Brazil part 2 Mai 26 - June 13/2011

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Our plan is to make a loop from Colombia via Venezuela, Trinidad, Suriname and French Guyana to Brazil and then via the Amazon back to Colombia. It will take about two months. The bottleneck in this loop is the road between Oiapoque and Macapa in Brazil. The road seems to be bad. In the rainy season it is sometimes even not possible to pass. It is the rainy season now. And it rains.

We stand at the busstation at Oiapoque. We just crossed the Fleuve Oyapok with a motorkorjaal, coming from Saint Georges de l´Oyapok in French Guyana. Our little family, consisting of Thijs from the Netherlands, Ben from New Zealand and us two, has got a new member. It is Kadassi from Japan. He tells us the boatsman crossing the Marowijne from Suriname to French Guyana had beaten him, because he wanted more money. For the rest Kadassi does not speak so much. (Look out when you are going to do this trip. You cannot buy tickets at the busstation. You have to buy them down at the village near the river. There is an ATM near the customers and there are persistent people in the village who want money from you for telling you things you already know).

It is 6 pm sharp when the nightbus of Amazontur leaves for Macapá. The first hour is ok, but the next 8 hours are a bumpy ride over a muddy sandroad/river across the dark jungle. Halfway the road is blocked. Some cars in front of us are completely stuck in the mud. One of them is the bus of another company which left one hour earlier. You cannot see the wheels anymore. Our bus tears it out of the mud and we can go again. The last 6 hours of the road are fine. When we arrive at Macapá we take a taxi to our (very nice) hotel ´Hotel America Nova Mundo'.

Macapá
There is not so much to do in Macapá. It is exactly on the equator, it is hot, it is humid and there is an old fort of the Portuguese, called Fortaleza de Sao José de Macapá. It is built in 1782 to defend the Northside of the Amazone delta against the French, coming from French Guyana. We get a tour in Portuguese, which we cannot understand.

From Macapá to Santarem
We are one of the first who enter the boat over the Amazon river to Santarem, so we can choose a nice place to hang our hammocks. The boat leaves at Santana, about 20 kilometer from Santarem. We just bought the tickets at the entrance of the boat. It costs 125 euro for 3 days, including all food (breakfast, lunch and dinner). We stock up some water and extra food at the port. When the boat leaves at 6 pm our hammocks are surrounded by about 30 other hammocks in all colours. The circumstances are not comfortable and the food is monotonous, but someway we like it. There is a little bar where you can buy drinks, there are toilets and there are showers. A little inconvenience is that the shower is just above the toilet and it is leaking. At night our hammocks swing on the movements of the boat. Together with the sound of the motor it makes me fall a sleep.

Linda and I stand on the upperdeck of the boat looking for birds with our binoculars. We sail close to the shore where the stream is less strong. As we are sailing upstream the trip takes one day more than downstream. Big islands of floating grass and waterhyacinths are passing by. We wonder where they come from. Some of them are so big that all kinds of birds settle down on it and taken by the stream they are transported to the mouth of the Amazone like on an Ark of Noah. The river is about 4000 kilometers long and about 40 up to 80 kilometers wide. What we think to be the shores of the river are in fact the shores of Islands. Specially in the delta is an extended constellation of bigger and smaller Islands. Now in the rainy season the shores are inundated. We see lonely huts standing in the water while the cattle is grazing on floating grass. The river is 10 up to 15 meter higher than in the dry season. The advance is that we are close to the canopee of the trees. We hear all kinds of sounds coming out of the jungle.

