A sign-up sheet for the 4 a.m. wakeup call to see the Southern Cross was nearly full. A lecture on ecosystems overflowed the ship’s movie theater and had to move to the main lounge. The “Wildlife In and Around the River” lecture demanded a repeat.
We were a typical mix of winter cruise tourists, but no one among the passengers asked the traditional, “Why did you pick this one?” We were all there to see the rain forest before-as the ads read-“it’s too late.”
The name of the 14-day cruise is Caribazon (accent on the RIB) and includes St. Thomas, Guadeloupe, Barbados and I’le Royale (Devil’s Island). Despite three university professors giving “enrichment lectures,” we were neither a floating college nor a sea-borne safari. All the typical cruise fun and games were firmly in place.
But the main attraction was unquestionably the Amazon River, specifically the more than 1,400 brown miles of it from the Atlantic to Manaus, Brazil. The rest of its 4,000 miles lay beyond our modest incursion, as did 50,000 miles of navigable trunk rivers; more than 1,000 tributaries including 17 1,000 or more miles long. At times we could barely see the opposite shore and always the flow was dark and rapid, carrying by far the greatest volume of water of any river on Earth.
The World Renaissance, flagship of the Greek Epirotiki Lines, does four Caribazon runs every winter. We entered at the river’s 200-mile-wide mouth and proceeded up its broads and narrows, stopping at once-important cities, an isolated village and a jungle beach; every day a qualified learning experience.
We also provided the week’s entertainment for the natives who, young and old, canoed out to greet us. A man would finger his shirt to show what he wanted, and someone would toss a plastic bag of clothes. Kids paddled wildly after the oranges and apples we had scrounged from the breakfast buffet. Everyone waved and smiled.
The riverside people are not aborigines but mestizos descended from Portuguese, Africans and Indians; small, slender, with red-brown skin, black hair and almost Polynesian features. Their wooden houses stand on legs or float on barrels to accommodate the seasonal rise and fall of the waters. Blue doors or blue trim signify a Christian mission. The backdrop is a curtain of second-growth forest, and between or behind the houses are small groves of banana trees. At night we could see the spotty glimmer of cookfires and occasionally the dull glow of lumber mills.
Our river journey was bracketed by Belem and Manaus, cities made and broken by the 19th Century rubber boom, each home to more than a million people. Remnants of Portuguese belle-epoque grandeur show through the buckling tesselated sidewalks; grafitti-covered bandstands; cracked tile facades; the pink and gold opera houses that once presented Jenny Lind and Enrico Caruso.
Going ashore and forewarned of thievery, we left our watches and wallets on the ship and carried only the most insignificant of cameras. In Belem’s Ver-o-Paso, Brazil’s largest open-air market, I looked at the merchandise (an anthropologist had alerted us to bargains in magic charms) and my husband watched the crowd. When I said afterward, “See, no one bothered us,” he-who-had-stared-them-down just laughed.
The small city of Santarem (population: 190,000) midway between Manaus and Belem has a history of dashed hopes, though with a Yankee twist. It was founded after our Civil War by Confederate soldiers from South Carolina and Tennessee intent on establishing a U.S.-style plantation system only to see Brazil abolish slavery a few years later. In the 1930s, Henry Ford established Fordlandia in the jungle 40 miles south, planning to grow his own rubber and manufacture tires on the spot. His $10 million boondoggle was sold to Brazil for $500,000. Even the gold discovered here in 1981 has proved insignificant.
Today Santarem is an overgrown market town, its riverfront lined with grubby boats hauling freight and people, its modest outdoor markets selling fruits, veggies and cheap everyday goods. Hedges of hibiscus and racks of hammocks provide the only color.
The ship’s four-hour pause at Alter do Chao is primarily a concession to those who want to say they “went swimming in the river.” The white sand beach is on a spit of land between the Amazon and Tarojo Rivers, and getting there means wading ashore from the lifeboat-tenders. Dugout entrepreneurs appeared magically to offer trinkets made of seeds and shells along with the inevitable dried piranhas.
Epirotiki has informally adopted the tiny off-Amazon village of Boca do Valerio, since 1985 a regular stop on the cruise. World Renaissance Capt. Pantelis Papageorgiou discovered the place literally by accident when his ship was becalmed offshore with an engineering problem. He became friends with the village chief and soon was supplying everything from medical supplies to the chief’s heart’s desire: a wooden double bed.
Yet, prosperity-even the modest prosperity of a handful of boat days a year-has changed Boca do Valerio. This time typical tourist schlock brought in from Manaus outnumbered the homemade dolls; a teenager wanted $1 from those who photographed his tree sloth. Somehow we felt responsible that in our compassion we had aided and abetted the despoiling of innocence.
Nevertheless, we wandered at will, were invited into the chief’s house, and with village children padding after us, followed irridescent blue morpho butterflies half a mile up a trail into the jungle.
Night is a special time on the Amazon. The sky was often obscured by clouds, but sometimes it looked like an astrologer’s chart, a startling revelation of what we have lost at home to pollution. One evening just after dinner, the captain’s voice came over the system: “Ladies and gentlemen, if you will come up on deck, we are presenting `Moon over the Amazon.’ ” There it was, too, an enormous white disk turning the river to silver.
The ship kept its exterior lights on low most of the time, not so much out of deference to the moon but to keep from attracting bugs. Moths the size of birds and other insects with 14-inch wingspreads dove at us. In the morning the crew was out at dawn sweeping up the mess so the early-risers did not have to squish their way to the wake-up coffee served on deck.
It is a testimony to the ecological state of the Amazon basin that in our journey we never saw virgin forest though our pilot assured us we flew over some on our way back from Manaus to Miami. Nor did we see animals in the wild, give or take a few parrots and howler monkeys. The pink dolphins apparently are no longer curious about ships, for none were reported in our wake. We found jaguar, ocelot, puma and peccary only in the fastidiously kept zoo of the five-star Hotel Tropical in Manaus.
On the optional excursion into the national reserve as well as in Boca do Valerio, children brought us baby crocodiles, tree sloths, tapirs, monkeys, birds and pythons. We were cautioned to scowl at these to discourage them from taking such animals, which inevitably involves killing the mothers.
In Brazil, not everyone shares our enthusiasm for saving the trees. “Ecologist” is considered a code word for “Yankee Busybody,” and cattle ranchers say the Americans, in particular, having given up on saving their own environment are now trying to tell other people what to do. Gilberto Mestrinho, governor of Amazonia, came in on an anti-environmental ticket. “I wasn’t elected by the trees,” he said.
Beyond watching for green-flash sunsets and magical moonrise, we were absorbing statistics. Thirty percent of the tropical rain forest in the world is in Brazil. Sixty-seventy percent of the 14,000 varieties of animal life lives 200 feet above ground in the canopy. The biggest fight in the forest is for light. Minerals are in the bio-mass (trees), not in the soil.
In volume the Amazon would make 15 Mississippis and 25 Niles. It supplies the planet with one-fifth of its fresh water. One-third of the world’s oxygen is produced by vegetation in its basin. There are more than 18,000 species of plants plus 10,000 species of orchids; 15,000 species of insects; 2,000 species of fish; 3,500 birds (including 319 types of hummingbirds); 20-30 million plants and animals live in the rain forest. More than 3,000 varieties of trees have been counted in one square mile. Ecology is helped by the slash-and-burn agronomy of the Indians; hurt by the all-leveling cattle ranchers.
