Of all the sounds in the Amazon’s night chorus, the enthusiastic and masculine “wow” uttered by a boat-billed heron as it digested frogs, or marveled at the night’s selection, was a favorite.
Less welcome but more common was the tentative treble “zzzz” of a hundred or so mosquitoes deciding to savor our company.
And right in the middle was the “waaaa” distress call of a young speckled caiman that had momentarily been lifted into our boat for photographs and a few carefully placed human touches.
As a camping trip in the rain forest drew to a close on a saunalike but starlit night, a mass of crickets trilled like distant sleighbells, frogs clicked like geiger counters over something “hot” and a common potou bird whose sad song our guide described best as “poor me, all alone” serenaded the night.
Guide Andrew Whittaker, a Manaus-based ornithologist, had taken our group of seven for a nine-night camping trip along the tea-colored Rio Negro, the largest tributary to the Amazon, the largest river in the world. (By itself, the Rio Negro is the second largest river in the world.) From there we motored to smaller and unpopulated tributaries to search for wildlife and enjoy the beauty of the forest.
Accompanying us were a cook, a boatman and, for the most remote leg of the journey, a Tucano Indian guide. We all rode on a low-slung and decidedly unfancy wooden boat with some of our gear stashed on the wooden sunvisor-shelf overhead.
This was an economy tour.
It was not the one for travelers who want air-conditioned cabins and padded seats or for those who would mind hopping overboard and pushing the boat off a shallow spot. It also wasn’t for travelers who would have minded getting wet when the wind blew whitecapped waves from the river that was an oceanlike 330 feet deep in places.
We pitched our own tents. We smashed our own mosquitoes and bathed in all but the last river, watching as small fish leapt above the surface nearby because predatory fish, perhaps a school of piranha, were snacking below. And although the heat, humidity and buggy state of affairs were seldom far from our thoughts, we had a very good time.
I had seen a story on a budget Amazon boat trip offered by Cambridge, Mass.-based Ecotour Expeditions Inc., in Vogue magazine. I called for a brochure and learned of the camping trip. I was sold on the intimate look of the rain forest the camping trip promised.
I like getting away. Really away.
A friend and I flew into Miami and then to Manaus, a duty-free port in Brazil surrounded by rain forest and accessible primarily by boat and air.
We spent the first day in Manaus and departed the next morning from the rustic Rio Negro port after getting down a plankboard “ladder,” a board with three-inch wide “steps” nailed across it.
We dropped into a smallish wooden boat with an outboard motor and pulled out across the river. We spent an average of five to seven hours on the boat on all but two days during this simple voyage into unpopulated areas.
We had all the attendant concerns city people have when they’re way out of their element: What if we see a jaguar? What do you mean they don’t attack humans? Our guide doesn’t have a gun?
The trip pulled us from our stresses and concerns and deposited us in places where we found it better to concentrate on what we were seeing, touching, hearing and certainly where we were sitting and standing.
Fire ants sent one traveler into the river after she found she was standing too close to their nest. Better their 10-minute sting than the 24-hour bullet ants we were shown, whose bites cause pain that lasts as long as the name implies.
Whittaker showed us a wolf spider, a sturdy arachnid that measured six inches from toe to toe, and after showing us its fangs suggested we avoid getting bitten by it. No problem.
The caution we exercised co-existing with the rain forest fauna kept us all in the moment. And moments are what vacations are about.
Just out of Manaus we passed many settlement areas where people live on what the land and river provide.
At dusk, we erected our tents near some small abandoned huts purportedly built as a far-flung getaway site that was so remote it never got any guests. With flashlights, we searched for tarantulas but found none. But we saw lots of bats as they flew herky-jerky overhead.
Whittaker took us on a short night hike and identified the critter calls we were hearing. Then he asked us to turn off our flashlights.
There we were. Nowhere. Surrounded by so many sounds and unable to see anything except the darkness and the silhouettes of the tallest trees. Amorous fireflies occasionally broke through the darkness with their taillights.
After that experience, we saw fewer settlements and fewer people. We didn’t monitor how much cash we carried or how our budgets were holding up. Except for one tourist center near the Lago Janeiro National Park, there was nothing to buy.
When we returned to camp, a pair of dung beetles noisily buzzed into our midst like a modern-day Romeo and Juliet, apparently hopeful that someone would leave them a “bed” of the stuff for which they are named.
Nothing is wasted in the rain forest. There is something that has evolved to eat all natural byproducts, and the bugs we encountered showed a willingness to try new things. Mosquitoes bit us through a cloud of Deet. And a camper who left his underwear out overnight learned leaf-cutter ants, who cut and carry pieces of leaves several times their size to feed a nest fungus they eat, also were crazy for cotton.
Though it was very humid, sleep was a whisper away. But in the night, animals walked by our campsites that were big enough to break sticks.
“What was that?” I would ask.
“What?” my groggy friend asked.
“What made that noise?”
“What noise?”
“You didn’t hear that?” I asked shining my flashlight into the darkness. “I heard something over there.”
So it went virtually every night.
I was glad to have a hunting knife nearby when I went to sleep.
I used to cover murder trials and read horror novels. My imagination aided by a noise in the night finds it totally plausible that a fierce Orinoco crocodile, lost during its search for a waterhole, or a jaguar, old and unable to hunt, would crash through our tent.
