From Delta Airline's in-flight magazine, SKY, August 1999
Week 1, Day 1: "After a four hour run up the Amazon in a rapido, we'll proceed up the Yarapa River, just north of the juncture of the Ucayali and Marañón rivers, birthplace of the Amazon itself. We'll stay in a lodge there, and, after supper, there are three options: the bar, the forest or the bed (or some combination thereof)."
Week 1, Day 2: "The next morning, we'll load the essential gear and head out in a motorized canoe, pulling a dugout behind us, taking one of my hunters. We'll head upstream, stopping wherever to fish, swim or hike into the forest. We'll camp somewhere, and as the sun sets, there'll be a chorus of giant gladiator frogs and pauraques calling. I invariably hit the woods at night with a flashlight to look for whatever varmint is to slow to escape."
This was a trip that my longtime canoeing buddy, Bob Bird, and I had been planning for years one week of camping and another week on a riverboat. In all of our discussions, though, there was one recurrent theme: How would we find the right guide? Someone who could show us the real deal, an unfiltered look at the greatest show on Earth?
Bill Lamar certainly has the credentials: He's been running tours up and down the Amazon since the early '90s, is an adjunct professor of biology at the University of Texas at Tyler, starred in the Discovery Channel's recent documentary on anacondas and handled all the logistics for National Geographic magazine's piece on tarantulas. What's more, he engenders the sort of respect and trust you look for in a guide--combining impish impudence with swashbuckling certainty. Still, you'd never accuse Lamar of trying to put on airs; though he's trim, bearded and bespectacled, you'll likely find him wearing red bathing trunks, a faded T-shirt and a ragged pair of high-top, canvas sneakers.
From the start, Lamar warns us that we'll be spending the next two weeks on more of an un-trip than a trip: "The region is so vast," he says, "all you can do in two weeks is sort of flit around like a hummingbird. And the whole concept of time in the tropics is not clock-driven.
"It's useless to hurry. The river sets the pace and dominates things. And it makes for a happy, more innocent place-easygoing and festive."
Guiding trips on the Amazon requires a radically different mind-set from, say, guiding climbers up Mount Everest. "In the mountains," Lamar explains, "one wrests control over nature through cunning and technology. In the rain forest, the only way to garner a measure of control is by first jettisoning any attempt one might make in order to gain or maintain control. The Amazon foils all plans and takes everything."
Sometimes, driving rain makes forward motion counterproductive. River levels vary radically, particularly on tributaries: Paths that we followed on foot the first week were canoe trails the second week. Trees fall, banks cave in, sandbars shift, whole villages relocate. Native guides and cooks operate on a less-than-Western timetable in which minutes stretch into hours and hours stretch into days. Equipment fails, with spare parts a hemisphere away. And up and down the Amazon basin, stealing gasoline is considered more a game than a crime.
Lamar's solution? Go with the flow.
If as an 8-year-old you liked the heart-spiking thrill of the haunted house on Halloween, you'll love walking in the rain forest at night. A rain forest is never a particularly quiet place, surrounded as you are by birds: the liquid warbling of oropendolas, the distinctive sharp wolf whistle of the screaming pihas, the constant fussing of parakeets.
But as the sun goes down, the sound track takes on that sinister timbre associated with people about to be eaten alive in jungle films.
The night belongs to the amphibians, a most primitive and frantic bunch. A few mournful big boys-mostly milk frogs, the baritones of the amphibian world-provide a deep doo-wop chorus to the tree frogs' hysterical cacophony. Add heat and humidity to this syrup of sound and the night is almost palpably thick.
But why go at night? "Going into the forest in the daytime is like going to the mall," Lamar says. "There's more visual stimulation than you can process, and you see a lot of things poorly. If you go out at night with a flashlight, it's like a slide show, and you see a few things well."
Like a carnivorous katydid that Lamar spotlights-nearly as big as a small office stapler and as colorful as a piece of Halloween candy. "Watch it," Lamar says. "They have major chompers and can take a big plug out of you." Or the occasional long line of quivering green leaves that crosses our path, a leaf-cutter ant under each piece of foliage heading for a nest that would dwarf a pitcher's mound. Or the spider (Micrathena) so spiny birds won't eat it. Or the wrist-sized green briar underfoot. "Tread lightly," Lamar advises as he shines his light on it. "The last time I stepped on one of those, I had to cut my tennis shoe off to get the spike out of my foot."
