APR-C-3

FIRST DAY UNDER WAY IN PERUVIAN WATERS,

GOING DOWN THE MIGHT AMAZON IN ORION THROUGH LIFE BOAT DRILLS AND ZODIAC LANDINGS TO BORAS AND HUITOTOS, PERU

FOR FOLKLORIC LIFE OF AMAZONIAN INDIANS

April 17, 2004

I am under way along the mighty Amazon! I am sitting in my luxurious cabin 407, and have just gone through the mandatory international maritime lifeboat drill and the coming Zodiac landing instructions for us to be off loaded this afternoon in ten-passenger loads to the two native Indian villages of Peruvian Amazonian Indians. It is an all-adult passenger list that has come up to 84 with the sixty crew and officers. I have learned a little about most of the group and not a lot about any one of them. The lectures do not start for a coupled of days and that will be when we are in the Brazilian waters after the hassles of Brazilian immigration have been cleared, which they anticipate taking all afternoon, given the police strike.

I have been coughing and sneezing, and am weary of this cold air shower from all the A/S vents I have been near. I finally realized that, despite the fact that I was coming to the tropics, I needed to put on the fleece and sweaters. Even though we are going to be in this A/S refrigeration (the first time it has been turned on, since the ship’s only early cruise was its maiden voyage to Antarctica) I will have to prepare for cold weather indoors. We had to get dressed with long sleeves (for mosquitoes) and a life jacket (by now you know the drill) and rain gear, which meant that we were most heavily dressed when we ventured outside into the high humidity and high temperatures, so I went from shivering with little clothing to sweltering in the sauna with lots of layers. Life can be like that.

GOING AU NATUREL IN TWO INDIAN VILLAGES

ADJACENT TO EACH OTHER ON THE RIVER YAVI,

FOR NATIVE CRAFTS, AND, BETTER, NATIVE DANCING

We finally get to go out after all the drills and to make our first excursion outside the ship by the Zodiacs. We loaded up in the rain and motored up a side river, which is a Peruvian village with a scrawny little fellow as its chief, and a sprawl of the “Pais” the thatched roof houses on stilts around a government built school where the children are to learn Spanish. They also carve calabashes and collect seeds to make into necklaces and various goodies, including blowguns and other artifacts. They make bark cloth of Kapok, and have a large meeting house. They paddle around in low dugout canoes and do everything you might wish to see if your precious experience had been in the Tiki Room of Disney World with audioanimatronic birds and people.

The first village’s name is Boras, which is a kilometer away from the next village, well within sight and separated only by the fact that they now have a second school there, to teach the people, who are the Huitotos, and speak another language of the same name, to speak Spanish and to inform them that they area also Peruvians. The two villages were always at war, and would achieve manhood by going over and bashing the other, and making a few shrunken heads, but that is all past now, since the acculturation is that they can attract tourons and shrink wallets instead.

As we cruise up the river, I see the splendid variety of the canopy and its flora past counting. I see the magnificent Cecropia tree, with its huge hand-like foliage, which is a sight for lots of birds and sloths since the fruit it produces is a magnet for these animals, and besides, one can see through the heavy leaves, so that they are visible. Who knows? The animal life may be no more abundant in the Cecropia than in any other tree, but at least it is visible! I also see Kapok, the tree from which the natives make their bark cloth mini-garments—only the bottom half seems required. Sop, we are going to be treated to a native dance and song, by bare-breasted maidens—always a crowd pleaser and a real Kodak Moment.

The naturalists spoke of the things we would see along the way, but the outboard drowned out most of them. It turned out, lucky for the people in the rear of the launch around me, that what they were going to point out is stuff I know well—like the hanging sack-like nest of the oro pendola, and a few of the clusters of black vultures that sun themselves when the rain stopped around the clusters of people. The kids were painted up for the occasion with a special juice that is used for body paint that comes from a seed inside a prickly plant pod, which Revlon has discovered and uses for the same purpose—body paint. It is alleged to also be a good sunscreen and mosquito repellant, but since I did not encounter many bugs, I did not get into war paint. There is an Andean group in Peru that makes the long trip down from the highlands to that rainforest just to collect this pod and to bring it back up to their highland homes where they smear it all over themselves, so they are known characteristically by the product of a plant many hundreds of kilometers away from where they live.

So, I had my own little group of question askers, largely because no one else in the back of the Zodiac had been in the tropics before and so I told them I could disseminate information, some of it possibly even true. But, at each juncture when the outboard engine diminished, and the bow-riding local naturalist could be heard, he would be confirming the names and tidbits I had just given out, courtesy of my many trips into the Orinoco Amazonas province of Venezuela with Luis Ayala and company of Terramar. We saw monkeys, too, but they were seen peering out of the windows of the houses over the waters where the locals had kept them as pets. There were heavy logs of the hardwood mahoganies floating low in the water, awaiting some from of mechanized pick up or a floating tow down the river to Iquitos or the nearest mill where this valuable forest product is turned into gold. The steep muddy banks are crawling with chickens, children, and a few small dogs. With a large contingent of locals looking down at the invasion from the other worlders, it was probably a duplicate of the scene at the “discovery” of the new world by the Europeans just half a millennium ago. My, such a change—there goes the neighborhood, and here comes trouble!

