courtesy of FreeWay Adventures Jungle Palace: it floats
Manaus, Amazonas - I’d just stepped out on my first floor balcony at the Amazon Jungle Palace. A pink dolphin leaped up, gave a squeaky greeting from the Flipper soundtrack, and slipped back into the pitch-black water.
The dolphin could get up close because my room was floating atop a barge anchored in a lagoon. Mine was one of a dozen or so standard issue but comfortable hotel rooms. The air-conditioned bar and restaurant awaited upstairs. A tennis court floated on an adjacent barge out back. An oasis of civilization – 45 minutes by speedboat from the nearest city and several miles even from the nearest village.
The Amazon is big. When flying above it in a small commuter plane, the ground below you seems carpeted with the green canopy of trees – broken only by a hodgepodge of rivers that ebb and flow into each other. All of Europe could easily fit into the rainforest.
According to an Amazonian legend, male dolphins sometimes slide out of the water at night and transform themselves into princely studs to seduce local women. Perhaps this was a gay dolphin. Or maybe this was a lady dolphin, her approach too discreet for legend. Maybe this was the moral equivalent of those surprise phone calls from “Maria” that unaccompanied men so often receive after checking into their hotels in Latin America.
In Brazil the later species has earned the nickname “piranha” – providing me with a nice segue into a description of my antics earlier that afternoon.
I’d accompanied a Nestle executive and his family to chase down some piranhas myself. In doing so, I was following the footsteps of 26th president of the United States. Teddy Roosevelt could be called the world’s first ecotourist - even if he did take a few pot shots at a stray caiman now and then. After leaving the Oval Office, the old Rough Rider journeyed through the Pantanal and the Amazon in 1914. He had a river named after him for his trouble.
In a published account entitled Through the Brazilian Wilderness, Roosevelt obsessed about piranhas. Ugly buggers about the size of a human hand, piranhas may have inspired the term feeding frenzy. A mere trickle of blood is enough to incite a fatal gangland-style attack that will transform any unfortunate creature into a skeleton on short notice. I once met a tour guide who claimed to have lost part of a finger to a piranha: it was hard to diss her missing knuckle. Wrote Teddy: “The razor-edged teeth are wedge-shaped like a shark’s, and the jaw muscles possess great power. The rabid, furious snaps drive the teeth through flesh and bone.”
Roosevelt warned against swimming in piranha-infested waters. Amazonian poet Thiago de Mello claims to have systematically ignored that counsel, and he’s made it to his 76th birthday. Yet Mello’s the one who tells of the “piranha steer.” When Amazonian wranglers need to cross a stream while driving their cattle to market, they will cut up a sacrificial weakling to attract the piranhas – allowing the rest of the herd to cross unmolested.
Piranhas cluster along the river’s muddy edge, so we nuzzled our little boat up against some shoreline bush and grabbed our makeshift Huck Finn rods - fishline literally strung along severed tree branches. These didn’t work as well as a contraption devised by our local boat pilot: he simply wrapped some line around a discarded mineral water bottle to fashion a makeshift handle. He slid his hook directly into the water and caught more than anybody.
Ecotourism proponents tell us we need to experience the rainforest in order to save it - or so I told my green conscience as we pulled the little critters out of their habitat and threw them into a bucket. Piranhas aren’t good losers, either. Our guide grabbed one and stuck a good-sized twig in its face: it chomped fiercely through in a single bite. Nearly a century ago, Roosevelt had witnessed a similar display: “As they flapped about they bit with vicious eagerness at whatever presented itself.”
Roosevelt pronounced piranhas “fairly good to eat.” Poet Mello says he prefers his barbecued. I suspect that ours eventually found their way into the mojica, the soup served everyday in our barge-hotel’s restaurant. An Amazonian legend – yet another one - attributes aphrodisiac qualities to this piranha soup.
Aphrodisiac qualities... maybe that explains the appearance of Maria the dolphin that night.
If I couldn’t muster much sympathy for the piranhas, I did feel a twinge of pity for the victim of our next wildlife adventure. The night following my rendezvous with the dolphin, a group of Italian tourists and I set out in a little motorboat to traverse a murky maze of streams and lagoons. The idea was alligator spotting, and we saw several at a distance. Snouts just above water level, eyes burning red as coals when caught by a well-directed flashlight beam. But the object of this sport is not to merely spot a reptile but to grab hold of one. Our guides tried a noose. They waded waist deep into the water. They got covered with slime. Eventually we gave up.
As our party sank into silent melancholy, I suddenly found myself surrounded by shouts of turbocharged Italian. The pilot had managed to sneak the boat up behind an unsuspecting creature. His partner leaned over the bow to barehand a three-footer. We passed around the animal – literally frightened stiff by all the attention. We carried him back to the barge, careful that someone always kept him immobilized with strong grips around the neck and tail. After a round of photo shots, he got thrown back into the drink.
After all that excitement, I asked to visit the neighborhood pharmacy the next afternoon. I went with Ceará. I’m tempted to alternatively describe Ceará as scrawny and sinewy. In town, you wouldn’t give this little guy a second thought. But this was his element.
Ceará and I left our boat at the water’s edge. I trailed him into the jungle. Contrary to popular belief, the Amazon forest is neither dense nor dark. Sunlight creeps through to nourish a thick underbrush.
Ceará prepared for our excursion by tapping an ant nest that bulged from a tree trunk. Dozens of tiny black insects swarmed over his hands. Rubbing them together, he spread the musky pulp over his hands. “That’s the smell of the forest,” he told me. “If we were hunting, we’d do this to conceal our scent.”
Our scent – or at least his - now hidden from the prowling jaguar that locals claimed was making late night snacks of their watchdogs, we began to explore the shelves of this pharmacy. First, the Amapá tree. A fellow guide, the son of Italian immigrants, swears that a far-flung medicine man healed his broken collarbone by merely immobilizing it and prescribing Amapá-resin tea. Next Ceará showed me what he called the Vicks Vapor Rub tree: he didn’t know its true name, but it really does smell like the store-bought gel. Locals scrape off its bark, boil it and inhale the steam to alleviate cold congestion. One plant after another – each with amazing curative powers. Why fear catching some weird jungle disease? Something would surely be found here to save me.
Hip Travel Tips
Manaus - Gateway to the rainforest, this former rubber boomtown was the richest city in South America at the beginning of the 20th century. Many still functional buildings belie both the extravagance of the era and the decadence that ensued.
Local Cuisine in Manaus: Canto da Peixada. If the place seems a bit funky, remember the Pope ordered out here. (You can’t expect His Holiness to hang with the unwashed, can you?). Address: Rua Emílio Moreira, 1677. Telephone: (55-92) 234-3021.
Down and Dirty Bar in Downtown Manaus: Bar do Armando. Frequented by artists, intellectuals and other assorted misfits. Hangout for political activists during the military dictatorship, though Portuguese immigrant Armando claims to be apolitical. Armando serves the coldest beer on the continent, and has devised a special way of handling the quart-sized bottles to keep their contents from freezing. Address: Rua 10 de julho, 593 (on the square in front of the opera house). Telephone: (55-92) 232-1195.
