The Amazon - Planning Ahead and Looking Back

---

The Amazon - Planning Ahead and Looking Back

April, 2008

It is late April and I am in full countdown mode. Twenty-five more commuting days until retirement. Less than two months from today I’ll step off a plane in Puerto Ayacucho, the capital of the Venezuelan state of Amazonas, to start a two-month river trip. Anxious, I click onto Weatherunderground, check the weather in Puerto Ayacucho (hot and wet) then follow the satellite photos from Puerto Ayacucho up the Orinoco, through the Casiquiare to the Rio Negro, down the Rio Negro to Manaus, down the Amazon to Santarém, up the Tapajós to Fordlândia - my basic trip plan. A money question intrudes into my thoughts and I jump to the Lonely Planet forum to post a question about parallel market exchange rates in the Caracas airport. Someone answers within a few hours.

Flashback to 1982

How did we plan trips before the Age of Information? No Internet. No email. No Expedia or Orbitz. No ATMs in the places I was likely to visit. No travel blogs. No travel forums. Not even Lonely Planet! My mind drifted. It was still on the travel channel, just drifting back in time to 1982.

How did I plan that first Amazon trip? There was a National Geographic map and the South American Handbook. Plus a travel agent. Some things were simpler. I didn’t have to agonize over whether or not to take the laptop or a cell phone. For a low-budget traveler a credit card was little use - the hotels I frequented wouldn’t take them. Nor could I get the black market exchange rate in Brazil with a credit card. But I could with traveler’s checks. And my life was simpler. I was newly single. My obsession with photography was in remission- a pocket Olympus and a dozen rolls of Kodachrome would suffice.

Still mulling over the dates for the trip, I was awarded a grant to attend a four-week workshop at Hamline University in St Paul -in Latin American Studies. It was, fortunately, scheduled for the very start of my summer break. A travel agent helped me get a good “open-jaw” rate for the air travel. Seattle-Minneapolis/St Paul for the workshop; from Minneapolis via Miami to Iquitos, Peru; from Rio de Janeiro back to Seattle via Miami two months later. Ticket, traveler’s checks, passport, yellow-fever card, malaria pills, camera and film, some clothes, Spanish-English and Portuguese-English dictionaries, wristwatch and sunglasses, turn in the spring quarter grades and I was off. Peru did not require a visa. Brazil did, but the South American Handbook assured me there was a Brazilian Consulate in Iquitos.

Not being a frequent flyer I was then - and am now - mildly euphoric about boarding a plane in one country and getting off a few hours later in a different one. From the upper Mississippi to the upper Amazon in about twelve hours! Then the worries would set in. Would my Spanish be adequate? I don’t really speak it but have learned how to mispronounce Portuguese well enough to get along - at least at a tourist level. And I hadn’t used it much in the years just prior to this trip - one week in Spain in 1980; no extensive dependence on Spanish since a two month trip through Latin America in 1967.

Iquitos

Flying north to south - even a long flight - does not induce jet lag. Iquitos is only one hour ahead of Minneapolis. I woke up reasonably early the next morning, knowing my Spanish was at least adequate for cabs and hotels. I had arrived in the dark and was anxious to see the Amazon. Wolfing down the hotel’s minimalist breakfast, I walked the few blocks to the Malecón, the clifftop promenade overlooking the river and the area where the riverboats landed. It was a muddy brown, much like the Mississippi I’d just left. That was as far as the resemblance went. This river is big. And busy. Dozens of boats have their prows jammed into the mud below the Malecón. Others are moving in various directions up, down or across the river. Two thousand miles from the ocean and I see an ocean-going freighter downriver from where I am standing. It looks like it is taking on logs (using old-style cargo cranes, not containers).

Walking toward the market I noticed about a dozen people crowded around the open window of a streetfront residence. The volume on the TV was turned up and the machine-gun stataco of sports announcer Spanish blasted through the window to be absorbed by the crowd. Taking advantage of my gringo height, I peered over the small crowd into the living room. Live from Spain, it was the World Cup -- broadcast into a city not connected to anywhere by road. The game broke for an Inca Kola ad and I walked on, not certain why I was so surprised that Iquitos would have TV.

