04-APR-C-4

 

A THREE-NATION DAY: 

LETICIA AND ZOO TOUR OF THE AMAZON FAUNA TAKES PLACE AS WE LEAVE PERU, VISIT LETICIA, COLUMBIA AND WE IMMIGRATE INTO THE LONG BRAZILIAN PORTION OF THE REST OF OUR VOYAGE

CAPPIN G THE EVENING WITH THE CAPTAIN’S RECEPTION AND DINNER ABOARD ORION

 

April 18, 2004

 

            My day began with a thumbprint and mugshot, had an anaconda wrapped around my neck in the middle, faded as an “arco iris” double rainbow arched over the river with a Brazilian island astern and Peru off the port side of my cabin and Leticia Columbia off the starboard, and ended in a formal reception by the captain and crew of the Orion on this its maiden voyage down the full length of the Amazon River.

 

IMMIGRATION “FORMLITIES” IN A THREE NATION TRANSIT WITH RECIPROCITY (OR REVENGE)

 BEING THE GUIDING PRINCIPLE OF INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS IN VISA HASSLES

 

Plans changed as the Brazilian authorities agreed to come aboard, as well as the Columbian and Peruvian agents.   The rules seem to be, whatever you impose on us, we will do to you and more.  Brazilian citizens are now required to have a visa to visit the US which costs something, and to be fingerprinted and photographed, and maybe even iris photograph identified—a new anti-terrorism tool since 9/11/01.  Well, two can play that game1

 

 That is why I had to hassle in coming and gong three times to the Brazilian visa office at the US Brazilian embassy on Massachusetts Avenue in the Washington with the advanced planning that this required.  Also, they threw me out since I had a same picture in my passport as on my visa application, and they said they could not allow a picture more than two months old—so I had to return for a new photograph.  I also had to pay $100 US for a visa that used to be free and issued at the gate upon arrival—but times have changed.  So the hassle value of getting stuck in Brazil is such that the authorities could have sent us back to Peru, or caused the ship to be quarantined.  Some of the passengers had not got yellow fever shots and were summarily given them at some as yet unknown cost.  I had filled in my own health pas book since I know that he live virus of the yellow fever is the world’s best vaccination and the shot should be good forever.  I could use my Tropical Medicine degree to help, but I was not invited to do so and did not offer.

 

            But, all of us stayed on this ship through a longer session this morning so as to have the rest of the day follow the clearance of the customs and documentation “formalities” all of it made slower by a national police strike in Brazil.  The non-US passport holders were essentially given a handshake and told to come on in as soon as they had worked over the Americans.

 

AMAZONIAN FAUNA,

UP CLOSE AND IN YOUR FACE:

LETICIA AND ITS ZOO

 

I hopped aboard the Zodiac with the sailor’s handshake and packed along the cameras to go to Leticia, the long slender finger of the Columbian’s that a 1929 treaty gave them for a port on the Amazon.  The Army has a big base here—and we saw recruits being hazed, puling weeds out of a large lawn inside the fence of the compound, and being punished with pushups required for some derelictions in duties known only to their drill instructor.  This is the Guarda Costa Amazonas.  We got bussed around these folk and went to the Zoo.  At the gate the first greeter we had was one of a pair of pregnant tapirs, which nose into us and lick all parts they can reach.  These are members of the horse family though they resemble pigs with a proboscis, that wraps around things a bit like and elephants, and slurps down leaves.  They are wandering loose, and are more pets than wild animals.

 

But, the zoo had some very good specimens.  Included among them are the “organ grinder monkeys” and the spider monkeys.  The latter are the only monkeys that can u se their prehensile tails alone to swing from branches as a preferred “fifth hand.”  No old world monkeys have prehensile tails.  We saw coatimundis, relatives of the raccoon, and the turkey size curassow, which is also tasty, and therefore rapidly hunted out.  We saw a blue and gold Guacamaya—one of two types of macaws we will see in the river curies.  The most spectacular birds we saw were an amazing pair of spectacled owls.  There were wild birds winging around—green parrots, ciscidis, and blue tanagers, and I spotted an Amazonian kingfisher, which flew off by the time I had notified the others keen on adding it to their “life list.” But it is a very common bird and we will see many of them later. 

 

Without a doubt the most impressive bird specimen here, or anywhere to be seen, is the Harpy Eagle.  A big and beautiful male was preening itself with its enormous talons. It has a crest it can raise, and a very prominent nictitating membrane that flicks across its eyes.  Even more impressive is the mobility of its neck, which could turn around 360* and also corkscrews down to look over curiously anything it was interested in, which was us.  It is a very handsome bird, wearing a black and white tuxedo.  It kills monkeys and sloths and can carry them out of the canopy of tall trees on powerful wings.  It is related to the national bird of Philippines, the monkey –eating eagle.  But, I have never been eyeball to eyeball with a harpy eagle so well displayed.

