04-APR-C-2

LAUNCH THE RIVER TRIP--GRANDEST OF THEM ALL: THE MIGHTY AMAZON,

LOCATION OF MOST OF THE FRESH WATER ON EARTH THAT IS NOT ICE:

TAKEOFF ON THE TRAVEL DYNAMICS TOUR

FROM DCA THROUGH MIA TO LIM FOR ARRIVAL

IN PERU FOR TRANSFER TO IQUITOS,

RIVERPORT UPSTREAM NEAR THE ANDEAN SOURCE

OF THE MIGHTIEST RIVER ON EARTH

April 15—16, 2004

Welcome to Lima, the coastal capital of Peru, a nation of 28 million inhabitants, eight million of which live in the capital, making it the crowded crime-ridden and industrial hub of the nation. Since I am coming to Peru, that means I must be going through Lima, even though I am leaving it as soon as the arrangements can be made to move all 74 of us, a gathering from a half dozen tour operators pooling their experts, one of which is I to entertain an eclectic group of Amazon River tourists. Due to the incessant cold air showers I had to keep taking since their was no escape from the jets of A/C in DCA and on the plane, I have a nose running like a hose, and a couple of my fellow tourists had read up about me and were eager to talk to me. I plead weariness, and checked in and went straight to my hotel room in this Swissotel luxury accommodation. I am still wearing fleece and fluff as protection from the over-A/S of this season on the cusp, when the calendar says they have to have full blast A/C while the reality is that it is a late spring with a lot of damp cold weather—both there at 38* above the Equator and here in Lima where I ma now at 12* 01.16 S, 77* 06.32 W. This means I have moved to sea level arid coastal Lima which is one hour time zone west of DCA and MIA. I am now in the tropics, but will only really get the full heat and humidity treatment of that 12 south latitude when I get to the river, and hour and a half flight from Lima to Iquitos, which we will start at ten o’clock departure from the hotel and a noon flight tomorrow. For the moment, in a hazy sneezy fog of URI, I am going to the Swissotel’s bed.

THE TRANSFER FROM SAN ISIDRO TO LIMA,

AND THE FLIGHT TO IQUITOS TO BOARD THE ORION

April 16, 2004

The Swissotel is really quite a luxurious place, and I had two surprises upon wandering around before and after breakfast this morning. First, I saw two costumed women in the pool area that looked like the next international trip rather than this one. They were Thai dancers who were promoting a Thai Festival to be held at the hotel. They posed with their long fingernail accentuation and did the posturing of the classic Thai dance, while a Thai male masseuse exercised a model nearby. I thought this was quite photogenic, until the next major event came by. It happened in this residential area of Lima called San Isidro (12* 05. 46 S, 77* 02.19W) where the Swissotel is located.

Upon leaving the breakfast room, where I met a few more of the seventy four people in this tour—almost exactly like the Antarctic cruise and for the same reason since this brand new boat we are joining is designed for the Antarctic and Arctic tours—I saw a stunningly beautiful slender young girl walking in a languid model’s cat walk. After my first double take, I saw another.

MISS PERU:

ALMOST HEAVEN

I had my little Minolta camera in hand since I had come down to see the Thai dancers. It is brand new, taken out of storage to replace an identical camera that had failed at the outset of the Taiwan trip. I was going to shoot a photo or two of the parade of Latina beautiful young women to a room across from our breakfast dining room, and did so at a distance and with a long lens. But, then I saw the sign: “Miss Peru.” These were all models who were “wannabes” coming to try to take the sash, and they were dressed to reveal most of their assets. They were very slender, with sprayed on pant suits that were usually two piece—the kind of costume one would associate with working girls of another profession. One after another came by, many with body guards or family, almost all of them doing a quick “air kiss” passing both ears, with great care to not make contact and smudge their two hour make-up job. They were breath-takingly beautiful. I only had a few exposures left, sine the majority of the roll of film is of the trophies in the Game Room. So, I fetched another roll of film and checked out of the room.

