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July 30th 2017

Published: July 31st 2017

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Dr Jon

Opera in the Amazon

Manaus supplied the world with rubber in the 19th Century. Consequently, it was a very rich city. (Until the British managed to grow Rubber in Malaysia.) At the height of the boom they built this opera house where Caruso once sang (although that can't be confirmed).

Manaus is a city of 2 million located in the middle of the Amazon rainforest. There are no roads to Manaus. It's accessible only by plane or boat. There are many Amazon "guides" headquartered there. (Some are even legitimate.) Since last November I had been corresponding with Antonio, a guide I found on the Internet. A typical exchange would consist of me asking ten or so questions and Antonio replying with answers to one or two of them. He sent me a checklist of what to bring—sheet for hammock, rain coat, flashlight, hiking shoes, and mosquito repellant. Any other luggage would have to be left behind in Manaus, he warned. Beyond that, I had little idea of what to expect.

I arrived at midnight after a four-hour flight from Rio (Brazil is almost the same size as the US!) I could taste the damp jungle air the minute I stepped off the plane. I caught a few hours of sleep at a hostel where I could leave my bag. The next morning began with a three-hour trip by van to the Urubu River, a tributary of the Amazon. The road was long and straight with walls of dense jungle vegetation

Jungle Pagoda

One of the structures at Antonio's lodge is this tower.

on either side. We passed nameless rivers and stagnant ponds. When the van crested a hill I could see the jungle stretching for miles in every direction. Occasionally we would see a shack with boarded-up windows or a small patch of cleared land. I imagine the farmer, worn down from fighting the relentless press of jungle and finally saying, "Fuck it. I'm going back into day trading."

The road trip ended in Lindoia, the major urban center and trading post for river people, but less than a dusty enclave of one hundred or so people living in dismal huts. From there we transferred to a launch that would take us an hour upriver to Antonio's lodge, which would serve as our base for excursions deeper into the jungle.

Until a few years ago Antonio's lodge had been Antonio's camp. But I wasn't the only one to have discovered him on the Internet. His business was booming and the camp had expanded into a compound of structures. There was a large kitchen/dining area covered by a thatched roof, another thatch-covered sleeping area with hammocks, a few smaller buildings containing bunk beds, and a dock that one could dive off

Jungle Jim and Jungle Jon, together at last

James, Amazon guide and ex-commando, shows me how to apply camouflage.

of when the heat became more unbearable than the possibility of being eaten by piranhas. Just beyond the dock pink dolphins played in the water.

At any given time there would be ten or so guests like me staying at the lodge and three or four guides. I was introduced to my guide, James a.k.a. "Jungle Jim," an ex-Brazilian Army jungle commando. The next morning James would lead me and a few other guests into the jungle.

My only preparation for this trip was to read The Lost City of Z, David Gran's book about Percy Fawcett. Fawcett was the last of the great Victorian-era explorers. He mounted three famous expeditions to the Amazon. But he was monomaniacal. He drove his men and animals to exhaustion and beyond. His rule was: keep up or be left behind. One member of Fawcett's party was a survivor of Shackleton's harrowing expedition to Antarctica on the Endurance. But even he couldn't keep up with Fawcett's pace. They found him years later in an Indian village, babbling incoherently and riddled with parasites. No one ever returned from Fawcett's fourth expedition, which aimed to find Eldorado, the lost city of gold rumored by

Amazon Killer

I murdered this piranha and ate it. Not much meat, but pretty tasty.

Spanish Conquistadors. Since then over 100 people have lost their lives looking for Fawcett or traces of his party.

The next day I thought about Fawcett as I followed James through the jungle, tormented by horseflies and sweating out of every pore. My eyes constantly scanned the chaotic vegetation looking for tarantulas, scorpions, bushmasters and coral snakes—As I tramped along I quietly recited the coral snake identification rhyme the army taught my grandmother when she was a WAC in Florida: red next to yellow can kill a fellow.

Occasionally James would stop to give us a little lecture about some tree (and also to let the horseflies catch up). One type of large tree had a trunk with star-shaped cross-sections. James struck the tree with his machete and sent a deafening echo through the forest that could be heard for miles. "Communication tree," he said.

There were rubber trees, cashew trees, mahogany trees. Mothers could extract milk for their babies from one type of tree. And if we ever got lost in the forest, we could extract water from another type of tree. I thought this information could be useful until James warned us that another nearly

Cooking technique

These guys go into the jungle with a machete, a hammock, a bag of rice and a few pieces of raw chicken. That's all you need.

identical tree was deadly poisonous. Frankly, there were millions of trees, and they all began to blur together. At another stop, James told us that his mother had been a shaman. She had taught him how to read plants. It wasn't something that could be learned from books, he explained. He could look at a tree and sense what medicine it had to offer. He told us that over the years he developed the same skill for reading people. He could look at a person and sense if they were good or bad. As he said this, he stared directly at me. Perhaps he could read some deep flaw in my character, I worried. Or maybe he was sensing that I thought he might be full of shit.

