The meeting of the waters is the place where the Rio Negro and the Rio Solimões meet to form the Amazon. The rivers are very different. The Rio Negro is mostly black with a pH of black coffee. The Solimões is like coffee with cream and full of silt. The two meet just past Manaus and the two waters run side by side, visibly different for a few miles.
It is de rigueur to visit the meeting of the waters if you go to Manaus and we did. IMO, it is one of those things that is worth seeing but not worth going to see. It looks like some muddy water mixing in with some less muddy water. The river trip was long, but interesting.
We went up the Solimões. The river is very much alive, lots of fish and plants. We stopped off at a riverside restaurant. The food was unremarkable. It probably was not alone worth the trip. But I did enjoy the lilies and river. I am very fond of these kinds of swamp landscapes. The trees were full of monkeys. You could hear the howler monkeys howling. It was an interesting experience.
Along the river are shacks made most of tin and scraps. The guide told us that government had recently furnished them with electricity and other amenities. I don’t think this is a good thing. It is nice to give people things to make them more comfortable, but perhaps eking a living from the river like this is not something to be encouraged. It is not environmentally friendly to live on these margins either.
Above is a floating gas station. Lots of things on the rivers. Below is another future problem. There are places where you should not build houses.
It is maybe wiser to avoid the forest floor, but the river is another story. I understand that there are also piranha, caiman and snakes in the water, but it seems peaceful and if you stay in the boat it is mostly safe. The rivers are the highways of the Amazon.
Alex and I took a canoe out for a while. We are not good at canoe paddling. Alex has become very strong, much stronger than I am so we are always drifting in the direction his paddle takes us. It was, however, peaceful and quiet.
The rivers are very wide and the forests are flooded this time of the year, so you really do not see a shoreline, just the tops of trees and bushes.
The jungle walk was familiar enough to make me long for the forests of home and different enough that I knew I was not at home anymore.
The forest here is wet, literally dripping with dew and humidity all the time. The ground vegetation is thick, although that may be because this was cut-over. I understand that in the true triple canopy forest, which I don’t think I have ever really seen, it is so dark on the forest floor that not much grows. The forest soil here is not fertile and it there is little organic material. It is all quickly recycled into growing plants. It is a different sort of forest from those I know. I feel connected with the forests back home. Here I am clearly alien. I recognize that this is a wonderful, complex and diverse ecosystem. Maybe that just overwhelms me.
Maybe it is because it is a dangerous place. There are snakes and bugs around that can poison you. If you get stuck in the jungle at night, never sleep on the group. That is why local Indians always use hammocks. If you lay down on the ground for the night, you are likely to still be lying there the next morning, just no longer alive.
We didn’t see any big animals or really animals at all. Many of the animals are nocturnal and all the animals are good at not being seen. Life is dangerous and short for the forest animals here. Beyond that, the soil is not very fertile, so there are not rich supplies of food. This poverty is especially acute on the Rio Negro, since (as mentioned) the river does not have many insects, which form the base of the food pyramid. The nearby Rio Solimões is coffee brown, full of silt and nutrients, and so full of bugs and fish. Tourists like it less because of the bugs and the mud, but it is a more living river.
Francisco, the guide, said that there were jaguars around but not very many. This is good, since jaguars are dangerous. They will attack and kill people and you don’t see them coming. He wears a jaguar tooth around his neck and he showed it around to emphasize his point. Jaguars are stealth hunters. They hide or sneak up and then jump on their prey from behind. They go for the jugular. When they get a hold, they just hold on until the animal, or human, passes out from loss of blood. They are beautiful creatures, but nasty. I recall seeing them at the jaguar sanctuary safely behind a fence. I am glad that we didn’t run into any w/o a fence.
That long brown thing in the picture is an ant nest. Maybe it would be more appropriate to call it an ant hive. The outside was crawling with ants. Francisco squashed a few and rubbed them on his hands. He told us that the native Indians would do that and rub it all over their bodies to mask their scent when hunting. The local Indians are also stealth hunters. They hide or sneak up on their prey and then dispatch them with an arrow or poison dart. Neither has much range in the woods, so they need to get close, close enough to smell the animal and be smelled. The ant juice makes hunting like this practical.
We didn’t see any Indians in the wild. They are not very numerous and those that still live traditionally are protected and contact with them limited. Meeting “wild” Indians is potentially hazardous to all involved. While I was there, I read an article about three people killed by semi-wild Indians. Evidently one of them worked for the electric company and made himself unpopular by trying to collect bills. He was marked for death, but he caught a ride with a couple other people, thereby dooming them too. Those are situations I cannot predict so prefer to avoid.
BTW – walking is not the way you usually get around in the jungle. It is difficult to walk most places. With all the water, boat is the best way to go. Alex and I paddled a little. I will show pictures in the next post.
Although they make a big deal about presenting the operation as a scientific endeavor, the monkeys are not really wild and they essentially perform for tourists. When they put out the fruit, the monkeys come. It is interesting to see them all swing on over. They look pretty buff. New World moneys have prehensile tails, i.e. they can grab onto branches with their tails. Old World monkeys cannot. The red faced monkey above is called locally an “English” monkey, with reference to the red skin which the locals think resembles a fair-skinned Englishman with a sunburn.
The monkeys are not dangerous, but we were told that they might try to grab jewels or cameras. They did not. They paid no attention to us at all. You can see Espen with the monkeys in the picture below. Espen is the one wearing the shirt.
The boys and I spent the last week in the Amazon forest. It was a good time & probably the last time any of us will be in this place. We stayed at the EcoPark, about an hour and a half outside Manaus on a branch of the Rio Negro (Black River).
The Rio Negro is black, as it name implies and it is a better place to be than many places in the Amazon basin, since there are fewer bugs. The Rio Negro flows through some swamps, where the water drops its silt and acquires an acid character. It is a mild acid, about as strong as black coffee, which it kind of resembles. This is enough to make life more difficult for insects. I was surprised at how few mosquitoes were around. I guess that is why.
A bus from Manaus takes you to a dock on the Rio Negro and the EcoPark picks you up in a small boat. There is a drier and a wetter season in this part of the Amazon basin and the river is high this time of year. This means that forests are flooded, sometimes several meters deep. This is a regular event and a good time for fish, since they can go into the erstwhile forests to find food and try to avoid becoming food for others by hiding in the trees.
The rivers are variable. They get very wide and then narrow out depending on the rain. The flood is part of the life of the river. The Mississippi used to be like this before we built all the levies and channels, although the Amazon is even bigger. On the downside, for us at least, the wet season allows the fish and animals to spread out where we can’t see them as easily. We went fishing for piranha. The boys and I didn’t get any. The guides told us that they were out there but more in the flooded forest. Evidently they are not as numerous or aggressive as they seem to be in movies.
