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Published: July 30th 2008
After the thrills of getting lost, the grey dolphins, the pink dolphins, the sloth, the caiman, the giant lilies, the mother tree, the haunting forest dazzling with reflections that disorient completely, the next day starts a little disappointingly. The Brazilian family are leaving. I´ve spent some time chattting with Sami, who turns out to be my age exactly, and who has a life story almost identical to George´s from Noronya (the story that is at the heart of my 14 song Anam Cara thing). Strange coincidences. Their story is not exactly an everyday life story. To find two stories like this in two weeks is kinda odd!
Grey dolphins are swimming right outside the lodge this morning jumping and flipping playfully. Our next mission is to visit the home of a local family and a local school.
The family live without electricity. The children, of which there are many, go to school each day getting picked up by the school boat. We arrive just in time for the kids to get home from school - the younger go in the morning, the teenagers in the afternoon, an emminently sensible idea. The young ones chuck away their yellow school shirts and go to cleaning and washing and cooking and preparing fish. Their home is neat and tidy. They have a gas cooker, a radio, and chickens, cats, dogs, and goats under the stilted structure of the house. I don´t understand why they allow tourists to come and go since they don´t get paid, but they do. I guess Sami introduced Elso to the family two years ago and they´ve become friends. The school is next door, so to speak, but we need to take a boat to get there. I meet the teacher and some of the students who all live at the school as well as work there. Washing lines and cooking pots sit next to school books, hammocks next to ancient wooden desks somewhat similar to the schools we visited in Ghana a couple of years back.
The engine of the boat conks out again on the way back. This time we are rescued by the owner of the lodge, a crabby looking judge from Manaus. Hey, it´s not our fault that the mechanic spent his time here flirting with the tourists rather than doing his job!
Elso is also annoyed with the mechanic since our afternoon plans have to be put on hold, but as the sun sets and darkness falls gorgeously Elso says, ´lets go,´ and we are back in the boat crossing the lake again. I´m nervous because of getting lost the previous night. When we crash up onto a grassy floating island crawling with caiman my mood is not improved and my doubts about Elso, shaken a little when we got lost last night, are thoroughly stirred. Once again we have to drag our selves off this island by digging our hands into the piranha infested waters and manually pull ourselves back.
A little later we are creeping along the edge of the grass searching for the ´short cut´with our puny headlamp and flashlight the only light that isn´t pouring from stars, when Elso sees a reflected light from the grass. He begins to make a peculiar gulping sound, and to my amazement he receives an answering call from deep in the grass. It is the sound of the caiman! Elso can tell that the answering call is from a very large one so we move on. He gulps some more and different caimans answer back. He is paddling now from the front of the boat. Alongside him he has a seven foot spear with a small, barbed trident head; wickedly sharp points. We stop. He raises the trident and in a sudden savage blow the water explodes around us. The caiman thrashes and dives but Elso has it in a grip of steel and inexhorably he drags it to the boat. He lifts the caiman. It is 3-4 feet long and weighs about 25 pounds. We forgot the machete, so I get the knife from the back of the boat as the caiman writhes and pulls trying to get the spear out of its neck. I hold the speared caiman and hand the knife to Elso. He apologises: ´I am sorry mike, but this is the life,´ and he cuts into the caiman.
Blood spurts as the head is almost severed from the body. Elso is talking about the differences between caiman and alligator. To demonstrate what he means he asks me to hold the caiman still thrashing many minutes after having his head severed, reaches into the water and snatches an alligator using only his hands and holds it next to the caiman for me to compare. Then he throws the little alligator back.
We are taking the caiman as a gift for the family with whom we are to spend the night.
Eventually, we find the canal through to the lake where the family lives. Blood still pulses and the caiman still twitches even with its head hanging by a thread two hours later. We have been searching for a caiman for me to kill, but I didn´t really want to - I was more worried about getting lost than killing a reptile.
When we get to the house, I carry the still twitching reptile to the back of the house where the 12 year old boy prepares the caiman. Only a small section of the tail is to be eaten. I hold a flashlight while mosquitos swarm in the heat and two of his sisters act like a cow´s tail swishing towels around to keep the pesky blood sucking vampires away. There are ten kids in the house ranging from one to twenty four years old. The feisty fifteen year old is making wicked fun of Elso.
I am charged with helping two of the girls prepare the fire and to grill sections of the tail, while Elso goes to find lemons for the Caiperinha. I decided to try to speak mostly Portuguese today, so I have my opportunity. Half an hour later, when Elso returns, the confusion between me and the girls has become so thorough that we are all three laughing. The rest of the tail was chopped into cubes that were skewered for a shish kebab type thing along with the capybara we had brought that was left over from lunch.
Back in the house, I ate the caiman which I found quite tasty. The grilled capybara was too tough for my teeth, so I left it. Eventually, after I had finished, all the kids jumped in. By 11:00pm all the kids were asleep. The Papa, Elso, and I stayed up till 1:00pm, with Elso switching between Portuguese and English, as I found out about the politics of living around here. At 1:00am, the hammocks go up. I´m the only one with a net. Inside, it´s possible to get comfortable, but it´s suffocatingly hot inside, and I awake a few times in the night in a claustrophobic heat panic, but by the morning the temperature is delicious, and I don´t want to get out. During the night, I hear the other-worldy wails of the howler monkeys and the equally bizarre collection of snores from fourteen people in this tiny space.
