04-APR-C-5

 

CRUISING DOWN THE BRAZILIAN AMAZON RIVER

ON ORION FROM THE BRIDGE,

 WITH THE FIRST LECTURES ON LOCAL ENVIRONMENT, AND THE FIRST ZODIAC EXCURSIONS INTO

 THE FLOODED FOREST

 

April 19, 2004

 

Patriots’ Day far from Hopkinton or Boston,

The first time in over a decade

 

            I am on the bridge of the Orion watching the world go by at 12.8 knots, 4 knots of which is the current of the seaward roll of the Amazon.  The steady thrum of the single screw seems to be pushing us smoothly, in 28 meters of water, a shipping channel that varies from ten to sixty meters.  I see around me the GPS showing our current position at 3* 26.5720 S and 68* 50.4701 W after a steady overnight of cruising which began around 6:00 PM just before the Captain’s reception last night.  In all the elegance the cruise could muster—which is a lot for a luxury liner—we had a formal greeting and then a formal sinner with the group last night.  I have tried to sit with a different group each night and dinner, so that I can know a bit more about many.  The group is well-heeled and many are very well traveled, having done even the Antarctic and other unusual routes, but mostly by cruising, which would mean the Adventure Lite kinds of experience for Golden Agers.  I am going to hope to be with them when I reach that point.

 

            Which seems a lot closer to me now than it would if I were in Boston as I usually am at this special weekend day.  I should be in Boston getting ready for the bus to Hopkinton about now.  IN honor of the Patriot’s Day event, I am wearing the BAA logo shirt from my 100th Boston.  I miss it, but even more the idea that I should be ready to run a marathon at any time, which I definitely am not just now, having been out of the running business.  I will try to get in a run or two before I have to do the “metric marathon” equivalent in the 25 K Grand River Run in Grand Rapids, the next race for which I am entered—the last two of which I had to waive—such as the Cheery Blossom Ten Miler for which I was reserved but was ten time zones away in Taiwan.

 

            I see the sonar pictures from the big bulbous snout under the bow, which shows a few logs caught on the front and pushed away.  It looks to me like this ship is a brand new version of the cruise liners that used to have a wheel and now have a joystick to program them.  It looks like a “fly by wire”—that is, the boat is run by changing the program which runs the ship rather than by steering it mechanically.  It is a low personnel bridge with one engineer and one mate at the windows, with several screens displaying the data.  There is an open bridge policy such as I enjoyed in the Antarctic.  The crew is German, as opposed to the waitstaff which is Odessa, Ukrainian.  One of the Ukrainian waitresses, Olga (pronounce “ola” in Ukrainian) had a twenty sixth birthday yesterday, and I learned to sing happy birthday in the Ukrainian language from Miguel, one of the speakers from Columbia University who was born in the middle of a family of seventeen kids who still live in a small Amazonian village in jungle Peru.  He is the only one who got out, and he married a Ukrainian, so at dinner last night he told me the words to Happy Birthday, so I could brighten at least one person’s life a long way from home.

 

            I am now going to sit in the frigid lunge (the A/C refrigeration is still in overtime—said by the Captain to be only a perception of excess because of the contrast with the outside world.)  The ship burns twelve tons of fuel per day, not dependent on whether we are gong up or downstream as much as how much power is being generated by the two generators.

 

THE FIRST TWO LECTURES

ON BIRDING IN THE AMAZON,

AND THE AMAZON FLOODS, FLOODPLAINS “VARZEA”

AND THE “RIBERENOS”

 

            The first lecture of the trip was a brief review with slides of the birds that might be seen in our excursion in the Amazon, ordinarily a topic that might interest me very much except if made into a dull catalog of repeated slides.  There are 1661 species of birds in Brazil, more than half of them available to our view on this trip.  Which would make it about four times more than in North America.  For purposes of contrast, there are 28,000 species of fish, more than all mammals, birds, reptiles and amphibians combined.  But the winner remains the insects with over a million coleopterans alone—as Huxley once replied to the question, what can you tell about the Creator from a study of Creation?  “An inordinate fondness for beetles.”  But even than is staggeringly behind the flora that are around us, a lot of it still unknown, and its relationships still barely dented.

 

            The more interesting of the talks came from Miguel my dinner partner, who had identified himself as a “ribereno” whose father was Indian and mother Spanish.  He was the middle of 17 kids, and as number eight was the only one to run away to the city to go to school by getting a night job in a restaurant to finance his going to high school.  He escaped and met a Ukrainian in New York City and has remained with Columbia University, studying the changing pattern of the river and its flooding and rechanneling.  Any changes made are transient, since the next flood may most likely erase whatever happened before.  The big booms and busts happened with firewood for steamboats in the twenties—with no lasting effect.  Then came WWII with a shortage of Olive Oil in Europe and the Giant River Turtle eggs were extracted for their oil of the same density, and about became extinct.  Then came the sixties with the hard and high value timbering making mahogany nearly extinct within reach of the river, and last was the oil boom of the seventies.  But the river keeps changing along the floodplane, called Varzea in Brazil.  The people are as endangered as are many of the other parts of the environment.  I like Miguel and we will talk further about his view of the river flood plane.

