I Have Heard It Said ‘Getting There Is Half The Fun’ Cruising The Amazon Is A Memorable Experience For All The Senses
Living in Manaus, Brazil, is a bit like living in someone’s armpit, only more humid. The first thing I noticed when I arrived was that the only way to stop sweating would be to Scotchguard my entire body. If I didn’t want to go up the Amazon so badly, I would have taken the bus back to Venezuela, where it was a balmy 90 degrees.
I made arrangements with a cargo ship captain to take me 900 miles up river to Colombia. I paid the captain $80 in advance for nine days of travel and three meals per day, then got ready to depart.
For the journey, I bought a yellow Brazilian hammock, some fishing line, a hook, three books, some snack food and a used guitar and hauled my provisions down to the boat. The Benjamin was substantially larger than The African Queen and considerably smaller than the Exxon Valdez.
Passengers were jockeying for space when I came aboard. By departure time, there were 30 hammocks crammed into a space on the rear deck not much larger than my freshman dorm room. The mass of colorful hammocks looked like a giant spider web, only it had more body odor than any spider would stand for.
Two hours after scheduled departure, el capitan appeared and casually mentioned there would be a delay.
“How long?” I asked.
“Four days,” he replied.
There were two Danish travelers and one German on board and we were the only ones who seemed disturbed by the news. We tried to bribe the captain with $5 bills but apparently he’d already made up his mind.
Years before, when I was delayed in the Denver airport for nine hours during a snowstorm, it seemed like a major world crisis. Now I was supposed to wait four days in a place that made the Denver airport look like Club Med because the captain wasn’t in a sailing sort of mood.
In those four days, two significant things happened: 1) I got a lousy haircut from a barber with shaky hands who chopped at my head like Edward Scissorhands; 2) I found a black widow spider the size of a Garth Brooks belt buckle in the $6-a-night hotel bathroom while I was shaving. The 15-year-old manager on duty brought in one of those cartoon-like poisonous spray pumps, chased the spider under my bed and proceeded to spray it with about 20 blasts of the toxic waste. This had relatively little effect on the spider, which was now under a chair on the other side of the room but it turned the entire floor into Chernobyl. Eventually, my rescuer squashed the beast with one of his flip-flops, picked it up for examination and pronounced it “berry dangerous.”
When we finally shoved off, the first sight, not far from Manaus, was the “Marriage of the Waters.” This is the famous confluence of the Rio Negro (Black River), which is bluishbrown, and the Rio Solimoes (Color of Phlegm River) which is the color of phlegm.
The Amazon was often a mile or two wide and often looked more like a lake than a river. Every once and a while, a friendly reminder of the river’s power would come floating downstream in the form of a massive tree that would knock into the boat like a disarmed torpedo.
Our boat was powered by - I think - twin-StairMasters, so the only way we could make any forward progress against the strong current was to stick close to the river’s edge, where the current was weaker. The problem was there were sandbars near shore and we kept running into them. It took 20 minutes to get off the bar each time.
These abrupt stops weren’t too disturbing because we spent much of the day lying in our hammocks, which absorbed the shocks and gave everyone a good swing.
When we docked at small villages I fished for piranha. A tiny piece of chicken would attract about 20 piranha and it didn’t take more than 30 seconds to get one on the line. I caught plenty but never actually pulled one in. I didn’t know how to remove the hook without losing a finger, so I always shook them off the line, which sometimes required bounding them off the ship’s hull a few times.
I may not have taken anything out of the river but I certainly added to it. There was a lot of trash in the river and some of it belonged to me. When the trip started, everyone, save me and the Europeans, threw their junk into the river. This bothered me. I put my snack food wrappers in the boat’s trash can.
That was, until I saw one of the deck hands dump the trash into the river. Then I saved my trash until I got to the next village. I went ashore and threw it into a trash receptacle on the dock. As our boat was pulling away, I saw the villagers dump the trash into the river. By the third day, I had given up and I was, with great agony, throwing my wrappers into the river myself.
A loud bell rang before every meal. Breakfast every day was coffee and Saltine crackers. Lunch was a piece of rubbery chicken, soggy rice and overcooked spaghetti. Dinner was a re-heated version of lunch. I spent the days reading, playing cards and exercising on the roof of the boat.
The most entertaining aspect of the trip, strangely enough, was the insects. When I brushed my teeth in the evenings at one of the two mirrors with florescent bulbs, there were 60 different species of bugs around each light bulb: green ones, orange ones, little one, big ones. It was a bug collector’s dream. Each day, the bugs du jour descended on us en mass like a plague.
Once it was moths, another time we were assaulted by monster-sized gnats that could suck blood faster than the Red Cross.
The most memorable visitor was a beetle the size of a walnut that crashed into people’s faces at high speed. Imagine reading a book and having a flying beetle ram into your nose. The collision didn’t hurt; it was just startling. Every few minutes a startled passenger would scream, realize it was just the nose-ramming beetle and smile. Everyone laughed. This “joke” was our first and only bonding experience.
After 900 miles, nine nights sweating myself to sleep in a spine-bending hammock and 18 rubber-chicken meals, the forest was still green, the villages looked the same and there were still parrots flying around. I could not detect the smell of marijuana in the air, nor could I see any coca leaves floating in the river. There was only a sign to tell us we had just arrived at the Colombian border.
MEMO: This sidebar appeared with the story: If you go The Brazilian Vacation Center, 16 W. 46th St., 2nd floor, New York, NY 10036. Embassy of Brazil, 3006 Massachusetts Ave. NW, Washington, DC 20008. (202) 745-2828. Books: “Freighters: Cargo Ships and the People Who Work Them,” by George Ancona. T.Y. Crowell, 1985. “The Saddest Pleasure: A Journey on Two Rivers,” by Moritz Thomsen. Graywolf Press, 1990. “Amazon Beaming,” by Petru Popescu. Viking, 1991. “Explorers of the Amazon,” by Anthony Smith. Viking, 1990. Guidebooks: “Running the Amazon,” by Joe Kane. Knopf, distributed by Random House, 1989. “South American Handbook” Passport Books, 1995 Lonely Planet Destinations (Brazil) http://www.lonelyplanet. com.au/dest/sam/bra.htm