Amazon Tales

We are back on the Amazon river today and have time to read up on the region. 

The current book I am reading is The Lost City of Z which is nominally about an explorer who was lost in the headwaters of the Amazon while looking for a lost city in the jungle. Series of explorers  then went looking for him and for the ancient city lost in the Amazon jungle. 

It is a story not unlike the Spanish looking for the Dorado or explorers looking for the lost tribe of Amazon women ( not true). I say this because the previous book we read is by  anthropologist Alex Shiumatoff who goes looking to find the source of that myth. 

Anyway we have learned the Amazon river is 300 ft deep in some places, has an island bigger than Switzerland (it is called Marajo) and has a 200 miles wide delta that flows into the Atlantic.  Apparently the river was discovered in 1500 by Vincente Pinzon a Spanish sea captain who happened to be sailing off the coast of Brazil and saw all this brown fresh water hundred of miles off the coast and followed it to the source.  We have discovered this river also has BIG waves and a 15 mile an hr. tidal bore. 

My brother Stephen has often said that there are two seasons in Brazil, hot and rainy, and he lives in what Amazonian say is "the south" which is, we are told, more temperate but hot by our BC coastal standards.  Well, the rainy season is just starting here and we got a flash rain storm a couple of days ago.  Our tanks would be filled in a day....rainfall like we rarely see, even living in the temperate rain forest. 

They say water in the river rises about 30 ft each year in Manaus (I thought it was 6', boy was I way off) and last year was a record.  Well, it is already flooding in Colombia, one of the headwater sources, which means there will be lots of water in the river this year.  Driving around the city one sees evidence of where the river rises on buildings, many of which are built on stilts by the river banks.  The other aspect of life along the river is that it is hot and hotter.  32c is average, 90F, and then it is very humid.  Fashion is shorts and a tank top--unisex.

Environmentalists geographers and anthropologists seem not to agree on what is here.  Some say it is a virgin forest, others say that conditions are  like the Arctic and make it impossible for large populations and complex societies to exist. Yet others suggest these views are false and there were complex societies here, such as the anthropologist who wrote the book 1491.  We don't have a clue but saw very sophisticated baskets, hunting tools and musical instruments in the Indian Museum - that and a lot of bird feathers from blue macaws that are now on the Brazilian threatened species list.  

Oh, and we actually did see a pink dolphin (also now a  threatened species because of the various forms of pollutants and other junk in the river) where the Rio Negro and Amazon meet. Finally, we saw a jaguar but it was in a zoo, dangerous looking and I would not want to be the person who fed it.  

Over and out for now.  Bottom line, happy we are on a ship instead of camping in the jungle.  There are too many nasty snakes and large wierd insects here to make being in the bush something we'd want to do.