 

I also learned by reading that the Amazon does not contain one fifth of the world’s fresh water that is not frozen; it, in fact, holds at any one time about 1 % of the world’s fresh water.  It discharges one sixth of the fresh water in the world into the world’s oceans, an amount that is only close to the Congo in second place, or ten times as much as the Mississippi.  It would take four years to fill Lake Superior and two years to fill Lake Baikal.  To avoid any exaggeration, its true facts are superlative enough.

 

THE PARANA DAS PANELAS

ZODIAC CRUISE INTO THE CHANNEL AT

“PARA”= 2* 58.14 S, 57* 51. 20 W

 

            The afternoon was recommended for a siesta rather than an early cruise on the river since the mid day would be too hot.  So, I got a Portuguese film entitled Foreign Land about Brazilians fleeing the harsh economics of the first President after military dictatorships in Brazil---during the time I was traveling in Brazil in fact, and the people who tried somehow to flee to Portugal which had its own plague of refugee Angolans, etc.  I saw that two rafts had been oversubscribed with the “Birders,” so, I went on a general interest Zodiac, cautioning the others not to look if we saw a bird, since we were not a designated birder cruise!  We then promptly saw far more rare birds that the birding rafts!

 

            Our guide was a Costa Rican birder named Denis, and we almost immediately came upon a group of horned screamers.  This sis a special big bird and is the mark of a special endemic group of birds here.  We saw a lot of the yellow rumped Caciques, the oro pendolas, the parrots, lots of macaws, a group of the caracals posing for us, and saw some unique shots of the squirrel tailed cuckoos.  We then spotted the Hoatzin—a very coveted big bird like a turkey which never had been seen by the whole previous cruise up river, and we saw not one but a group of them.  They are a bird that eats the special rhododendrons like pant and has a bad smell so it has not been hunted out for food.  It has “wing claws” as a juvenile up to the first year, and it uses them to crawl and climb up trees when it falls out of them rather than flying to escape predators.  This makes it look very primitive like the pterodactyl, which it resembles.  It has a loud cry.  It was good to see and photograph.  

 

            We saw Savannah hawk, whittled jacana, green parrots, parakeets, and lots of other noisy birds, including a lesser toucan.  But, most of my next film was shot at a two toed sloth.  It was holding on to the trunk of a Cecropia tree, which it does not go to more than any other to eat leaves, but it is easier to see him in this tree with less dense leaves.  This one was a male, and it was hanging out in the sun, since it needs to heat up to ferment its leaves.  On a cloudy raining day period it can die with a full stomach, like the elephant, which need s to ferment as well.   IT crawls down its arduous slow process to defecate once every tow weeks, and buries its scat, thus; planting new trees, but also, thereby, preventing predators like cats from smelling it and finding it.  It has a lot of moss and other green stuff growing on it, which makes it an artist in camouflage.  It can swim, but when it emerges from the water, it looks very skinny since its long hair is matted.

 

            As we turned to go, the long rays of the Equatorial sunset could be seen on the cumulus clouds and striking the Orion at sunset on the river.  Just then a big rainbow emerged behind our Zodiac between two rain squalls.  We navigated into a channel to see the local fishermen who had paddled in with their dugouts from which they were fishing.  One fish jumped into our Zodiac.  It was an enchanting ride with a lot of raucous bird calls in the variegated canopy overhead.

 

            As I emerged, a woman identified my name as Dutch, and said she was with a fellow who was Dutch, whose name turns out to be Koiker.  He said he lived in New York but the there were two dozen of his names in the Holland Michigan phone book, but he was born in Friesland.  I then went into the bit about Friesian not being Dutch and about Middle English, etc, so he was amazed that I should know until I told him I was from the Western Michigan he was describing.

 

            I heard the first “re-cap” of our first Zodiac excursions, and was amused that our “non-birding boat” had seen more birds than that of the die-hard birders.  I went to dinner and sat deliberately with a few of the Abercrombie and Kent group whom I did not know including one couple from Louisiana who had cattle on their greatgranddaddy’s spread but otherwise just were trying to hold it together.  I went to bed rather than trying to see the DVD I have wanted to borrow from someone else who has it out just now which is on the subject of a Brazilian, which had so interested one of the passengers that this DVD is the reason she had taken this trip.

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