Not the store Amazon.com online, but the real Amazon basin, Amazon River, Amazon jungles, Amazon tribes, Amazon cities?
Could you please tell me what it is like? Were you afraid? Sounds, sights, smells, animals, people, natives, languages, weather, bugs, snakes, birds, food, clothes.
Were you happy? Were you satisfied? Were the people friendly? Was the trip worth it? Were you glad when the sun came up in the morning?
Did you enjoy the sunsets?
Did you experience fear at night?
Did you see the area in question from the air?
Did you see slash and burn any where?
Did you get asked for your passport?
Do they keep passports till you leave?
What kind of money do they accept?
I have. No, I was never afraid, but I have an irrational lack of fear in general.
My passport was never kept, I wouldn’t have agreed to that.
It was an enjoyable trip, but definitely would not be for someone dependent upon creature comforts of modern 21st century life.
Here are a few tips:
Bring your own bug spray, the kind easily available does not work at all. The kind you bring will barely work. You WILL be bitten by a lot of mosquitos.
Bring light-colored lightweight shirts and pants, also to keep from getting bitten so much.
Get any needed vaccinations as much before your trip as possible. A friend with me got his all at once shortly before the trip and ended up in the hospital.
Bring some powerbars or similar, because sometimes the food situation gets a bit iffy.
Pick up a mosquito net to hang over your hammock before you go to the jungle. These will probably be provided for you if you are in a tour. They will probably have holes.
Bring a bit of laundry detergent, in case you want to wash stuff. It’s damp, and some of your clothes will get wet.
Bring antibiotics, for the stomach problems you will probably get.
It is a beautiful adventure and well worth doing.
I’ve taken a locals riverboat cruise up the Amazon starting in Manaus, going to some town about 4 days journey upstream where I wasn’t able to stay at some famous wildlife preserve. It was an interesting trip. The boat was some kind of tramp steamer straight out of a Werner Herzog movie. There were several very uncomfortable rooms at the front of the boat but most people slept on hammocks on the open middle deck. I got there several hours early and staked out a place for my hammock. When I got back, the deck was packed with hammocks and someone was laying in mine. No one spoke any English and I have a hell of a time parsing Portuguese, especially the flavor they speak in Brazil.
The Amazon itself got real dull in a hurry. There really wasn’t much change in the jungle on the side of the river and generally it was super flat. There was some dude prosthelytizing in front of the food dispensary asking for money so I couldn’t figure out if the food was free or not. Eventually I figured out that the food came with the passage, so I didn’t starve or anything.
I was sort of expecting some sort of Disneyland jungle cruise with exotic animals roaming about and crazy birds but there was none of that. I did see several Amazon dolphins, both gray and pink ones. The pink ones were a real treat and super strange looking.
It was hot and humid as fuck and I spent most of my time at the bow of the boat trying to catch the tiny amount of breeze. The boat was used for regional transport and we would stop at tiny villages and load and unload the various sundry items of day to day life, including a large motorcycle and what looked like 100kg rolls of steel wire. These were all hand loaded by laborers standing on tiny planks. It was amazing to see them wrestle that motorcycle onto the boat without even a decent gangway setup.
I ended up flying from the town with the nature reserve up to Leticia in the Tres Fronteras where Colombia, Brazil and Peru come together. It was a funky jungle town that while pretty ragtag was charming in a third world off the beaten track kind of way. I stayed at a jungle camp for several days in Peru where I fished for piranha (world’s easiest fish to catch and pretty good eating) and went for rain forest hikes but only saw a bunch of monkeys and not nearly enough birds.
Next, I took a high speed boat to Iquitos which was a super great town, ostensibly the largest city in the world with no roads from the outside. Everything has to hauled by river boat or airplane, so there aren’t a whole lot of cars. It was a great time with classic colonial architecture and an iron building designed by Eiffel. The nightlife was a blast.
The only place that seemed sketchy was Manaus as it’s a huge city with lots of poor people. There are definitely parts of town that I was uncomfortable walking around at night, but no more that a big city in the USA. There was a native village tourist trap kind of thing up near Iquitos where you see topless native showing traditional lifestyles who probably go home to their apartments at night. I got to blow a blowgun there although I don’t think there was any frog poison involved.
Well, if you are thinking about going to Manaus for the World Cup, it’s actually a kind of interesting city. It’s big, with a metropolitan population of over 2 million. It was a major rubber producing region and there are some really nice mansions built by the rubber barons. They have a gorgeous opera house, which was one of those things that showed that you had “arrived”. I seem to remember that they were so rich, they sent their laundry back to Portugal to be cleaned.
Henry Ford opened a huge rubber plantation and forced all his employess to live in a company town with American style houses which did not fair well in the tropical heat and humidity. He also forced the natives to eat American style food which they did not dig. Cause shit, Brazilian food is fucking delicious. They have this deal where you buy your meal by the kilogram, and there are usually at least 3 types of fish.
What really drew me to Manaus is that I had read about the Meeting of the Waters, where the black waters of the Negro River meet the brown waters of the Solimoes River, flowing side by side without mixing for 9km. Ever since I saw this in National Geographic, I always wanted to see it. Very cool!
I would echo what ahs been said-I was in Manaus a few years ago, and took a river tour. It was nice, because the Amazon was in flood, and you could take a small boat and cruise around in the jungle. As for the city, it is mostly a big slum-the only interesting part is the old opera house and the port/market area (you can buy fresh caught pirana fish for lunch).