While looking for birds in the trees along the shore I think of Henri Bates and Alfred Wallace who made the same journey in 1848. Bates was 23 and Wallace 25 by then, about the same age as Ben and Thijs, the members of our little family.
Both gentlemen were naturalists and explorers and like Darwin inspired by the great Alexander von Humboldt.
Both gentlemen collected insects. It was a national sport in those times. Also Darwin collected insects.
Both gentlemen read the same books as Darwin, like Malthus´ book on the growth of populations and Lyell´s ´Principles of Geology´.
Both gentlemen read the ´Voyage on the Beagle´ of Charles Darwin, which was published in 1839.
Though Darwin did not publish his ´On the Origen of Species´ yet both gentlemen were determined to "gather facts towards solving the problem of the origin of species", as Wallace put in a letter to Bates. Evolution was in the air.
Both gentlemen wrote books about their explorations. A long time ago I read The ´Naturalist on the River Amazons´ of Bates. Some years ago I also read Wallace´s book ´The Malay Archilelago´. Both books left a deep impression on me.

Bates writes in his book:
"Para lies midway between the two centres (Bates means Guyana and Brazil), each of which has a nucleus of elevated table-land, whilst the intermediate river-
valley forms a wide extent of low-lying country. It is,
therefore, interesting to ascertain from which the latter
received its population, or whether it contains so large a number
of endemic species as would warrant the conclusion that it is
itself an independent province."

While we sail along the shores we hear the birds in the trees. One of them is the Grietjebee who says his own name. We heard them often in Suriname and French Guyana. Under biologists Bates is famous for the so called Bates mimicry. It says that some harmless animals look like animals which are dangerous. This way they protect themselves, because predators are afraid to attack them. The Grietjebie is a tyrant flycatcher, which defends itself quite pugnacious. Smaller and less pugnacious tyrant flycatchers look like the Grietjebie and might have some advance out of it. An example of Bates mimicry?

We see all kind of birds like macaws (Ara´s), white herons, parrots and swallows. Now and then a grey or pink dolphin jumps out of the water. We cannot take pictures of them, they are too quick. When we pass some rocks we see holes in the sandstone. They are the nests of kingfishers.
After 22 hours sailing we meet for the first time a village. It is called Almeirin. At night sometimes a little boat comes out of nowhere to pick up a passenger. One of the passengers has a big box. I guess he has a fridge inside.

When we awake next morning we are sailing in between wide wetlands full of waterbirds like cormorants, ducks, geese and also kingfishers. Linda and I are on the upperdeck again to watch them. And again my thoughts go back to these two wonderful young men who sailed here about 160 years before. Maybe they were on the same kind of boat we are sailing with. The first two years they explored the Para ditrict, exactly where we are now. At Santarem they went ashore. Then they went on to Manaus in the Amazone district. We will do the same. After Manaus they splitted. Bates continued on the Amazone, while Wallace followed the Rio Negro. What we are going to do after Manaus is not sure yet.

Wallace became finally more famous than Bates. He is called the father of Biogeography. He is also known for his Wallace line, a line in between the Indonesian Islands near Bali, where the Asiatic fauna is separated from the Australian fauna. It is not clear if this is really true as we learned when we were there some years ago.
Most famous Wallace is because he was the first who came out with an evolutiontheory based on natural selection. He sent his manuscript to Darwin, who was famous for his voyage on the Beagle, but who had not published his evolutiontheory yet. In the beginning Darwin thought it was just a case of progressive creationism. Nothing new. But then he awoke with a shock. He saw his own evolutiontheory. Friends pushed him to hurry up otherwise all honour would go to Wallace. Finally the theory of Wallace and Darwin was read out at the Linnean Society in London in 1858. Wallace was at the Malay Archipelago by then and Darwin was sick.

In the meantime we pass Monte Alegre. Cargo goes off like softdrinks, but also banana´s and cabbages. It is not so far to Santarem anymore. At lunch we eat catfish. Last night it came aboard with a little boat.