Our tents were an open buffet to predators, or so I thought late at night.
The next morning, after packing up all our gear, we got back on the boat for a long river trip into the Igapo ecosystem, a black-water flooded forest where trees live with their trunks and leaves underwater for many months of the year.
Sometimes treetops appeared to be bushes until you realized you were gliding over water 30 to 50 feet deep. The water was so still in many places it reflected the images of the life above water, giving the banks the appearance of having trees that were growing up and down.
Wasp nests and bird nests hung from branches and vultures circled overhead. Sometimes festive parrots, whose raucous calls reminded me of giddy people who have had a few too many to drink, broke the quiet.
Huge philodendrons grew in rings around the upper reaches of tree trunks, and vines hung like tailor threads on unfinished jackets.
We saw pink and gray river dolphins playing in the river and many other animals, but the Amazon of movie fame, replete with huge snakes and roaring big cats all over the place, was to remain hidden.
We saw a 10- to 12-foot yellow anaconda floating in water, but it had been killed by someone. We saw two jaguar pelts, but no jaguars.
“They’re all shy, they’re extremely well-camouflaged and they are all on the lookout for predators,” Whittaker said of the absence of animals.
Skilled at bird calls and some animal calls, Whittaker enticed birds to fly overhead to search for what they thought was company or competition in their territory, and a male capuchin monkey crossed several treetops to get a good look at us.
While hiking, we saw many birds and plants and learned how the spartan and complex ecosystem worked. We also learned how trees had adapted a means of letting bark and branches fall to rid themselves of vines, which can damage or kill them. And how strangler figs–deposited as seeds on tree limbs by birds–grow, grafting themselves into the trunk and killing the tree that had been their host. Or how a plant and the Aztec ant worked out a cooperative agreement where the ants feed on a sweet substance and protect the plant from other bugs.
At night, we went on boat rides looking for wildlife along the riverbanks. Propelled by Osvaldo, our Tucano guide, who used a pole to guide our boat silently downriver, Whittaker aimed his flashlight along the banks and in the trees, looking for the reflective light the beam would leave on a creature’s eyes.
He spotted dwarf caiman by the orange glow their eyes reflected by the river’s side, a boa constrictor’s white eyeshine in a tree, tree frogs and night birds.
The night rides, even without views of jaguars or piglike tapirs, were high points. The fresh air, our silence and the natural sounds of the forest from caiman darting into the water to the insect and frog chorus were a far cry from car alarms and the rumble of passing “L” trains that make up city noise.
Another high point was a remote campsite near a small waterfall where the water was cool to the touch. For lunch one day, we ate a fish someone had caught that had a mouthful of molarlike teeth. When not hiking, we relaxed in the water, the only place to avoid biting flies, and dug between the boulders for sand-polished amethysts and quartz.
Considering we were in the rain forest, we were rained upon only three times during our 13-day trip. One day, a cool driving rain soaked some of us who didn’t cover up as we rode in the boat. And two nights we slept as thunderstorms released several hours of rain.
Though the company is called Ecotour, which has also become a buzz word for ecology-based tours, it does not provide preachy tours about deforestation.
We were able to see the affects firsthand and draw our own conclusions, as we walked or motored past settlements where small patches of forest had been slashed and burned to make way for fruit trees. The clay earth is not good for crops, essentially losing its nutrients after three years’ use. We often saw settlements that had eroded more and more of the rain forest to grow crops as more and more land became infertile.
We also saw the majesty of the forest, unhindered by humans.
DETAILS ON AMAZON ECOTOURS
Getting there: We flew United ($324 roundtrip) to Miami and Lloyd Aereo Boliviano from Miami to Manaus, Brazil ($800). Varig Airlines, the national carrier of Brazil, also goes to Manaus from Miami. Fares vary between $800 and $1,000, depending on date of travel.
The itinerary: Ecotour Expeditions Inc., of Cambridge, Mass., (800-688-1822) offers the camping trips two or three times a year, generally in July and August, the end of the Brazilian winter when river water levels are high enough to permit passage. It offers trips on larger, more comfortable boats from which groups take day hikes into the forest between the end of April and late December. The camping trip costs $1,400 plus airfare. It includes a hotel in Manaus for arriving guests and all meals on the camping trip. The other trips vary between $1,500 and $1,750 for 8- to 12-day trips.
What to take: The insect repellent Deet is not good for you, but we used very strong Deet (70 percent to 100 percent) nonetheless. We still were bitten, but it was worse for those who didn’t use Deet. (Oddly, I bought a T-shirt as a joke that had beetles emblazoned on its front, back and sleeves. I never got bitten on my upper body.)
I carried the Freshette device that allows women to stand and urinate. Available at travel stores for about $18, it’s worth it.
A micro-cassette tape recorder would have been nice. You will hear animal sounds and birds that will amaze you. One cicada sounded amazingly like a futuristic air-raid drill.
Binoculars are necessary to see the animals, because most are high in the treetops or at a distance. Aqua-socks, or shoes you can wear in the water, came in handy during baths and leisure swims. A good flashlight and extra batteries, sunblock and a hat for sun protection also are needed.
Other options: Jungle tours can be arranged at travel agencies in Manaus. Single-day trips along the river varied in cost from $55 and $80 per person, and the lower rate offered at one agency rose to $310 for a two-day, one-night Amazon Explorers trip. Custom trips also can be arranged.