Since any trails used by locals are heavily hunted, Lamar uses native guides to blaze fresh trails. My favorite is Rene Perez, a.k.a. Cosho. With a devilish grin equal to any Roman comic mask, Cosho is a satyr trapped in a man's body. One part courage and two parts lunacy, Cosho whips anacondas out of the water, rousts vampire bats from hollow trees and bullies tarantulas right out of their burrows onto his hand.
As we walk along in single file, bats rip down the trail, fanning our hair as they feed on the insects buzzing around us. Suddenly, the march stops at the trunk of a cecropia tree. Lamar's advice: "Don't bump into it. The tree and the ants have a symbiotic relationship, and if disturbed, they ruthlessly shower down on man or beast. Their sting is like white molten lead."
Supper, compliments of Cosho, is the most Southernly fried chicken I've ever sampled, with plantains, rice and a blistering salsa made from tiny, freshly picked yellow peppers. We bed down on foam mattresses covered with mosquito nets, a large blue tarp over all of us. I've never slept more soundly.
Week 1, Day 3: "Well shove off after breakfast (rain or shine. . . I love the river when it rain the air is heavy and pungent). Another full day upstream-checking it out. This type of trip is basically a picaresque novel, with you, the protagonists; experiencing a world of novelties."
We stop the boat for an icy swim. "About those catfish," my friend Bob asks, knee-deep in the creek and anxious. For weeks before I left, friends had expressed the utmost and sincerest concern about my well-being. I was warned about piranhas, cholera, killer bees, scorpions, spiders, boa constrictors, headhunters, pickpockets and, again and again, the dreaded urethra-threading catfish, candiru. Trichomycterid catfish, Lamar explains, already up to his chest in the water, are parasites that attach themselves to the gill rakers of large fish so as to feast on their blood. Since they're accustomed to homing in on streams of warm water, they might be attracted to, say, someone urinating in a river. "But I've never encountered anyone who has been afflicted," Lamar says as Bob and I slip into the water. "Besides, greedy tetras and other hazards preclude skinny-dipping anyway."
After our swim, we walk up the bluff to visit with the Manihuaris, a family whose open-air but overlooks the landing. Perched on pilings four feet off the ground and capped with a thatched roof, their home resembles the ultimate treehouse. While Grandma rocks the baby in a hammock, chickens and ducks forage below. As the sky darkens and rain threatens, we're invited to spend the night. On the frontier, that sort of hospitality is a given.
A rainstorm in the tropics is a symphony. The prelude comes from the shrill piccolo panic of the birds as the wind whips leaves from the trees. The theme is introduced by the brittle percussive snap of raindrops on the thatched roof (if you're lucky enough to be under one). Soon the woods join in with a variation as millions of raindrops pound upon thousands of leaves. The crescendo has all the sound and fury of a forest fire and is every bit as frightening. But, roofers, take note: Not a single drop finds its way through the Manihuaris' roof.
Week 2, Day 1: "After I pickup my clients at the airport, we'll transfer to the MS Explorer, our boat for the week. We'll get situated, open the bar, and shove off beneath a blanket of stars, heading upstream since most boats go in the opposite direction. We'll travel all night and most of the next day, until people on board take on the smiling countenance that only 98 percent oxygen (or a good dose of Prozac) can induce."
Bob and I spend our second week with a dozen people who have obviously scraped, saved and sacrificed to realize their common dream: cruising the Amazon River. The diverse lot includes Ed Moll, a university prof and turtle expert; Laurie Averill-Murray, an ornithologist who works for the state of Arizona; Laurie's husband, Roy, a state herpetologist; and Lance McAllister, a credit-union examiner and a zealous amateur herpetologist. Also along: a fireman, a sewage-treatment engineer, a 911 operator, a teacher and a surgical nurse.
As we head upstream after breakfast, Lamar gathers us on the rear observation deck and holds our one and only meeting. "This is a real democratic trip," he tells us. "Who the hell am I to tell you how to enjoy the Amazon? If you want, you can sit out here, drink rum and watch the sunrises and sunsets and have a perfectly delightful time. I focus on spontaneity. If you remember your phone number the second day we're here, I don't count it as a successful trip. We're trying to generate some flat lines on your EKG.
"But the Amazon does not give up its secrets easily," Lamar continues. "If something's worth seeing, you'll have to sweat a little to see it."
Week 2, Day 3: "Dawn finds us up the Tigre. There's a trail through "high " forest (never inundated) across the river by tie cemetery-a great place to experience beautiful forest. Were likely to see some rare birds, also lots of monkeys, toucans, macaws and Amazon parrots."