While we stand at the upperdeck we see lots of the beautiful Victoria amazonica, the waterlillies with their big leaves, called after Queen Victoria. They are so big, that a child can stand on it. Now we see some birds walking over it. Some leaves have a diameter of two meter. I remember that they had one in the Hortus Botanicus of Amsterdam in the past. My father told me that once a year at night the flower opened. It was a spectacular happening where in the fifties of the last century lots of Amsterdam inhabitants came to to see the wonder.
How is it possible that finally Darwin became famous for his evolutiontheory and Wallace became just a footnote in history?, I ask myself. In Westminster Abbey I saw the grave of Darwin, but the medallion in honour of Wallace near this grave, I have never noticed.
Though there are some differences they came both with the same theory. Darwin stressed more the competition between individuals while Wallace as a biogeographist emphasized the environmental pressure. Both are valid and both lead to adaptation. So what makes the difference?
Is it the better status of the Darwin family, the powerful friends Darwin had, like Huxley, Lyell and Henslow? There was no enmity between both gentlemen. Wallace supported Darwin´s theory fully and Darwin helped Wallace when he had financial problems.
Still there were some ideas in Wallace´s ideas who were at odds with Darwin. Wallace thought that the raison d´etre of the universe was the development of the human spirit. It sounds like the ideas of French filosopher and Jesuit priest Pierre Teilhard de Chardin. As a student I was really attracted to this theory. But when the raison d´ etre of the universe is the development of the human spirit, then you suppose that evolution has a purpose and that humankind is central in this proces. Things you cannot be sure about.
Maybe this is the reason why Wallace was never accepted fully by the scientific world and also never attacked by the church, while Darwin was. It reminds me of Galilei who was attacked by the church while Newton was allowed to sit at the right hand of God. Both said the same, but Newton let room for the existence of a God.
Later Wallace moved more and more in the direction of spiritualism, which damaged his scientific carreer. Newton also did, but his status was never damaged by it. So what was the reason why Wallace became only a footnote in history, the Man who was not Darwin, as National Geograhic calls him in an article in 2002? While I think this over, I see Santarem coming closer. Just a few minutes and we are there. We will stay here for a while like Wallace and Bates did.

Santarem
When we stand on the quai we say goodbye to Thijs and Ben and to Kadassi. Everyone will go his own way. Linda and I sleep at Hotel Brazil. We love the old wooden floors and the high ceilings. Santarem is a nice city. The quay is full of activity, colourful boats full of hammocks of passengers about to leave. There is a market where you can buy hammocks and suitcases, everything for a long trip over the Amazone. Along the river is a boulevard. You can see where the Amazone and the Rio Tapajos come together. They have a different colour. The Amazone is whitish because of the minerals coming from the Andes. Because of its high speed the minerals stay suspended in the water. The Rio Tapajos streams slowly. Minerals can sedimentate. Because of its lower speed Rio Tapajos is warmer than the Amazone. Dead materials get the opportunity to rot which produces organic acids. That gives the river a dark colour. Because of the acids larvae of mosquitoes cannot survive. That is why there are hardly mosquitoes along the river and so no malaria. Because of the differences in speed, temperature and density the waters of both rtivers do not mix over a long distance.

´Do you see these big trees standing alone in the middle of this soyafield?, asks Nelis Barbosa, our guide ([e-mail]). ´Those are Para trees. They are protected now. In the past they were exported because of the wood. From Para (now Belem) ships transported them to Europe and North America. Now it is forbidden to cut them. But the paranuts you may eat.´ We stop at a farm and one of the locals demonstrates how to free the nuts out of their shell, which look like a coconut.
´Farmers may use 20 % of their land for agriculture. The remaining must stay forest. In the past it was the opposite´, tells Nelis.

When we drive a little further we see an old tractor.
´This is the first tractor Henri Ford introduced in 1929 in Brazil´, says Nelis. ´It was the beginning of the deforestation of Brazil. Actually it were the Americans not us, who started the problem.´ We drive in his car to Jamaracua, a little community along the Tapajos river in Floresta Nacional do Tapajós (FLONA). In Santarem we arranged our permit with IBAMA to visit this National Parc. IBAMA stands for Instituto Brasileiro do Meio Ambiente e dos Recursos Naturaís. FLONA tries to protect the forest, while allowing sustainable use by local residents, including ecotourism, though it has a limited budget.

