HOME | POLITICS | SPORTS | LIFE | SCI/TECH | OPEDS | HELPFUL TIPS
|
Jan. 12, 2005 Last Friday, January 6, 2006, I took a taxi with my 100 pounds of baggage to Armazem #10 on the docks in Belém, Brazil. The ship was scheduled to depart at 6 PM, but I arrived at the docks around noon. I could see at once that the ship would probably not be very luxurious, as the Armazem (Storehouse) was an antiquated structure of riveted steel and galvanized sheeting, and most of the passengers appeared to be below middle class. At 3 PM, we all embarked. Yes, the ship was very plain and bare, complete with a gangplank and ship's ladders. I had booked a shared suite, which also was minimal, but adequate. At 7 PM, we still had not sailed, so I just went to bed. At daybreak, we were on the Rio de Tagipuru, which is a north-south river that is part of the Amazon Delta, and on the starboard we had the Ilha de Marajó, an island about half the size of Maine. There was continuous impenetrable jungle on both sides of the Tagipuru. Now and then we saw a hut or a shack, in complete solitude on the bank of the river, apparently without electricity or running water. Sometimes we saw a hamlet of 5 or 6 such houses together. I expected my ship, the Cisne Branco (White Swan), to have two or three restaurants and maybe a couple of shops, as I´ve seen on some ships, but it turned out to be spartan. The meals were free, which I had not expected, and pretty tasty too. At one point, about 20 canoes approached the ship, manned mostly by children, including little girls apparently no more than ten years old. The passengers on the ship cast plastic bags of food onto the waves, and the children fetched them handily. Farther along, three or four times, a canoe would approach the ship, hook onto it and be tugged along for miles. Each of the canoes was manned by teenage boys vending local products, especially shrimp. These were much smaller than the shrimp one buys in the US, and were boiled whole, with head and eyes and tentacles, and without batter. The meat in each shrimp was no more than the size of a caterpillar. We usually hugged the shore, remaining within 100 meters of one bank or the other. I tried to identify trees, but 98% of them were unknown to me. I saw a few obvious species of fig and palm, along with mangroves and silk floss trees. On the Tagipuru, there were no plantations or ranches. On Sunday, we reached the Amazon mainstream, which varies from 1.6 to 35 miles wide, but mostly in the 3 to 4 mile range. The Amazon has a great number of massive tributaries, and the confluences are vast, sometimes 10 to 20 miles across, so that you can hardly see the opposite shore. Quite a few islands lie along the river, creating channels. Our ship often navigated in the channels, which were sometimes no more than 200 meters wide. On the mainstream, there were a few more human habitations than on the Tagipuru, and even a few villages, with scattered plantations and ranches. We saw true buffaloes--not the same thing as bison--as well as ordinary cattle and horses. The most important crops seemed to be sugar, papaya and aninga (Montrichardia linifera) grown for its fruit. Occasionally I saw rubber trees. Basically there are two kinds of rubber trees: Hevea brasiliensis, tall and slender; and Ficus elastica, dense and multiply trunked. I saw the former of course. Wheat and corn are also grown in places. Still jungle made up 75% to 90% of the landscape. Everyone on the ship spoke Portuguese only--no English, no Spanish. But, though I am far from being fluent, I managed to get along nicely with all the other passengers. In fact, I fell in with a party of three or four, a man from Portugal, and a man and two women from Brazil. On Sunday afternoon, we put in for half an hour at a small town called Prainha, and, later in the evening, at another, Monte Alegre. About midnight, we put in at Santarém, a city of 300,000 on the confluence of the Rio Tapajós and the Amazon, where we were told we'd be moored for 12 hours. At daybreak. my acquaintances and I left the ship, and hired a taxi to take us to Alter de Chão, a scenic village about 30 miles from Santarém, with an island of the same name nearby. In Alter de Chão, we hired a man with a motorboat to take us out to the island, which has a Lago de Jacaré (Alligator Lake), but we didn't see any alligators. Fishermen told us that the alligators hide during the day, coming out only at night. The fisherman had caught several tucunaré (peacock bass). On the way back, we saw several dolphins leaping in and out of the water. We also had the cabman take us to downtown Santarém, which is not as modern as Belém. Some of the streets are not paved, and stores tend to phase into stalls. About one in the afternoon, we sailed again. I kept looking for exotic animals on the bank, but didn't see much. The only birds I saw were gulls, herons and especially vultures. In Santarém vultures walked around nonchalantly on the streets, like so many pigeons. These vultures are the gray-headed vultures, unlike the American turkey vulture, which has a turkey-red head. We arrived in Manaus on Tuesay, January 11. I got a room quickly for 32 Reais ($14) a day, but I haven't been out to see the town yet. Almost the entirety of the Amazon lies within the two states of Pará and Amazonas, with their capitals at Belém and Manaus. These are enormous states. Amazonas is almost as large as Alaska, and Pará is almost twice the size of Texas. I haven't yet learned how I'll get out of Manaus, but I don't have time to sail back down the Amazon. My visa expires in less than three weeks. Among interesting Amazon facts are that it has 15,000 tributaries and subtributaries, and carries 25% of the riverine water on the whole planet, discharging as much as the next seven largest rivers combined. With an annual discharge of 1363 cubic miles, the Amazon could supply the entire human race, which uses 800 cubic miles a year for everything, including irrigation. 1.) The Amazon: 1363 cubic miles a year 2.) The Congo: 318 cubic miles a year 3.) The Yangzi: 265 cubic miles a year 4.) The Orinoco: 212 cubic miles a year 5.) The Ganges-Brahmaputra: 151 cubic miles a year 6.) The Yenisei: 148 cubic miles a year 7.) La Plata: 148 cubic miles a year 8.) The Mississippi: 133 cubic miles a year ------------ About the author Thomas Keyes: I have written two books: A SOJOURN IN ASIA (non-fiction) and A TALE OF UNG (fiction), neither published so far. I have studied languages for years and traveled extensively on five continents. Email: udikeyes@yahoo.com Comment on this article here! ------------ All articles are EXCLUSIVE to Useless-Knowledge.com and are not allowed to be posted on other websites. ARTICLE THIEVES WILL BE PROSECUTED! |
||||||
|
|
|||||||
|