 

Another animal well displayed is El Tigre.  The jaguar is a big carnivore, very much more powerful and stocky than the leopard it resembles as Pantera onca.   It can climb trees but not very often or very well, which its cousin the leopard does supremely well, often with a heavy burden in its jaws. The male was unhappy with his encagement and would jump and hit the fence in such an impact that people would stumble over backwards—and he would hiss and snort.  As it opens its mouth, we can see the Thompson’s vomerineb organ that allows it to taste a scent—as many animals who exhibit “Flemen Behavior”—sniffing and licking the air to pick up the pheromes and scent of an estrus female—like deer in heat.

 

They have a captive docile manatee named polo, with a big brad tail that looks like a flat sheet of rubber.  It wandered around its pool taking a few hyacinths from our hands and liking to be rubbed.  The sea cow has a mermaid’s tail, but hardly one that would be attractive to any other than a sea bull.

 

The biggest moment for many in the zoo was the handling of the eleven foot anaconda, which you could wrap around your neck for the fun of it.  Another snake nearby was a red tailed boa constrictor who had no such charming in mind, and would hiss and bite.

 

I saw agouti, that I had hunted as “lapa” in Venezuela.  The agouti (which happens to be delicious) is a rodent that is the only animal that can crack the hard shell of the Brazil nut.  It picks up the nuts and buries them some distance from the tree, forgetting where it put them more than half the time, doing, as do the squirrels, a good job of tree planting thereby.

 

 There was an eighteen foot caiman, the crocodilian that is here in the Amazon.  If you, too, would like to get wrapped up in an anaconda, the mark for Leticia is LETI = 04* 13.31 S, 69* 56.51 W

 

Two ocelots were here and the Margay cat was missing, but that completed the great cats of the new world tropics.

 

On the giant Amazonian lily pad—that can even be used as rafts supporting the weight of up top a man, we saw two spectacled caimans sitting up posing right next to the large white water lily that comes from these big pads.

 

I liked the zoo, since we got a chance to see close up the same animals we will now see at a distance, and try to shoot photographs that will not have wire cages around them, but will be a small blur on the horizon on which no camera can autofocus.

 

I boarded the Zodiac, returning to the Orion and got a DVD “Cider House Rules.”  I talked with the travel writer Sheila who is along on this trip as a writer for the Rob Report, a magazine that prides itself on the most conspicuous and extravagant consumption. Annually they come up with the Ultimate Gift list, such as Four Season in Four Sites, with a private Gulfstream II on standby to carry you from one to the other.  It is unusual to have such blatant displays of extravagance, but the magazine (which I have never, of course, seen) caters to cars, wines and spirits, cigars and luxury items for high rollers, money no object.  So, that seems to be the ideal subject for me—where my adventure travel includes not a chartered Gulfstream but a sleeping bag and a dead horse in Kazakhstan.  I do not know if and when the article will come out, but am unlikely to see it.  The next Ultimate Gift List will have a round of golf on each continent plus the moon by rebuilding a private Apollo program.

 

I returned in the afternoon to stroll the somnolent village of Leticia with not a few inebriates lying on the sidewalks in a heap next to empty bottles—this is the “weekend” in a tropical paradise.  I wandered about remembering of course that only “mad dongs and Englishmen go about in the noon day sun.”  Make that only the latter, since I saw lots of dogs doing road kill imitations lying in a crumpled heap in any shady spot.  I bought the postcards I had been unable to find in the morning, and strolled among the locals alone.  I saw magnificent displays of tropical fruits.  Any time I visit the tropics I see some new kind of fruit I had not known before. I also saw a dugout canoe at the river bank with two women under umbrellas being used as parasols, while a man would occasionally wade in next t them and splash water on a very large hog in the dugout canoe between them.  Black vultures crouched all along the shoreline and spread their wings to thermoregulate. 

 

I came back to the Orion to write a few of the cards I had just bought on the fantail and watch as a dark cloud came up over the river from the direction of the island that represents Brazil in the three nation spread around our anchorage here, blotting out the spectacular piling up of tropical white thunderheads of cumulonimbus.  A double arch of the “arco iris” rainbow preceded the brief warm rain that dropped and passed up river.  The Orion’s bulbous nose under the 12 foot draft mark at the waterline had caught some flotsam among the longs and branches that keep floating down, as the flooded forest is shedding its biodegradable detritus downstream—the same direction we will head out as soon as tonight’s captain’s reception and dinner has been completed.