When we arrive in Jamaracua we see immediately the rubbertrees (Helvetia brasiliensis). Wallace and Bates must have seen these trees. They must have seen how the locals tapped the milk from the trees. How they used the latex to make waterproof bags and shoes. French geographer de la Condamine (the man who assessed the spot of the equator in Ecuador) had described it already. In the western world it hardly had any application. You could just use it to rub errors away. That is why it is called rubber. Nor Wallace neither Bates had the slightiest idea that this tree would eventually become one of the most important trees in worldhistory. Six years earlier Charles Goodyear had experimented with a mix of rubber and sulphur and found a way to make rubber durable. The proces is called vulcanization after the God Vulcanus. It would take still 50 years before John Dunlop invented pneumatic rubber tires. That was in 1892, the same year that Bates died. The prices for rubber rocketed. Rubber became big business.
In 1913 Wallace died. In this time the Brasilian rubbermarket had his summit, but the germ of the decline was already laid. Maybe Wallace and Bates had sent some specimens of the rubbertree to the Kew Gardens in London when they were young. But it was nothing compared with the 70,000 rubbertree seeds Henry Wickham smuggled in 1876 to the same gardens. They were for the British colonies in Asia. In 1913 they began to yield. It was the end of the Brazilian rubbermarket.
There was some hope when Henry Ford started his rubberplantations here near Santarem. It was Ford´s answer to the British who raised the prices for rubber. Ford produced still rubber in World War II when the colonies in Asia were occupied by the Japanese. But the production stopped again in 1945 when the war was over. The Brazilian plantations were infected by a leafdesease. Henri Ford left his plantations to the Brazilian governement. Together with his old tractor.

Jamaracua is a little community in the National Parc of Tapajós which welcomes tourists. You can sleep here and eat with the indigenous people. With Ivonice, one of the people of the community, we make a hike of 4 hours across the forest. The first part is secundary forest. The soil is sandy. All minerals are gone. Higher up we walk across a primary forest. The trees are far bigger and the soil is not sandy anymore. Ivonice demonstrates the use of several trees. Some have a nice smell, like the Craru da Mata. People make shampoo out of it. The Breu branca has a white powder under the bark. ´We call it white amber´, says Ivonice. ´When you put in your nose, you get sleepy.´ The Ibauba is hollow and contains water. The Sapopema has big buttresses. They make a deep sound when you beat the trunk with a stick. ´Indians use it to communicate´, tells Ivonice. We saw the same in Uganda, but there chimps used the buttresses for their communication. The biggest tree we see is a Samauma, a kind of Ceiba tree. ´We call it a elephanttree, says Ivonice. ´It is definitely 300 years old.´ When Wallace and Bates were here, it was already a big tree of about 150 years old. We are surprised when Ivonice shows us a part of the bark. It looks like an elephant. In between the trees we see strange nests of bees. Ivonice lays a hand against the bark of a tree. Her arm streams full with little ants. Then she rubs them fine. ´We use them as a repellant´, she tells. Suddenly she stops. When we look we see a tarentula as big as a rat hiding away between the crevices of the trunk. We see some Yellowheaded macaces. The song of one of the birds reminds me of Burger´s Bush in Arnhem. It is the Capitao da Mata, the captain of the forest. ´We call it the flirter bird´, says Ivonice. ´It sounds like a man whistling after a woman.´ In English it is called the Pied puffbird (Notharchus tectus).

After the hike we make a cano hike of an hour across the flooded forest. It is full of birds, like tucans, macaws (ara´s) and kingfishers. High in the tree we see Red Howler monkeys. It is a wonderful experience.

Finally we swim in the clear river. ´No anaconda´s, no piraña´s, no stingrays, no little candiru (Vandellia´s), which swim in your urethra?´, we ask. ´No, it is safe´, says Nelis. ´You can even sleep without mosquitonet.' That night we sleep under the open sky full of stars. Down we hear the water against our little house. When we awake next morning we see the river at dawn. In the room next to us we discover some sleeping bats.

