Amazon

Well, it is big I’ll give it that.   There’s a relatively short stretch of Amazon which runs between Peru and Columbia and we’re up it.    Two hours (about 50 miles) by fast boat from the town with the airport, Leticia and then another hour in a much smaller boat chugging up a tributary, the River Amacayaco.   The Amazon itself, the colour of weak hot chocolate, moves at a surprising pace considering we’re 4,000 kilometres from the sea and only 96 metres above sea level.  The speed of flow is because of the quantity of water flowing in the rainy season and, yes, we are here in the rainy season.   To give you an idea of the size of this river, at 4,000 km from the sea it’s two kilometres wide (or thereabouts) and huge quantities of debris are being washed downstream.   I say thereabouts because judging the width is difficult.  What seems like the bank is flooded in most places to way past where the eye can see.  Further downstream it’s sometimes flooded up to several hundred kilometres each side of the main ‘river’ and the water is fresh 200 miles out to sea.   I said it was big.

There aren’t many people stories in this one, we only met two people in the Amazon and could only communicate with one of them and that was Julian, the owner of the lodge we stayed in.  He’s a Canadian/Columbian of 30 whose first language is English.   It would be fair to say that we are getting back to nature here.  No electricity or hot water but you can get a phone signal and we’re the only guests.  Apart from Julian, the guides are local tribespeople from the nearest village which is two hours walk or half an hour by boat.  Our guide Reynaldo was a hunter until two years ago using a blowpipe and curare as a poison.   He has eagle eyes, fantastic hearing and understandably a great knowledge of the forest.    The village has about 300 people and they are basically subsidence farmers and hunters.  There’s a generator which provides them with electricity morning and evening, a school, church and a concrete football pitch.  Running water is the river.   One of the staff at the lodge is a seventeen year old girl who has lived her entire life in the village with her parents but is smart.  She’s managed to win a scholarship to one of the best schools in Bogota where she’ll be moving to soon.   It really is impossible to judge the culture shock she’s going to undergo when she moves.

Although the big wheels in the drug cartels would have been near the big cities this area is a prime drug raising area and the village was very much involved.    The man who looked after one of the airstrips in the forest was pointed out to us.  He went to prison but managed to avoid being sent to a US prison where many of the cartel leaders now reside.   But the big problem was the social effect on the village.  Traditionally the village elders made decisions and were the respected members of the community.   Once it was seen that it was possible to make a lot of money by just standing around with a gun, that became the target occupation and the old order basically crumbled.   The drug trade wasn’t seen as a problem, these people were growing a crop that somebody bought.  I said traditionally, but only a couple of generations ago there was no village, these were nomadic people who moved around the forest with a bit of hunting or fishing and some slash and burn for a few years of cropping before moving on.  These are Ticuna people and they have drink problems like so many tribal groups: Australian Aborigines: Kalahari Bushmen: Inuits: Native Americans and Scots.

Apparently when the pressure was on the cartels in the 1990’s, they had some sort of negotiation with the Government for an amnesty and their offer was to pay off the entire Columbian National Debt of US$16 billion.  The Government turned it down and Pablo Escobar, the biggest of the drug lords was shot by a US funded government force of 1,500 people who still took several years to find him. 

Apart from a couple of paths from the lodge, going anywhere means a boat ride and on a walk rain boots (wellingtons to us) are worn because they’re helpful in the mud but mainly as snake protection.   We’d just crossed a small log bridge when Julian spotted a small Fer-de-Lance curled up where our feet had just been.  These look like dead leaves, don’t disappear into the undergrowth when they sense something coming and are deadly poisonous snakes.  The small ones are worse because they don’t limit the amount of venom on a bite, you just get the whole lot.  Nice.  Sometimes I wonder why we do this sort of thing but only when I’m awake.   Heather asks me to add that as I crossed the following bridge it collapsed under me and I ended up sprawled in a muddy ditch, fortunately not full of either water or Fers-de-Lance.   The wildlife is amazing but not teeming, that’s a misconception.   We saw fantastic, ridiculously coloured birds and insects, multi coloured poison frogs, huge butterflies plus some mammals.  Morpho butterflies are electric blue, never seem to land and are the size of a saucer while many of the insects and birds also have iridescent colours.

One of my highlights was seeing the Amazon River dolphins who come in grey and pink and are separate species.  Greys are about 4 to 5 feet long and the Pinks are twice that.  Heather went swimming in a wider part of a tributary which they call a lake here where we had been watching both species, so we claim she has been swimming with Dolphins up the Amazon.   We packed as much as we could into this trip, with the boat rides, night and evening walks in the forest and even a visit to a Monkey Sanctuary where they collect pet, orphaned or injured monkeys with the aim of returning them to the wild.  There are no cages except for treatment, no fences and the monkeys leave when they want to.   The hunters generally try to find a female monkey with a baby so they can shoot the mother for meat and sell the baby on as a pet.  This place involves the hunters in tracking troupes of monkeys for research as a way of deflecting the hunting.   Apparently it works - sometimes.   Even I was captivated by one of these delightful little creatures (a baby woolly monkey) and I have photographs of Heather with a baby Tamarin (a rat-sized monkey) in her hair.  It did also pee on her blouse.   I must say that all the biting insects here in the forest are a great reminder of our rightful place in the food chain.

Our night walk meant we got to see and hold tailless scorpions and a tarantula, which was wonderfully soft.   This particular tarantula was hand sized and much more cuddly than an even bigger species we saw later on.  We saw some ants which were about two inches long and sting rather than bite.  Another stinging ant, only half the size but which we kept well away from is called the Bullet Ant because being stung by it is like being shot.   Allegedly, but we weren’t going to test it.   The night walk was the occasion for my other highlight.    In the middle of the forest we turned off our torches, held hands and in this impenetrable darkness shuffled forward few yards to find ourselves surrounded by phosphorescent fungi.   A magical sight.  It was on dead leaves on the forest floor which when the torches were turned back on, look just like dead leaves.    I call tell you that it was very uncomfortable, very hot and in humid air that was so thick you could spread it on a piece of toast.   In the humid air nothing dries and the dampness is all pervasive.  Pretty well all our clothes are wet and anything washed stays wet for days unless you can actually get it in the sun.  I have shirts that have been wet for three days and smell like a damp church crypt.  We are bedraggled.  It’s one of those strange words because nothing to my knowledge is ever just draggled.

We’ve been very lucky with the weather.  It is the wet season so it rains a lot at night and early morning with one day when it rained until mid-afternoon but we were boating up river in a covered boat looking at birds and of course it was warm and very pleasant.   Julian had told us that it rained very heavily just before we arrived which reduced the temperature considerably.  It had been about 38 – 40 C (over 100 F) and 80% humidity.   It would have killed me.