When I came down, they were clustering around, and I took a few more photos. But, I realized, these young women are professional models, and do not have to have surreptitious photos taken of them—that is what they live for~ So, with a brief “con permisso” I asked the current reigning Miss Peru to pose. She did so, with a dazzling smile. That is when I discovered how long it takes for the flash to recycle on the new Minolta—as I agonizingly pushed the button and she stood there with a plastic smile fixed on here face, awaiting the triggering of the camera, actually turning her attention to other things for a little while before the flash went off. Several of the candidates came to greet here, and there was a lot of gentle hugging and air kissing going on. One of the models came over to pose with us. Ah, the joys of life come upon us so unexpectedly!

I remembered this happening once before at a time I had a camera in hand. I was in the Sheraton San Cristobel in Santiago Chile, and getting ready for a lecture later in the evening, I went to the swimming pool, having forgotten that the month of June is winter at the opposite side of the equator. As I sat on a lunge chair at poolside, out came a woman with a frozen smile, but with the distinctive strutting walk, and walked along the narrow cement sidewalk between the swimming pools, wearing a one-piece bathing suit with a sash that identified her as the current reigning Miss Chile as she was greeting the candidates to replace her for the coming year. It is a good thing I photographed her at that time, since I froze her at her best, since that is now long enough ago that she is most likely post-menopausal and deteriorated as rapidly as most fresh cut flowers.

Latina young women are distinctively beautiful, with the poise and the special effort they make to ALWAYS look their best, never casual. They can be viewed as works of art, which is what gave me then, and now, a rather unusual feeling. I was sad. Not for the passing of youth and beauty, but for the fact that the greatest curse of these young women was to be stunningly beautiful, so much so that they would be objects of photography or voyeur’s stares, or ribald jokes, and no one could ever take them seriously as anything other than a spectacular body on which to hang a few very scanty clothes, and maybe to use them for the brief period of their usefulness to sell something by attracting attention to it. I hope they are working their way through school by doing this, as one young lady I know now (not then) who did it with clear-eyed deliberateness to make money that she would otherwise have to earn by waitressing to keep on with what else she had planned in life, and using this as a platform to get “value added” to jump start her career in something else other than just posing.

So, the grand climax of my South American tour came early, and most of the real thrills are over already! But, I got in the bus and rumbled off to the airport, Aero Puerto Internacional Jorge Chavez Lima Callan, Peru. While milling around during the check in onto Aero Continente, the same carrier that had flown me around when I had gone to Machu Picchu in 1999, I met a few of the other folk here on the trip, a process I have been doing deliberately by seeing that I do not sit with the same group I first encountered—a process Michael said he had done at JMU to be sure he came to dinner and sat with a different group as often as possible to learn as many of the students as possible. Some of these folk are very interesting, many of them retired and having done interesting things before deciding it was time to “enjoy life” as a half dozen of them said without knowing each of the prior ones had said the same.

THE AMAZING AMAZON

I sat in the plane with a few new folk trying to be as invisible as possible as I was sneezing and dripping from the cold I have acquired by being unable to escape the cascade of frigid A/C air that has blown over me non-stop in each of the airports and planes starting in DCA yesterday. Great! I arrive as a VIP on this trip to sit in the corner with my nose running like a hose—a great opening impression! When my seat mate took a nap during the flight, and I borrowed his book on the Amazon, I learned a few more specific data points about this massive river system. It is not the longest river on earth—it is 4,000 miles long and the Nile is 4,100 miles, but in every other department, it is undoubtedly the mightiest river on the face of the planet. It has 16% of all the world’s fresh water (not ice) and its outflow is 3ight times the next eight biggest rivers on earth, and ten times the Mississippi, pushing freshwater 300 kilometers into the Atlantic with huge loads of silt into the wide delta. At Iquitos, the largest port on the river, to which we are heading, the river is 7.9 km wide depending on the rainy season vs. dry (the rains start in May so we are at the end of the six month dry season when the river is low) but at some points downstream it is 65 km wide. You might appreciate the massive size of this river only from the air or outer space, since while one is on the river, many islands make it look like the opposite bank is being viewed, and there are many tributaries which might be confused with several channels of the river. Some of these tributaries themselves rank among the top rivers on the earth, falling into fifth through eighth places.

