04-APR-C-10
OUR EARLY
ARRIVAL;
CITY TOUR OF
THE RUBBER BARONS ESTATES,
THE MUSEUM
OF SCIENCE, WITH FISH AND INSECTS DISPLAYED, AND VISIT TO THE OPERA HOUSE:
THEN A
RAINFOREST RESEARCH TOUR AT INPA, BEFORE PRE-RAINSTORM RETREAT TO ORION
AND
PREPARATION FOR THE BOOMBAH—
THE HIGH
WATER SEASON FESTIVAL CELEBRATION
Welcome to
You are at MANA = 3* 08.25 S, 60^ 01.24 W. We have come gradually eastward, and still have not varied more than one degree from our south of the equator position. I was drowsy when I finally did get up this morning to witness the town of Manaus coming into view, since I had awakened at three in the morning being driven nuts by the itching of a hundred chigger bites all over from my exploring the villages along the way such as San Francisco del Boca del Rio Capybara most recently. For the sunset I viewed last night, such a torture was well worth it.
I watched
the dancing girls bumping and grinding, figuring that such dancers are usually
about ready to finish their performing day at hits hour rather than strapping
on their grass miniskirts and saying they were about to trot off to work amid
the tourons that were about to be washed up on the dock of the thriving city of
Manaus. This is not a small town. It has nearly two million inhabitants and is
the number two economic capital of
THE AMAZON:
A NONJUCNTIONOF TWO RIVERS:
THE WHITE WATER SOLOMONES,
AND THE BLACK WATER
The Rio
Negro comes in from the south and Manaus us founded on the south bank of the
junction of the two rivers which remain very distinctive, like the non-mixing
of the White and Blue Niles from Khartoum where they converge to Omdurman where
they mix at last, some 23 kilometers downstream. This pair of rivers is flowing side by side
and not mixing for some time yet, and I will see how far before they look like
the black (“root beer” colored) water of Rio Negro mixes with the white (café
au lait colored) water of the Solomones.
But there are important advantages to being on this southern side of the
TOUR THE TOWN,
BEGINNIKNG AT THE MERCADO MUNICIPAL,
AND GOING NEXT TO THE
RUN BY AND LOCATED IN THE QUARTER OF THE
TOWN FOR
JAPANESE REFUGEES OF WW II
We stopped at the Mercado Municipal—a steel prefabricated structure made by and assembled from the factories of—guess who?---Messier Eiffel He was a very busy man in much of South America, especially Chile where he made Railroad Bridges and the Saint Mark’s Cathedral in Arica in what was then Peru and is now Chile, and the special house we saw in Iquitos which was built during the rubber baron times and is now the British consul.
We toured the vegetable and food sections and then the special herbal medicine divisions. I especially thought the bags displayed prominently up front were well labeled—“Regional Viagra.” This is the kind of non-FDA endorsement that is possible “off label” in herbal markets.
My favorite was the fish market. There we saw a kind of brown catfish being brought in next to the beef slabs all ready to be disassembled. The brown catfish were chopped in half and each half still wriggled as it moved around in the pan. The fish most prized was next to the Pacu, the herbivorous piranha. The giant fish was being filleted and is advertised everywhere as the most tasty fish in all the Amazon. The Tambiqueno is a very large fish and makes tasty fillets. Our guide was quite covetous, since he grew up catching such fish for free in the upper river, but now in Manaus, such a fish would cost him over eighty dollars US. We also saw the rarest and the most precious of the scaled fish of the Amazon a symbol of much of the way the people have lived and the changes that have come to them. The Pirarcu, is a huge fish, about three meters long in the largest, and is an air-breathing fish. It has a flattened head and a vertically tapered tail, looking very primitive. It is the largest scaled fish in the Amazon, with several smooth skinned catfish that come larger, and the black and white tiger striped cats we saw were up in the 300 kg class. But this fish is associated with a lot of lore, since the fisherman must hunt him from a canoe, and the dugout canoe is silently paddled within range until the fish comes to the surface. The hunter draws back a bow and a thick arrow that it really a harpoon with a detachable barb is shot at it at close range. The close range hit is then followed by a lot of thrashing. The heavy armor of the fish is in overlapping scales that size of apples. But if the fish tires and t dies, now the fisherman has the problem of getting the fish back to the camp and his family, which will feast then dry and smoke the rest, with enough food for weeks. How to do that in a fish the same size as the canoe? The fisherman must sink the dugout canoe under the big fish and then bail the canoe out to float the fish away with it. In bloody water with a lot of piranha, this may be a dicey proposition. So, a successful Pirarcu fisherman is a hero. But if there were too many there would be few of the slow growing surface feeding fish.