Be very careful about guided tours-ONLY book one from an established tour office-the touts you see on the streets are mostly frauds.
As for wildlife -visit the zoo. the Amazon lowland wildlife is mostly nocturnal-you will not see much in daytime. If you want wildlife, the (coastal) Mata Atlantica (Atlantic forest) is a better bet.
In general, it is a poor area, inhabited by very poor people…the Amazon is no frontier of riches-the people who go there mostly lose what little they had.
I spent two weeks in the Amazon (Peru) several years ago on a work trip. I spent most of the first week in a clinic in Iquitos with an IV in my arm after I got sick from food/water and was put on a boat and sent back to Iquitos. That was an interesting experience since I don’t speak Spanish.
The heat and humidity is awful (and I’m from Alabama.) The Mosquitos are everywhere and really annoying.
On one hand I’m glad I went on the trip and got to see and do some of the things there but on the other hand it was probably the most physically uncomfortable I’ve ever been. If given a chance to go back I’m pretty sure I wouldn’t take it.
If you aren’t used to heat and humidity that will probably be the worst part of the trip…and the Mosquitos.
A few years ago, I considered visiting the Amazon; then I read this:
—excerpt:
In Trouble Again: A Journey Between the Orinoco and the Amazon
by Redmond O’Hanlon
[After adventures in Borneo, the author decides to explore the Amazon]
…There are no leeches that go for you in the Amazon jungles, an absence which would represent, I felt, a great improvement on life in Borneo. But then there *are *much the same amoebic and bacillary dysenteries, yellow and blackwater and dengue fevers, malaria, cholera, typhoid, rabies, hepatitis, and tuberculosis–plus one or two very special extras.
There is Chagas’ disease, for instance, produced by a protozoon, Tripanozoma crusii, and carried by various species of Assassin bugs which bite you on the face or neck and then, gorged, defecate next to the puncture. When you scratch the resulting itch you rub the droppings and their cargo of protozoa into your bloodstream; between one and twenty years later you begin to die from incurable damage to the heart and brain. Then there is onchocerciasis, river-blindness, transmitted by blackfly and caused by worms which migrate to the eyeball; leishmaniasis, which is a bit like leprosy and is produced by a parasite carried by sandflies (it infects eighty percent of Brazilian troops on exercise in the jungle in the rainy season); unless treated quickly, it eats away the warm extremities. And then there is the odd exotic, like the fever which erupted in the state of Para in the 1960s, killing seventy-one people, including the research unit sent in to identify it.
The big animals are supposed to be much friendlier than you might imagine. The jaguar kills you with a bite to the head, but only in exceptional circumstances. Two vipers, the fer-de-lance (up to seven and a half feet long) and the bushmaster (up to twelve feet, the largest in the world), only kill you if you step on them. The anaconda is known to tighten its grip only when you breathe out; the electric eel can only deliver its 640 volts before its breakfast; the piranha only rips to you bits if you are already bleeding, and the Giant catfish merely has a penchant for taking your feet off at the ankle as you do the crawl.
The smaller animals are, on the whole, much more annoying–the mosquitoes, blackfly, tapir-fly, chiggers, ticks, scabies-producing Tunga penetrans and Dermatobia hominis, the human botfly, whose larvae bore into the skin, eat modest amounts of you for forty days, and emerge as inch-long maggots.
But it was the candiru, the toothpick-fish, a tiny catfish adapted for a parasitic life in the gills and cloaca of bigger fish, which swam most persistently into my dreams on troubled nights.
In Borneo, when staying in the loghouses, I learned that going down to the river in the early morning is the polite thing to do–you know you are swimming in the socially correct patch of muddy river when fish nuzzle your pants, wanting you to take them down and produce their breakfast. In the Amazons, on the other hand, should you have too much to drink, say, and inadvertently urinate as you swim, any homeless candiru, attracted by the smell, will take you for a big fish and swim excitedly up your stream of uric acid, enter your urethra like a worm into its burrow and, raising its gill-covers, stick out a set of retrorse spines. Nothing can be done. The pain, apparently, is spectacular. You must get to a hospital before your bladder bursts; you must ask a surgeon to cut off your penis.
In consultation with my friend at the Radcliffe Hospital in Oxford, Donald Hopkins, the inventor of the haemorrhoid gun, I designed an anti-candiru device: we took a cricket-box, cut out the front panel, and replaced it with a tea-strainer.
Released so brilliantly from this particular fear, I began, in earnest, to panic…
Very true…if you stay around Manaus, mosquitos are not a problem (they cannot breed in the acidic Rio Negro waters), as the tannins leached from the forest prevents that. But the humidity is exhausting, and sleeping without air conditioning is impossible. We did a few short hikes in the jungle-outside of a few monkeys and enormous spiders, there was not much to see. Tropical diseases are endemic in the Amazon basin, use lots of Deet/Off, and do not go out at night without anti mosquito nets. The local Indians are not very healthy-they live about 45 years, max. It is no “Garden of Eden”.
Read “The Lost City of Z”. It’s an incredible true story about the authors attempt to find a legendary lost city while also giving the history of some explorers that attempted the same many years ago. It’s a great read.
This is exactly what I am looking for … I’ll order it, but I was more concerned with todays dangers than the ones in 1925, but I will read it. Thanks again for your insight.