THE DANCES AND CEREMONIAL GATHERING

IN THE LONG HOUSE TO MAKE IT POSSIBLE

FOR DIRECT BARGAINING

BETWEEN WHITE MEN WITH WALLETS

AND NAKED INDIANS WITH TRINKETS—

HISTORY REVERSES ITSELF

We had come up the Yavi River from the Amazon (03* 26. 45 S and 72* 00.21 W) to the village of Boras (BORA= 03* 20.33 S, 71* 51.48 W) and were headed into a long house with intricate wrap and vine thatching to sit on logs around a central flat earth floor. On one end were slit drums, very like the talking drums of the Congo, and used for the same purpose. A long kapok log represented an anaconda and could be stomped on any time anyone wished to feel like they had control of their environment.

But, the real attraction were the bare-breasted women swaying around in body paint and kapok bark cloth skirts, standing in front of a wall covered with hangings of some kinds of carvings or paintings. I especially like a young woman with a small baby on her hip, since the baby was painted up for the occasion and curiously stared at the unusual looking invasion of the polyester clad pale people. I started shooting picture of the baby’s perplexed expression, but the young woman also saw opportunity rather than danger in the encounter. This man was packing Soles that would be no good only a few hours downstream.

The scrawny chief came out and gave a greeting in Boras, a language I could not understand, but he did not really understand my Spanish, either. The group of painted worriers then pounded the ground with blackened sticks wielded like clubs and the women were eager to get into a ring around them, not the best position for the photography that each of the surrounding digital cameras were popping. I had to have the single most common experience I am having in the photography department, failure of camera at a critical time: the brand new Minolta has such a delay before it decides to take a picture on the basis of its autofocus and exposure metering that whatever I had wanted to shoot had passed (rather like my “chance of a lifetime, posing with Miss Peru had done!) And then the Nikon NTT, the one resurrected after an investment larger than the purchase of the replacement camera, took one photograph and then refused to advance. So, given the failure of two thirds of my flash cameras, I could sit back and enjoy the show, taping a bit of it and also snapping a couple of photos with the disposable Photo Works. No problem, I have been here and done that before.

It was entertaining, and I did given them some of my Soles, probably about twice as much as they had originally asked for a necklace or two, since they were not skilled (or perhaps were very skilled) in making change! I was about to walk out of the long house when I walked over the prostrate form of a fellow named Vin. He was a member of our group who had been taking diuretics and had diarrhea and carried no water and just fell over in a faint bumping his head on the newly placed concrete outside the long house. Anther fellow stepped forward, the man who was accompanying his wife from Phillips Exeter Andover who made orders all around, so it is obvious that anyone who assumes command, is clearly a physician who is used to giving orders. So, I assisted, but did no more than get him up and over to a sheltering hut where he could drink water while being observed with curiosity by a number of this kids sitting in the bleacher seats behind him, the seats usually reserved for a soccer match on the muddy wet field ahead, but this was far more entertaining that anything they could have scheduled.

We walked over to the formerly warring village of Huitoto, only meters away, but with a different language and customs, and there the women wore bark cloth. They did a dance which looked for all practical purposes indistinguishable from the one we had just seen, and then they went into their super sales pitch, from which I was the only one who emerged without a blowgun and darts.

The rain had stopped, and it was almost comfortable for me, after being a refuge from refrigeration for the last forty-eight hours. WE got into the Zodiacs and made a landing on the Orion, a magnificent ship, registered in Nassau, at anchor out in the Amazon at the mouth of the Yavi River we had cruised up only a kilometer or two. This was “Jungle Lite” for the groups who would later be doing the serious birding or catfishing with handlines, or jungle sloshing in the flooded forest to find the botanic and animal life for which this incubator of biodiversity is so well know by every grade school child world wide, everyone of them with heavy loads of information of which they are all very sure—with very little out here in the very real world that one can be very sure about.

CIVILIZATION:

RETURN TO AN ELEGANT DINNER, WHILE FIGHTING OFF A COLD AMONG INTERESTNG COMPANIONS

I have scarcely been able to talk with the laryngitis and coughing that have afflicted me recently, but I have not seemed to need my voice in any volume, since people are clustering around me and leaning in close to ask questions. I have not said much, and maybe that is the right way to start anything in a mixed group. A number of people hearing that I was a lecturer had asked me what I would be talking about. I remained vague, but one of them said to me, “I heard from some other passenger that there is a fellow here who goes all over the world operating in developing countries and I certainly would like to hear from him.” I said, “Perhaps we will both hear at the same time, and I look forward to it as well.”

I sat at a table with an elderly fellow who was a little out of place wearing an ascot and carrying his tipple from the cocktail hour. He turns out to be an ardent fly fisherman, who also just happened to have been a retired vice president of Mellon Bank. Before long, we were swapping addresses with each at the table, and I have learned about one third of the team so far, by deliberately not sitting with anyone I had already go to know.

Civilization came to me in a discovery that there is a DVD player in the room and I could withdraw the DVD’s from the library. I tried to get a disc called the Fast Runner from the Inuit peoples, but it did not work, so I watched a swash buckling musical Broadway type review called Chicago which won every prize already. But, I will go back now and look for a specifically Amazon disc and see what it can be made to do in the DVD player.

Tomorrow is a “Three nation Day” crossing from Peru, to the brief contact with Columbia at Leticia, and then with whatever hassles are built-in by Brazil beginning the rest of our voyage in the Portuguese influence of the long cruise from here to the Atlantic in Brazil.

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