact, this day had not been that bad) with the miserable climate to be expected if the 2022 World Cup goes forward in Qatar.

I myself am thinking about whether to go to Russia in 2018, btu I cannot possibly see going to the Cup in Qatar.

We followed the crowds away from the stadium area, decided not to take on of the busses lining up to take people to the Centro Historico, and found a can back to Hotel Ideal where we met Nancy about an hour before we had expected to get together.  Everybody was hungry so we proceeded to take a taxi to the evening’s restaurant selection, Canto da Peixada.

We had three excellent fish dishes that were more than enough to feed the five of us: grilled tambaqui ribs; arapaima in coconut cream; and fish stew with peacock bass.  We tried the cuparaçu cream for dessert. 

Our Pantanal Tour: Part Two

We left Pousada Canto do Arancuã just after lunch, planning to drive along the Transplantaneira for the afternoon, arriving at our new lodge, the Pouso Alegre, in time for the sunset and, not coincidentally, in time to see the US play Portugal.  Joe and I had seen a few capybarra on the way to Cuiabá for the Nigeria game, but on our way out to the Transpananeira I was able to photograph a few for the first time