Entering the market, a man in jeans and teeshirt - something of a uniform for men here - waved a Rubik’s Cube in my face. It was just the first of many plastic doodads the stall minders here were selling. Interspersed with Asian plastic goods and piles of teeshirts were the Amazon items. Monkeys, parrots, other birds and iguanas sold as pets. Fruit - familiar ones like mangoes and papayas and bananas -- and fruit I’d never seen, even after living in northeastern Brazil and travelling widely in the non-Amazon regions of Latin America. Herbs. Fish -- fresh and dried.

But in those pre-Internet days the gaps in a travel plan had to be attended to. My plan was - I know now - overly ambitious. Go upriver on the Ucayali as far as possible, cross from Peru into Brazil in Acre where the Transamazonian highway ends at Cruzeiro do Sul, bus the entire highway to the coast at João Pessoa, then hop, skip and jump down the coast to Rio, stopping in cities I’d been to before like Recife and Salvador and some I hadn’t, like Iléus. Definitely Iléus, where my fascination with Brazil had begun at the age of nineteen. Having hired onto a Danish freighter in New York, I had gazed at Iléus from the deck of the Heering Rose after two weeks at sea. But we couldn’t go ashore. With the harbor too shallow our cargo was unloaded onto a barge. Three years later I was in the Brazilian northeast with Peace Corps, but unable to fit in a trip to Iléus. In the meantime I’d read almost all of Jorge Amado’s novels, even the social realist ones of his communist youth - novels with one-word titles like Sweat and Cocoa - written before he progressed through the romanticism of Gabriela, Clove and Cinammon to the magic realism of Dona Flor and Her Two Husbands, and many were set in Iléus and the cocoa plantations that surround it.

The Brazilian consul was skeptical of my planned route from Pucallpa to Cruzeiro do Sul, suggesting I could fly by getting on a waiting list in Pucallpa for a small plane that would leave when and if it filled. But he stamped the visa into my passport and signed it and I enjoyed a brief conversation in Portuguese along with a cafezinho.

Perhaps the harbor is more organized now, but in 1982 the boats ran their bows into the muddy shoreline wherever they fit, put out a gangplank, and sent a crewman up the precarious path to the Malecón to hang a small sign advertising where they would be going and when. Cargo was carried up and down the hillside on the backs of strong men negotiating paths that were slippery when wet (which was almost always - even during what passes for the ‘dry season’ in this part of the Amazon) . On the double-deck boats which made the longer trips cargo was stowed on the lower deck. The upper deck had space for hammocks - many hammocks - and a few cabins. Passage included food for upper-deck hammock or cabin passengers; cargo deck passengers paid a lot less and brought their own food.

The sign at the top of the cliff read “El Arca, leaving for Pucallpa Friday, accepting passengers and cargo.” It was Thursday. I descended the steep muddy trail, hard enough even without my luggage and both hands free, moving aside to let a stout guy with a refrigerator on his back ascend. Boarding El Arca I bargained a bit with the captain and was assured all meals were included. I can’t recall how much I paid but do remember thinking it was ridiculously cheap. The trip, according to the captain, would be three days, “more or less.” And I could sleep on the boat tonight if I wanted. After a quick trip into the market to buy a hammock I checked out of the hotel.

Friday came and a crewman said there were some delays, maybe we would leave on Saturday. Good - more time to wander around Iquitos, through the market again, and through the floating slum of Belém - although the floating shacks were now on the Amazon mud as the river level had dropped. Garbage and sewage piled up, waiting for the river to rise to give the neighborhood a well-needed flush. It would be several months before the river would start to rise again. Saturday came and went, then Sunday. The engineer was busy fiddling with the engine. He dove into the river off the stern of El Arca, hammer in hand, to bang some dents out of the propeller. The Amazon can be a very clean river, but not in or just downriver from a city.

---