04-APR-C-11
A SUPERB
MORNING INTERPRETIVE WALK
IN THE RAINFOREST, A CONTROVERSIAL
PHOTODOCUMENTARY ON INDIAN AND RAINFOREST PRESERVATION, AND AN AFTERNOON SWIM
IN THE
BLACKWATER
AND A SAILING ON
AS THE
AMAZON BROADENS OUT BEFORE US
Pagadao = 2* 53.23 S, and 60* 29.28 W, and this is a back water away from Manaus where the small stream is in the blackwater river, and has a non-flooded highland forest (it highland means only slightly over the floodplain) and a different flora and fauna of that which is above the flood resistant plants of the lower river. I was keen to go ashore on one of our last real rainforest walks and did so with John Howard since he is the botanist of the group and the one I would learn most from, as apposed to the birder walks or the general raft trip. It was very interesting, and I learned a number of things I will describe to you.
As soon as I stepped ashore, is saw a large caterpillar strapped to the underside of a twig and waving long toxic antennae. I am told that it is the larval from of the luna moth, but, whatever it will become it is huge right now.
We went off
bushwhacking through the jungle with a local fellow named Jose, here in
Zher whacked off a dead hollow small tree trunk, exposing a small frog which was living in the hollow space. One of our group wanted to play Tarzan and swing on a liana. There was a fruit of some kind here that had a central stone that was edible, and a story was told of three friends who were lost in the forest for three days and survived on Hearts of Palms, since almost every palm has an interior edible soft part.
I could hear the call of the “screaming pia”—which was used as Jacques Cousteau’s’ background music, the signature of the highland forest above the floodplain. We saw ferns and tree ferns up higher, and there are no ferns in the floodplains A number of floating plants or fish born seeds had been seen earlier in the floodplain, but on the upper reaches the plants had to be wind or insect or animal pollinated. While we were out making these observations, a “parrot snake” had dropped into the raft and made the return trip back to the Orion, stirring out only when the raft was elevated to the deck.
We saw a lot of roots crawling into the rotting stump of a fallen tree, the interpretation of which is that the ;plant sending roots in had found much better nutrients in the stump that was rotting than in the soil which is very poorly laced with any kind of nutrients. A large sharp-buttressed tree is called Scolenes, which is not known by a common name. We had made the entire circuit in the woods without crossing our own tracks, so we bushwhacked back toward the rafts to be ready to return to the Orion for a lecture on the conflict between the modern and the traditional Indians and two authors who portrayed this struggle with a contrarian view on the outcome—each went in to rescue the noble savage culture, and realized that the only hope for the Indian is to be assimilated at the loss of their culture no matter how sadly that may be achieved.
The Rio Summit on the environment and the unusual coalition between British Pop Star Sting and a native Indian with a plate through his lip made for a media feeding frenzy, and each were the darlings of the eco movement which cooled with no obvious benefit to the people allegedly served, but with a whole lot of hangers on who got their fifteen minutes of TV time from accomplished publicists. At the end, the only people who could come to a conclusion of some kind, said that the only hope for Indians short of annihilation was acculturation, and they had already learned to use the media of which they were now the darlings second to the rock stars who had flaunted them. Even Sting came to the conclusion that it was not easy, and that it was very complex with a naďve first assumption he had made to help without any question on how it should be done. The Indians were protecting their land—and at the same time, making backdoor deals with gold miners and timber dealers, while still courting the media and the world’s superficial thinking beautiful people.
This lecture allegedly on the arts and literature, was an acknowledged extension of my lecture and dealt with conflicting interests of disparate worlds.
I went to visit the Doctor Vladimir, who has been a ship’s doctor for five years when there was work. He asked me about chigger bites, and showed me his reference software which directed him to the digging out of jigger fleas in tungiasis. He had confused the mite the eight-legged arachnid chigger with the sand flea six-legged insect Jigger—one of which requires digging out (the latter) a souvenir of the slave trade. New world sand went back in ballast, infesting the old world with the new world pest of the jigger flea. The chigger is a new world mite with a proboscis with which it injects saliva to suck serum, but this inflammation is a passing thing and no amount of digging should be done. This seemingly semantic difference between jiggers and chiggers may have costed some inconvenience and scarring if I had not stood up and made the small note of difference public in the re-cap part of the program this evening.
SWIMMING THE BLACKWATERS OF
AT PRAIXA GRANDE
Even I got
out of the rafts in a bathing suit and paddled around in the root beer colored
waters of the acidic
Praixa
Grande is 3* 05.21 S, and 60* 22.33 W. I
had told the folk about the candiru, the little catfish that crawls up the
human bodily orifices, and likes to follow the scent and taste of urine. I do not believe nay [peed in the water of
the
As the
other half of the group went off for their night time cruise, I sorted out a
few slides of Malawi and Tibet to use for a later presentation and to show a
few of the slides of Everest to those who had asked. What else is there for me to do? I went down to yet another gourmet meal with
the others in the dining hall!