That night we hung hammocks in the forest and gathered firewood. James built a huge fire. He skewered pieces of chicken on long sticks that hung out over the flames. Another stick suspended a pot of rice over the fire. He showed us how to make plates out of broad leaves. It was the best meal I've ever eaten. After the cleanup, we got into our hammocks. I stared up through

Best meal ever

Chicken and rice served on a plate I made from a few leaves.

the trees to the night sky. Fireflies floated by. Occasionally a flame would spark out of the embers of the fire and send a yellow glow flickering up the tree trunks.

Antonio must have sensed that I was looking for adventure, or maybe he actually read some of my emails. Back at the lodge a few days later he gave me a boat and a local kid from a nearby farm. "Here," he said. "Go." The kid, Wellington, a.k.a. "Jungle Boy," was 17 years old, had lived on the river his whole life, and spoke rudimentary English. He asked where I wanted to go. "Upriver," I said.

The Urubu floods this time of year. The rainy season is over, but the water backs up from the Amazon covering much of the jungle and turning the water black with organic material. The flooded jungle is called the floating forest, and it's possible to explore the canopy by boat. Of course, this means steering the boat through thickets of thorny branches. In the floating forest the water is like a black mirror. Beyond the bow of the boat I could see the trees and sky above and their reflection below

black mirror

Gliding through the floating forest was like flying.

me. I felt like I was flying.

At dusk Jungle Boy found a muddy patch big enough for a campfire. He stood up in the boat and hung our hammocks over the water. "Snoring?" he asked. "Yeah, I guess so," I answered. He thought about this for a moment and then took my hammock down and rehung it a bit higher in the tree. He explained that my snoring could attract an anaconda that would have an easy time snatching me out of the tree if my hammock was too close to the water. I hadn't considered this before. The only anaconda I've ever seen is at the Hall of Science in San Francisco. It lives in a swampy enclosure that bears a striking resemblance to exactly where we would be sleeping. Being shot in a favela would be an okay way to die, I guess, but being eaten by a 30-foot snake? Not so much.

Jungle Boy also told me the story about taking his girlfriend camping in the floating forest. Apparently, he didn't tie her hammock securely. It gave away and plunged her into the black, swampy water in the middle of the night. He reassured

Jungle Boy

Jungle Boy cooking our dinner.

me that since then he had learned to properly tie hammocks.

Jungle Boy started a fire on the muddy patch and suspended chunks of raw chicken over the flames. As we waited for the chicken to cook we listened to the jack-hammer noise made by dozens of frogs. Over the cacophony I heard the call of a distant howler monkey. The howler has my vote for the strangest and loudest noise made by an animal. At first it sounds like an approaching jetliner landing in the jungle. Or maybe it's the sound of a vintage air raid siren signaling an approaching V2 rocket. Or it could be the sound of a miniature hurricane caught in the branches of some tree. I asked Jungle Boy why the howlers howled. Was it a warning? A mating call? Marking territory? He asked me what time it was. I glanced at my watch. "Seven-o-clock," I said.

"That's why," he said with confidence, "They will howl again at 4:00 AM."

"I see," I said, "so it's a service, like Big Ben."

We climbed into our hammocks around 8:00. It took me an hour to fall asleep because I imagined every noise

Anaconda feeding bags

This is where we slept. My hammock, the red one, had to be raised a bit lest I would be easy prey for anacondas.

was an anaconda. I went through various scenarios of how I might defend myself if I woke up in the middle of the night with a giant snake wrapped around me. None of them were promising.

Here's a little confession: I'm old. That means my old bladder wakes me up a few times during the night. This presents a unique challenge when sleeping in a hammock suspended over an anaconda-infested swamp. The technique involves reaching down to find the boat, pulling the boat under the hammock, carefully stepping onto the boat, then peeing over the side while shifting one's weight from side to side to stabilize the rocking boat and avoid plunging into the water. My first performance of this feat was at 11:30 at night. I was about to climb back into my hammock when I noticed an unusually bright firefly behind me. On second glance I realized it was a flashlight coming toward me. "Wellington!" I hissed, "Someone's coming." It only took Jungle Boy a few seconds to recognize old Mr. So-and-so, who spearfishes in these waters late at night. Apparently the fish are attracted to his light. Pleasantries were exchanged. When I asked Jungle Boy what