We ground our boat in a barely visible break in the vegetation, and soon we're surrounded by the fallen remains of the lean-tos and huts of a fish camp. Rising steeply behind us is a hill, a tangled green biomass that beetles ominously over us and begs to engulf us, as it soon does once we set off on an arduous hike up a game trail. Walking into a rain forest is like entering a cathedral, so high is the canopy. Look up at the 30 shades of green and you can easily get vertigo.
Whenever Cosho slows down to chop vines and branches out of the way, iridescent-blue morpho butterflies light on his back, preferring to feed on his sweat-soaked T-shirt rather than our Scotchguarded, ripstop nylon safari shirts.
More experienced trekkers by now, we easily step over the brigade of army ants crossing our path, detour around the basketball-sized wasp nest and shun all the other hazards that after a few days become as easy to avoid as cowpies in a pasture. At last I'm beginning to look and not just look out. What I see and hear and smell is both familiar and unfamiliar: plants I've seen only in hotel lobbies; coffee trees, vanilla orchids, rubber trees, breadfruit trees and pineapples planted so thickly underfoot that the sword-like leaves prick your ankles; toucans, more bill than bird, just like the one on the Froot Loops cereal box; and a classic "Polly-wantsa-cracker" parrot.
The birds are, perhaps, the most arresting distraction in the rain forest: the primitive hoatzin, believed to be a relative of the cuckoo, whose hatchlings have claws on their wings so they can climb back into their nest; umbrellabirds; squirrel cuckoos; speckled chachalacas (pronounced "CHAka-LA-kas" ), also called motmots; yellow-rumped caciques; russet-backed oropendolas, who, along with caciques, make their homes near wasp nests as a defense against predators; and slews of macaws, parrots, toucans and parakeets, almost everywhere you look.
After a sweaty and torturous uphill and downhill and cross-creek twisty trek of two hours' duration, we come to a clearing paved with matchbook-sized wood chips, which, when trod upon, are more aromatic than sassafras root. Nearby is the stump of an enormous tree. Forty feet away are its upper branches. What, someone wonders aloud, happened to the trunk?
It's now a canoe, Lamar explains. Our shirts are perspiration-soaked just from carrying ourselves to the site, and someone asks the obvious question: How on Earth did they get it to the water? On their shoulders, Lamar says. As Mick Jagger once proclaimed in a different context, time was very much on their side.
Week 2, Day 4: "We'll continue to float downstream, stopping at the village of Monte Verde, a great place to meet the locals and do some swapping. Evening we'll hit a trail along a creek, a good spot to look for critters and huge tarantulas."
At Monte Verde, Ed and I bargain with some kids for the freedom of several pet turtles, one T-shirt per pet. In another village, Cosho catches a snake-a deadly fer-de-lance that came within inches of biting a little girl. As we encounter frogs and lizards, either Cosho or Lamar pops them into large plastic bags (filled with air) to take back to the boat. All of these creatures will be released after they're photographed. Over the course of the trip, we see more than 100 different kinds of birds and 56 different species of snakes, frogs, toads and turtles, acquiring, among other critters, a leaf lizard, whiptail lizards, a black-spotted skink, a red-tailed boa, various swampsnakes, three calico snakes and, yes, a poison dart frog. To Bob's dismay, we never encounter one of the armadillos that reach 80 pounds. "He'd probably be run over anyhow," he says.
Each afternoon, Lamar sets up a backdrop of leaves and limbs on a table in the boat's dining lounge and the photographers in the bunch gather around to get close-ups of reptiles and amphibians so brilliantly hued that they look like the work of 3 Chagall or a Miró.
On the evening before we head back into port, we're sitting on the rear deck, replaying an incident in which Cosho scrambled up a tree to play a game of tag with a three-toed sloth. The sloth, whose posture-and level of interest closely resembled that of a sack of fertilizer, had avoided Cosho by nonchalantly climbing higher and higher onto slimmer and slimmer branches.
Suddenly the narrative is interrupted. Around the bend comes a gleaming, 124foot luxury cruise boat. Binoculars focus on the air-conditioned, chandeliered dining room, where waiters in starched white coats are serving passengers at tables decked out with linen and crystal.
"I bet they've got hot-water showers," says one of the members of our party. (We don't.) "And turn-down service at night," says another. "With a mint on the pillow,' says a third. (Ditto.) And so on, until they're interrupted by Lance McAllister.
"I don't know about anyone else," he says, "but I came down here to do the Amazon with Bill Lamar, and I wouldn't trade what we've seen and done for any amount of luxury."
Nor would I.
David Bailey is Sky's executive editor and barista.