It is bloody hot already when we leave Jamaracua. Nelis drives his car over the sandy road. And then we get stuck. We have to dig the car out. When the car is free, Nelis notices he lost his keys somewhere in the sand. But where? So we try to find it. Finally we give up and decide to walk back to the community. When Nelis takes our rucksacks out of the car he finds the keys. So we can continue to Santarem.

Next day we leave Santarem. We walk with our rucksacks to the boat to Manaus. It is a big boat. We buy tickets (45 euro for a two day trip) and hang our hammocks on a good spot at the upperdeck. We think the boat will leave at 3 pm. But instead of becoming fuller, the boat becomes emptier and emptier. When we ask in our Portuguese/Spanish/Italian when the boat will leave, we understand the boat will not leave at all. And also not tomorrow, but Monday. But it is not any problem when we like to sleep here. So we sleep two nights on a completely empty boat (apart from the guard). Actually there is no problem, because everything what we need is there: toilet, shower and for the food we go ashore. And it is free!

From Santarem to Manaus
Finally the boat leaves at 11.30 am. It is completely full. There are about 400 passengers. The lower deck looks like an inferno. The upperdeck is better. All day we hear foro music. ´Music for all´, explained Nelis when we sat together in Jamaracua. ´For all´ became ´foro´. We do not like this music, while Brazil has such a nice music. The samba e.g., born in the beginning of the 20th century in an area in Rio de Janeiro. It was played by Bahian immigrants and based on African rhythms. The parallel with the birth of the jazz in New Orleans, also at the beginning of the 20th century is striking. In 50´s of the last century a new kind of music came up in Rio: de Bossa Nova, the new wave. Nelis told us it was related to the atmosphere at the universities. Composer Antonio Jobim and guitarplayer Joao Gilberto slowed the tempo of the samba down and introduced a new sophisticated rhythm. Most famous is ´The Girl of Ipanema´. ´Actually it was the daughter of a general´, told Nelis us. Her real name is Heloísa Pinheiro. Moraes, who wrote the lyrics and Jobim tell how they were inspired by her, when ´she passes by´ the popular Veloso bar near Ipanema, ´but does not look at me´. She has even a website.

We are the only ones who have a mosquitonet around our hammock. It is true, there are hardly mosquitoes, but there are enough other animals around. Still Linda finds this night the biggest cockroach in her hammock we have ever seen. And the problem is neither Linda nor the cockroach can come out of the mosquitonet so quickly. That night Linda dreams of cockroaches who come from other planets to colonize the earth.

We do not like this boat so much. It is too modern. We like more the little old boat from Macapá to Santarem, which let us think about Wallace and Bates. Linda and I stand again on the upper deck, watching birds. We see birds of prey, which catches fishes with their. claws. ´It is a Gaviao´ (a Harpia), tells a Brazilian passenger us. We show him some pictures we took from birds and he writes down the names: Garca azul (little blue heron), Tizorina, Curíca...

Slowly we leave the Para-dictrict and arrive in the Amazon-district. The Para-district is the place where the struggle between the preservationists and the agriculturists takes place. Here a American nun was killed in 2005, like so many others, because she opposed the ranchers, the loggers and the farmers. But it is also the place where 150,000 km2 is protected area. In the 80´s of the last century one footballfield of forest disappeared per minute. Suppose the opposite: that every minute a Brazilian footballfield would be planted with trees. Then there were really a problem in Brazil.
At the petrolstations in Brazil we see ethanol. We have not seen that before. Since the oilcrisis in the 70´s of the last century Brazil uses sugarcane to produce ethanol as a fuel for cars. In itself a good innovation, but environmentalists fear for further deforestation. That is why former president Lula assessed that new plantations onlycan be started at lands which are already degraded.