The origin of the river (a dispute whether one means the highest point, the largest volume—like a lake—or the furthest point from the sea) is agreed, since the National Geographic Society made an expedition into the Peruvian Andes with a GPS to determine that it was a source at 5,597 meters up in the area I visited on my Colca Valley tour in my 1999 Peruvian tour. From Iquitos where we will put in, it is 2,975 km (1,849 miles) to the Atlantic, a trip we will make in two weeks, at a boat speed of fifteen knots, added to a current speed of four knots, for a twice as fast downstream trip than upstream.

I read some history of the rubber boom and bust in the area, which was fascinating in view of my just having completed the story of the Congo atrocities of the Leopold’s exploitation that gave him tremendous wealth from his Congo colony but at a cost of half the population. A fellow name Harderberg was just like the two reformers who spent their lives full time decrying the outrage in Victorian England, a time when people could still be shocked by atrocities, and he was the whistleblower against the Aracano’s Peruvian Amazon Rubber Company, pointing out that every ton of rubber shipped out cost the lives of seven men women and children in the Amazon. This is comparable to the millions of people worked to death and victim to introduced diseases in the Congo which had alarmed England with public meetings showing the missionary Harris’s photographs, so that since the company traded on the London stock exchange Harderberg went to crusade in London. The rubber boom busted shortly after that, however, with NOTHING to do with the revulsion against atrocities, but the cultivation of rubber in the smuggled plants in Malaysia and then the advent of synthetics after Dunlop had first “vulcanized” rubber to make it last in lots of flexion. It had been Priestly in England who named it since he found it could erase pencil marks (‘rubber”, get it?) and a fellow named Mac Intosh who soaked fabric in it to make a waterproof slicker.

Before the collapse, rubber barons had built the huge opera house in Manaus to which all the greats like Caruso, Bernhardt, Pavlova were invited and came, but never performed. So, I will see the exploitation history of the Amazon, but there is no way anyone could conquer it, despite its rapid clearance, annually losing chunks of it the size of European countries. It is an overwhelming experience in biodiversity, and the sheer flooded mass of it—the “Green Hell” of the flooded forest where most speciation is not even yet discovered. There are credible and plausible stories of great cities and lost civilizations swallowed up inside the jungle, and several of these have been seen, their architectural ruins such as pyramids photographed and measured, and then they have disappeared to be lost again. A few of them are know by satellite navigation and plotting, and at least one of them has had several expeditions mounted to go to re-find it, with each of them coming to disastrous failure, including the last one which was lethal. So there is mystery and legend enough here to keep a few stories going even if there biology itself is not overwhelming.

IQUITOS,

THE MAJOR PORT—FAR INLAND FROM THE SEA

Arriving at the airport of Iquitos, I look out over the fleet of derelict aircraft scattered all over the airstrips. If the American South has the highest number of derelict cars up on cinder blocks, I think the number of 707’s 727’s and other jet aircraft that are being cannibalized to keep the aluminum parts of the others still working is world class. WE were on a 737—one of the pre-noise abatement models, and we screamed to a halt in the hot humid climate of the Iquitos airport, with about 160 meter elevation, but at 03* 46. 53 S, 073* 17.15 W it is not just tropical, but equatorial. It looks like an equatorial town—languid, crowded with people strolling in very little clothing, with makeshift housing called Pai which are stilt platform houses covered with palm thatch along lagoons and oxbows of the river. It has a population of 400,000, and has a lot of military, since this is a border with Brazil and Columbia. It has two universities, one public and one private, and the Mormon Church is very active here. It is a river port, but everything that is manufactured has to come a long way to get here so every such product is very expensive—with tow exceptions. Gasoline in Lima was 12 Soles per liter and here it is 6 Soles per liter. The currency, named after Bolivar’s General Soles is 3.4 S =$1.00, so that translates to $15 per gallon in Lima against half as much here—because the fuel comes from this area of the upper Amazon. The second product is wood, with a lot of saw mills cutting the Amazonian hardwoods which we watched being floated down river, and hauled up on a cable pulled rail car which was sent down an incline to submerge and a couple of swimmers would tie the logs to the funicular.