In the morning, the younger kids get ready for the school boat. The smallest kids play with the water bottle and the camera. On the way back to the lodge, the engine dies, not for the last time, so the Papa gets his engine onto his dugout canoe and tugs our boat slowly, in the sweltering heat, back to the lodge.
Back at the lodge, I eat a hearty breakfast, shower, shave, and pack.
Today, we are going into the forest for the rest of the trip. On the porch, the staff have trapped a monkey spider as big as my hand under a plastic bottle. Apparently, these spiders jump, and their bite is a bit rough, so I keep away. Grey dolphins frolic again in front of the restaurant. A storm passes by in front of us. Soon we will be hitting the jungle proper away from the comforts of the lodge.
´´Fresh blood for the mosquitos´´ - Elso Lima
Elso gathers all the supplies for our four days deep in the forest: hammocks, water, food.
We set off in the boat. The engine purrs as we leave the lodge behind. After two hours, we swing into what Elso calls the canals, and suddenly we are wrapped in the forest. We switch to paddles. The beauty is stunning: preeternatural. After another hour or so, with the forest singing its unearthly songs, we pull up on the bank and unload our supplies. We climb a small hill to what will be our base camp for the next four days and nights. Elso has built a rough shelter out here. We hang our hammocks, and as night falls, we paddle back out of the canals to hunt for our dinner.
First we are treated to a fantastic display by three dolphins as the sunsets. Beautiful. But as darkness comes, and the slightly ominous silence starts to envelop us, Elso comes to life. In the next two hours, he will hunt five fish, an alligator and a caiman with his spear!
Back at the camp (how he found it in the dark I´ll never understand) we start a fire. The air is alive with mosquitos, tha calls of night monkeys, and acrobatic bats circling. I decide I´m not hungry and retire to the netted hammocks. The persistent whine of the mosquitos on my left side keeps me turned to the right in the hammock. Some of them bite through the hammock, the net, and Elso´s clothing. It´s fantastic inside the hammock, though. The symphony of sound is so beautiful. I sleep like the dead, with the howler monkeys calls so much closer here.
In the morning, we start a fire and have fisherman´s coffee before setting out on a four hour jungle walk.
What a day this was to be! Elso tempts a tarantula out of a hole with a tiny piece of palm leaf that he covers in sweat, and he plays with the spider as if it is a cat with a cat toy. We see the Chimbo tree, which the native people use to extract poison for their darts - they mix it with the poison from a poison dart frog. We play, ´telephone´ with a woodpecker: the sound reverberates across the forest as if it were a large cathedral. I get a great picture of a toucan in the tree next to our camp. We see the bizarre dragon blood vine: a cross section has concentric rings of white and blood red sap. Elso makes a bow and arrow out of a walking palm tree in one hour - I have it with me now, so, hopefully, some of you will see it. We see two agoutis on our path, then three black spider monkeys, and we see the bird who´s sound dominates the day song of the forest, a bird Elso calls, ´The captain of the jungle´.
Back at the camp, we make a fire and eat a hearty rice and sausages lunch then set out exploring in the canoe. We see a tribe of coatis. When they see us the group runs for it. One makes a leap for a tree, misses and tumbles into the canal in a very amusing way. Elso splashes a small one and it gallops away like a wet dog with its tail between his legs to find its mother. We find the howler monkey in his tree. We see the dangerous parrot snake in a tree.
Back in the camp, I am about to rest my hand on a tree when Elso points out the pink toed tarantula hiding under the leaf right where my hand was going! We have to kill it - it´s too dangerous to have in our camp. It takes three blows with the machete for me to get it!.
What a day.
The next day we do more walking, canoing and exploring, both day and night. We see the Harpy Eagle, the greatest bird of prey on Earth. The batteries finally die on the camera, as I get a poor quality shot of this magnicent bird. It eats monkeys and sloth. The way it swivelled its head made me think he was sizing us up - were we small enough for him to take?
That night, two animals scuttled under Elso´s hammock touching his butt as they passed. I heard them, but they had gone by time i got light on the scene. From this point, we slept with the spear and machete within hand range. The next night Elso´s hammock and my bag were coverred in ants, and as we cleared them they bit us with ferocity. On the night walk, Elso walked past a rattlesnake - for the first time I saw an animal before Elso did!. We had to split fast. Later, we also had to run from a wasp´s nest. We saw a tribe of brown capuchin monkeys - I had now seen all five types of monkeys found in this area - one of them did the most acrobatic jump anbd missed like the coatis on a previous day! Sitting in the hammocks at night, after eating food we had hunted, listening to the beautiful music of the forest, it was pretty darn magical. The sounds, the sounds, the cathedral stillness, floating in silence, Elso paddling without making a sound: The four days and nights just seemed to flash past. We even went out of the canals to the main river a couple of times for a refreshing swim and wash.
On the fifth morning, we crashed the camp and started back to the lodge for a real shower, a shave (I looked like Robinson Crusoe´s poor cousin), and a cold drink. We were going to a festa tonight along the river. Little did we know that such a simple thought would turn into the last adventure we were going to have on the Amazon river!
See you on the flypaper,
mike
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Adena
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Pictures of Cuiaba
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