04-APR-C-16
FINAL DAY CRUISING AMAZON ON ‘ORION”
BEGINS WITH AN ON-DECK CRUISE THROUGH
THE BREVIS STRAITS IN THE
BETWEEN KIDS PADDLING OUT IN CANOES TO
GREET,
AND THE SPOTTING OF A “LIFER”—THE HARPY
EAGLE—
BEFORE LECTURES, CEREMONIES, AND FAREWELL
DINNER
ON BOARD IN PACKING AND PARTING FROM
ORION
Amazing! As if to commemorate our passage into our
final day aboard the Orion through the Brevis Straits, also called the
We were up on deck for the transit through this narrower—even if longer—route to the Atlantic to Belem, a city that is a contraction in Portuguese of the name “Bethlehem” and is the principle port city of the Amazon, which we will view tomorrow as we leave the ship. The city has 1,200,000 inhabitants and is the portal originally founded in 1616 to control the borders with the French Dutch and English to the north of the single most important waterway in the Continent. Along this narrow channel, with its flooded forest at this high water point in the year, with five foot tides even though the water is not brackish (the ocean is not powerful enough to push salt water this deeply into the onrush of the largest outpouring of water fro any river on earth) and there are house s on stilts along the way. For that reason the boat pilot has to go slowly, at about ten knots speed with the current going out, so as not to throw a wake that would wash out houses or disturb the narrowly converging forest margins. Besides, there may be barge traffic on the river through this channel and the ship has to do this only by daylight, with the blasting of the horn for any heavy ship traffic.
What I saw
in large quantity were hundreds of dugout canoes, often paddled by little kids,
often nude, often in whol family groups, with kids as young as two years old
bobbing on the wake of Orion in dugout canoes being paddled with perhaps two
centimeters freeboard at their ‘Plimsol Lines.”
We saw endless kids coming out to greet, waving at us, and not seeking
so much to beg, or to attach themselves to us, as just to see this floating
package of a far away world. This must
be what it was like for Captain James Cook to enter the
We watched much of the morning, with the continuing show—of them for us, and probably even more of us for them—and also saw occasional lumber mills and then huge woodlots of the deforestation of which the Amazon is best know by alarmists everywhere. We have had a lot of ecotourist information on board, and the simple answer to the questions posed by some environmental groups and by the popularizing of such rock stars as Sting—it is not an easy question with a very facile solution. There are not simple right and wrong answers—a summary that should have been apparent after my lectures and a few of the others. Even if a few folk were still shaking their heads and demanding “Just what must we think, therefore?” the questions, if posed directly and correctly, remain open and have no dominant group with the right or wrong response.
I had watched beyond the lumber mills and the fishing villages along the narrow straits as we went further downstream on the still rising tide, and passed river towns of some size. We are leaving the uninhabited—and in some places, uninhabitable—rainforest, and entering riverine port country. We will be going further to reach the outlet than we would have had we followed the northern route that comes close to the 00* Equator line, adding two hindered miles to the journey, meaning that the Amazon if measured through the Belem route that is the most common traffic direction is actually longer then the Nile’s 4,100 miles. We will be having many final ceremonies today, including a cultural discussion of the Samba and the Bossa Nova, as well as the Captain’s slide show on the construction of the Orion for this maiden voyage, and then the farewell Captains’ dinner and the slide show made by the group and its official photographer along with the naturalist’s own digital cameras which will be carried home by each of us on a CD. I will be carrying home over 30 rolls of exposed film—and in this instance, I do mean “carrying” since there is no way I would entrust this stock to the tender mercies of the X-Ray now in use at the ports of each environment I must pass. It may be a primary reason for converting over from film to digital to take along less in the way of susceptible film through the people like the one I met at Lima, who took my camera off the belt and ran it through three times more in the X-Ray examination, since I had isolated it out for a search rather then the X-Ray clearance I had hoped to avoid. This is no doubt part of their photojournalism promotion program.
AFTERNOON OF LECTURES, DEMONSTRATIONS,
AND PRESENTATIONS ON EVERYTHING FROM THE
CONSTURCUTION AND LAUNCH OF THE ORION FOR THIS VOYAGE, TO THE RHYTHMS AND
PATTERNS OF SAMBA
VERSUS BOSSA NOVA
Xhe Artur played and sang the difference between the regular rhythm of the samba which could be accompanied by an instrument even so unsophisticated as a matchbox, and had to be sung while walking, since these were poor street performers at the time of Carnival who could not perform indoors and had to take to the streets. The Bossa Nova was an indoor parlor music and was a-tonal and with a syncopated “off key” sound. The samba could be considered the Negro spiritual and the Boss Nova the jazz derivative.
We heard
Carol talk about her experience in the canopy research station in
AFTER MY LAST AMAZON SUNSET ON DECK
I AM PREPARING FOR THE CAPTAIN’S
RECEPTION AND FAREWELL DINNER