I noticed a lot of young girls in the market, most wearing the languid costume of the tropics—sandals shorts and a tank top. There is a good deal of flirting as the shoppers go around the market and a lot of salesmanship with the intent to sell the tourons something they do not need and will never again look at upon return. Added to this are some well-dressed English speakers who are touting the jewelry of Amsterdam Sauer or H. Stern everywhere that a bus stops, and you can imagine the Maginot line of sales folk to be crossed at each transit point.
We went next some twenty minutes away, a far enough bus ride to pass the industrial sector filled with the Japanese name brands for assembly. There is a large Japanese population here, invited by the president of Brazil in 1944 when the WW II refugees were fleeing the US victory, and they were assigned a patch of jungle distant from Manaus—which has subsequently become confluent with the Duty Free Zone established in the 1980’s when the Brazilian government was worried about using or losing the Amazon. We arrived at this Japanese built museum alongside the japans schools and university. We saw the taxidermy of lots of piranhas and the kinds of catfish that fill the Amazon, and also the prized Cichlid with an eye-spot—the peacock Bass that I caught in such numbers with Luis Ayala with both Michael and Donald.
In a special aquarium, they had the Pirarcu in large presence, which have the pre-historic look from lying on the bottom with no swim bladders, then rising to the surface in their ponderous beauty, with huge scales that turn bronze when they move, like a tom turkey’s feathers. The large fish also show the special good eating one we had seen in the market. As a special souvenir, I have some of the dried scales of the Pirarcu, with the other relic everyone would like to use as an Emory board is the pirarcu tongue. They showed how they could scrape with the pirarcu tongue on a bar of the product of a planet with ten times the caffeine of coffee to make a jungle “pick-me-up” drink.
We left the
museum and also passed in front of a special luxurious home of a German young
man who came here in the late 1890’s to seek his fortune in rubber. He indentured many Indian rubber collectors
and they went further and further afield to extract rubber for him. In three years he made over 60 Million
dollars a year---and that was THEN! Each
of his Indians was worth 60,000 dollars a year to him, and each was
expendable—like those
One of the
German barons decided to build a special Opera Hose to show how civilized they
were in their high fashion multiple crinolines and petticoats and tail coats and
high hats---3 degrees below the Equator.
So a special plan was made to build a gilded Opera Hose and to make it the
second place in all
We toured all through the Opera House where flash photography is not allowed, so I put the camera down and set it to self-timer and let it take its own pictures from the boxes and from the balconies and special Versailles-type mirrored halls. I also went next door to the souvenir shops where I bought postcard stamps, which is all I will send back, although I toyed with the idea of getting a collection of the spectacular Morpho butterflies under glass, which are almost incandescent. I liked the opera house, along with other views, including the President Lulu recently elected in Brazil who was here three days ago for a Verdi opera and has a commemorative plaque here for that event. It is good to know that we are commemorating an era of unbridled greed, that has undoubtedly “transited”—and perhaps the next one based in microchips or legal constructs may also self-extinguish.
AFTERNOON AT INPA
I am unused to having lunch with three wines and a five course selection so I almost missed the next act, but jumped at the chance to go to INPA the Amazonas Research Institute. There we walked amid the displays of the wildlife and the unfenced wildlife that is refugeed there. The highlight was the trio of newborn manatees that we could stroke and cuddle. There were special monkeys, macaws, agouti running around, and a good deal of flora on display. WE could also sample forest products like the tapioca and the special extract of several of the nuts or palms. Bachota is a pod that produces a red dye that the Indians rub on their faces, which is also the same purpose for which Revlon uses it. There is a huge leaf here on display which is the Cocolobo—the largest leaf in the world—over ten feet long. The special monkey was a baby Brown Bearded Saki Monkey. I saw a turtle feeding frenzy when a group of school kids came by and threw in popcorn.
I returned to the cabin in time to see a very black cloud come over. It was startling in its darkness over the blackwater river, with a couple of smaller boats visible from my cabin as they went out in the slanting rays of the setting sun under the bright light against a dark backdrop—a picture I took quickly as I realized its uniqueness. Then I saw it really was unique—the boat I was looking at was capsizing in the rough wind and heavy waves just as the rain hit. I went to tell the bridge and they already knew and had reported it. The lights on the cocks went out as the city was plunged in darkness---the first time this has happened in their recorded memory—canceling the quayside special dance we were going to have which I a festival in celebration of the high water mark of the year said to rival the Rio Carnival. Not any longer—it is no longer to be done in our presence at least, since the streets were flooded and a number of people who were still out shopping tried to get cabs which were shorted out or failed in their return and streets were flooded over the waist in the downpour.
This is the rainforest. Even a gilded Opera Hose cannot protect from
the natural cycles of boom and bust.