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AMAZON |
May 2005 |
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Click on any photo to see a larger version |
DS photos courtesy of |
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Ironically,
the initial thing I noticed about the Amazon wasn’t
the water --- it was the sky.
Stretched beyond limits, as if the skies of the southern hemisphere
weren’t big enough to cover the vast riverscape below.
Early
that morning we had flown over
the Andes and from the plane caught our first glimpse of
My brother Ron and I, together with friends Dirk
and Beth, had come to fulfill every herper’s dream: breakfast at the airport McDonald’s, in situ After
nearly 24 hours of travel, we
finally arrive in
Fully sleep deprived and totally excited, we stumble across the airfield into the waiting van of a friendly transfer agent from the eco-tour company that arranged virtually every detail of our trip.
Out of the airport and into the city. Relatively few cars and trucks --- with no outside roads, there’s little need for automobiles --- but the streets and open-air markets are crowded with bicycles and noisy motocarros, colorful motorbikes converted into canopied tricycle taxis.
Across the center of town and down to the docks. The waterfront overlooks a long lake (formerly a section of Amazon until the river changed course) streaked with islands of floating vegetation. The van is unloaded and we pile into the speedboat that will take us 100 miles downstream to our final destination.
The
Then
it’s into the main channel. The sky
expands, the river banks recede, and at last we enter Rio Amazonas.
It doesn’t take long to realize the river is a highway, with eighteen-wheelers (minus the wheels) hauling logs to Iquitos and delivering cargo to distant villages dependent on provisions from the big city.
Families use the river, too, as their residential street. Scattered all along the Amazon are isolated homesteads, little more than clearings on the river bank, whose residents live off fishing and subsistence farming, and perhaps the ocassional surplus they sell in Iquitos or trade for supplies. These are mostly Spanish-speaking settlers, not indigineous Indians. At the beginning of the twentieth century the
Amazon basin produced much of the world’s rubber, fueling economic growth
that enticed Peruvians from the other side of the Andes to come work in
But it was the sky that captivated me. Everywhere above the rainforest, clouds grew into mountain ranges, the heat and humidity made visible and magestic. I could practically see the river saturate the trees, transpire through the leaves, and rise up to the sky. Forming cumulus so heavy with water vapor there was no chance of escape, no drifting on the wind, just returning as rain to the Amazon to begin again. Here, even the clouds belong to the river.
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