We had a good lunch of fish in a good hotel, the “only” one, as described by our Guide “Clever” and then a one hour tour of the town. We saw a building made of pre-fabricated iron, assembled here by the design of Messieur Eiffel—marking the fifth or sixth major structure I have seen in Chile and Peru from the Eiffel of Tower fame. The building here is now the British Consulate, perhaps the last time the French and British collaborated in anything!

There are river front elegant buildings fronted in Portuguese tile that I remember being from the town of Coimbra when I had been visiting professor there. These buildings were the product of the rubber boom, and have fallen on hard times since. Along the way we saw a “Huelga”, a strike, and there were dramatic scenes of a couple of near naked men blackened with dye and chained to a cross labeled “contratos” These turn out to be school teachers who are not certified, and without the qualifications that were imposed in a new upgrading of standards, they are not re-hired, and they are protesting losing their jobs. South Americans strike readily (as we go down to Brazil, we will encounter a National Police strike) but they have a way of dramatizing their complaints rather vividly.

BOARD THE ORION,

A NEW LUXURY CRUISE SHIP

FOR THE POLES AND EQUATOR

The Orion is brand new, launched in November 2003, and this is its maiden voyage up the Amazon. It had already made its virgin voyage to the Antarctic, which I remember well from less luxurious accommodations on a Russian ice breaker. There are about five different groups here, from a Columbia “alumni group” of two, to birders to a Cambridge University group, Abercrombie and Fitch, and the Travel Dynamics, which one of the women participants took the program to a friend and showed it to her with a description of one of the lecturers on board, saying “Look! This is the quality of the people we have on this trip!” going on about one of them being an acknowledged humanitarian, unaware that she was addressing the subject of her description!

The crew of 60 is largely from the Ukraine, so that is like the Antarctic tour, and the officers of the boat are German, with a Hungarian masseuse and a few local performers, who can come in from Iquitos and be off-loaded since the Orion is anchored out in the main Amazon, without being brought into the Iquitos port because of the shoal water of the low-water season port and the twelve-foot draft of the new ship. We will be anchored here tonight, starting under way at about 4:30 AM and a group of Iquitos Inca-tune-playing family came into the after dinner Ledo lounge to perform, with a twelve-year old dancer, daughter of the band leader who plays the pipes and guitar. I sat with a still newer group in the elegant lounge and had a good dinner of halibut and Mendozan wine. That did not help me sleep given both jet lag and a runny nose through the night, but it may have helped you, since I am completing this chapter just before the [pre-dawn anchor weighing as we begin our 2,000 mile Amazon cruise. Stay tuned for our next landing in the Zodiacs after the mandatory boat drills, and I will describe the remainder of my stay in the Peruvian part of the river, before going for our next port in Leticia Columbia, and from there on into what the whole staff fears will be excessive red tape of hypersensitive Brazil with the Police on strike and the new fingerprinting and eye photographing required of them coming into the US, they are threatening to reciprocate.

So, from the somewhat artificed natural beauties of Miss Peru to the stunning immensity of the Amazon, this is a day to relish the wonders of the natural phenomenon of an abundant life all around me. Come on along for the ride and appreciate all of it without the humidity, mosquitoes and international red tape!

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