Amazon voyage - part two

Christmas Eve and, well out to sea, Atlantic blue had become Amazon brown. The river's mouth is hundreds of kilometres wide and an outbound freighter was off to port. After all my time at sea, I am still fascinated by ships. Name and home port? What's it carrying? Where is it from and going to?

A few hours later, we began to see the Amazon's banks.

What to say about the Amazon that hasn’t already been said? What impressive statistics to state that you haven’t already heard? The Amazon is the world’s largest and most powerful river system. It drains an area bigger than the Continental U.S. From the Andes, it runs nearly 6,500 kilometres to the Atlantic. The river is so wide that, so far as I am aware, no bridge spans it.

Late at night, we crossed into the Southern Hemisphere.

0630 Christmas morning. A year ago, I was on a tall ship a day's sail from Tahiti. Today I am on the world's mightiest river.

And we have some visitors.

Everyone knows how I feel about Christmas, so, suffice it to say, the day passed in the low-key way I had hoped when plotting my escape six months previously.

The trip encouraged me to search my library for H.M. Tomlinson’s ‘The Sea and the Jungle’, his extraordinary account of a 1909 voyage from Wales to the Amazon. I also read Richard Collier’s ‘The River that God Forgot’ and extracts from Henry Walter Bates’ 1863 book, ‘The Naturalist on the River Amazons’ (sic). Bates was succinct: “The prospect of being swamped in this hideous solitude was by no means pleasant…”

Tomlinson describes it as feverish and pestilential, a ‘white man’s graveyard’, and preserve of natives with poison-tipped arrows. It still is. A voyage up the Amazon requires a yellow fever shot and anti-malarial drugs. And, not far from where I was leaning on the Explorer’s railing, perhaps an Indian was aiming his blowgun - with any luck, not at me.

Occasionally we sighted huts and small settlements. For someone from a major city, they seemed inexpressibly remote. Come to think of it, they are.

Women doing laundry in the river; children running to watch us pass; cows sheltering from the muggy tropical heat.

More than a sixteen hundred kilometres up the river we came to the 'meeting of the waters' where the black of the Rio Negro intersects with the brown of the Amazon. For some distance, there is a clear demarcation.

Around the bend is the fabled city of Manaus. Here's Manaus in 1900 – a thousand miles from the Atlantic and jungle just two miles from the city centre. Only the river to get in or out.

Electric streetcars and street lights. Twenty-three high class department stores for a city of 36,000. A customs house that was shipped - massive stone by stone - from Britain.

Stores with the latest fashions from London and Paris. Laundry sent to Europe for cleaning. More diamonds were said to be sold here than anywhere else in the world.

All built on the backs of what was virtually slave labour. Tomlinson writes of rubber – “the damnable commodity which is its [Manaus'] ruin”.

Below is a rubber tree; you can see the cuts, which are made periodically, and from which comes the latex.

In 1896, on the proceeds of rubber, an extraordinary opera house was completed in Manaus. The workers, designers, most of the materials came from the other side of the Atlantic. Wood for some of the flooring was shipped from Brazil, carved in Europe and sent back to Brazil.

Here, for a few, short years, were scenes of elegance to rival any in Europe and then the rubber boom collapsed. What had been the 5th richest city in the world became a tropical backwater and the opera house a warehouse.

The flash of a 'point and shoot’ camera does no justice to the opulent interiors, so here's a shot I've 'borrowed'.

No opera, but how often do I go to the opera in Toronto? Instead, we attended a wonderful performance combining classical strings with contemporary regional percussion. Seated on a red velvet chair in a box once the preserve of evening clothes and gowns, it was hard not to reflect on the irony of, even now, this being only a short distance from the jungle.

And here, on a sweatily humid morning, is the nearby rain forest.

And, with the sun out, here’s some more.

This may be botanical heresy, but, to me, one rain forest is much like another. Sorry, I'm not a flora & fauna person, but I’ll tell you one thing – the vegetation is so thick, you can’t see the rain forest for the trees. Tomlinson says “ … I was told that once a man had gone merely within the screen of leaves, and then no doubt had lost, for a few moments, his sense of direction for the camp, for he was never seen again.”

Architecture interests me more than trackless jungle and poisonous frogs. Evidence of the rubber era is easy to find in Manaus. This mansion was built by one of the rubber barons.

And there are superb old tiles, weather worn reminders of when isolated Manaus was a strange combination of South American 'Wild West' and tropical haute société.