It is early in the morning when we arrive at Manaus. In total from Macapá to Manaus we have covered a distance of about 1500 kilometer over the Amazon. Linda and I have the idea we have sailed from the past to modern times.


Manaus
Together with Benito from Canada and Hendrik from Belgium we take a taxi to our hotel: Manaus Hotel (strict rules, no service, do not go there, Hotel Manaus is better). While we wait at the reception Thijs and Ben walk in and our family is complete again.
Manaus is an amazing modern city with about 1,5 million inhabitants in the middle of the jungle. We live close to the Teatro Amazonica, a beautiful operahouse in classical style. It was opened in 1896 during the rubberboom. We read that the pavement around the theater was made of rubber, so that visitors would not be disturbed by the noises of late guests.
Linda and I go to the Bosque Sciencia. It is a jungle parc in the middle of Manaus. Strange: Manaus is an enclave in the middle of the jungle and inside Mnaus there is a little jungle. There is not so much to see apart from some Coatis and Manatees. Manatees live in the Amazoneriver, belong to the family of the Sirens and look like see elephants.

With Thijs and Ben we discuss how to continue our trip. The customers at Oiopok gave us only 20 days for Brazil. When we take the boat to Tabatinga at the Colombian border we do not have time enough. Moreover some do not like it so much to stay another 6 days on the boat. So we decide to take the bus to Boa Vista and from there to Venezuela. Linda and I do not like Venezuela so much, but it is the only option.

From Manaus to Venezuela
The bustrip to Boa Vista should take about 12 hours, but because of the roadconditions around Boa Vista it takes far longer. Near Boa Vista we have even to take a boat over the Rio Branco, a trip of one hour, before we can continue with the bus.
Together with the other passengers we are waiting for the boat to come. It is hot and invisible sandflies circle around our feet, leaving little red spots, who will itch for days. There is strong stream in the river, which is coloured whitish because of the suspended minerals. I suppose the river comes from the Roraima mountains in Venezuela. Little boats try to sail upstream. They hardly make any progress. Next to me stands a young lady. She is elegantly dressed. She had tried to help us already several times, when the busdriver said something to us. Then she asked if we understood it what he said. ´A little´, I said and then she said once more what the driver said, but with two times more words and at a far higher speed.
When the little boats pass, some passengers begin to yell. If they cannot take us with them to Boa Vista, they ask. Also the elegant young lady is shouting. And then suddenly one of the boats turns and comes to us. There is an old man aboard and reaches a big fish to the young elegant lady. Biologists would call this fish interesting, but most people would call it ugly. I think it is a suckermouth catfish, a Corroncho they call in Brazil and biologists call it a Hypostomus plecostomus. And their she stands the young elegant lady, with the fish in her hand. The old man has gone already with his boat. She holds the fish at his tail. Maybe she is afraid for the poisonous stickles at the back. What would a young elegant European lady do, when she gets suddenly a fish in her hand, I ask myself. I see the fish is still alive. He is trying to escape. Then the young elegant lady lays the fish on the ground and with one blow on his head with a not so elegant stick , she kills the fish and puts it in her elegant handbag. For dinner this evening.

At Boa Vista we take a taxi to the Venezoalian border. It is drive of almost 3 hours. The border will close at 6 pm and we are just in time to pass. We leave Brazil and contrary to our earlier experiences in Brazil we had a phantastic time here. It is a pity Portuguese is such a difficult language, so we hardly could communicate. Anyway we met a lot of nice, warm people here. ´On the boat Brazilians dance and foreigners read´, said Nelis, when we were in Jamaracua. Though we never saw a Brazilian dancing on the boat and we also never read, I think he exactly describes the difference between us. Brazilians have a joie de vivre we do not have. And maybe they suffer under this joy of life, when they are in doubt if it is right what they are doing. Maybe a good book now and then will help.

It is already dark when we arrive at the excellent posada Michelle at Santa Elena de Uairén in Venezuela. We are back in the Northern hemishere again.

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