Tuesday, January 13, 2009

Amazon voyage - part three

Lest it be thought Manaus nowadays is just old buildings and bejewelled ghosts, here's one of the shopping streets.

And this is the fish market about six in the morning.

But what I enjoyed most was the hubbub around the docks.







There's something quite endearing about riverboats. They are cheerful - almost cocky - little vessels butting into the water as they chug along. Mind you, that's easy to say as, from the comfort of a liner, you observe their crowded, hammock-filled decks.



No picture - or at least no picture of mine in an e-mail - can adequately convey the size of the Amazon. But I'll try. First is a close up of a small boat and, using an old television technique, next is a wide shot.



Santarém, a city halfway between Manaus and the sea, is where the Brazilian rubber industry's downfall began. From here, the British smuggled rubber seeds to be planted in what was then Malaya. Nowadays, according to the Guardian Weekly, “Brazil could be the world’s biggest rubber producer, yet it imports 70% of its rubber … Brazil now has only 2% of world production. Asia has 95%, while Africa accounts for the rest.” (5.9.08)

At Santarém, I'm big news. Well, perhaps not me, but the ship. I was considering offering the young reporter some highly personalized professional advice.

Flooding sometimes cuts off Santarém from the rest of the country. Much of the one road is dirt and, even when open, there are said to be bandits. Below is a road sign on the town's outskirts. It's a long way to other parts of Brazil. One day, I'll make it to Rio or Sao Paulo, but maybe not Porto Alegre.

In the 1920s, Henry Ford, otherwise a reasonably astute businessman, sank millions into a rubber plantation near Santarém. It failed. Nowadays, occasional visitors arrive to inspect the remains.

The Americans built homes for managers and workers, offices, clubs, hospitals, schools and churches. The fire hydrants - imported from Michigan in 1930s - apparently still work.



The locals were welcoming.

Even this egret was prepared to pose.

I also spotted a wonderful scarlet macaw, but, unfortunately, didn't react quickly enough to get a picture.

I liked this Brazilian-made Beetle. The originals were made in Brazil until the 1990s. They remind me of those jaunty little Amazon riverboats.

There were other islands still to come - Trinidad, Dominica, St. Kitt's, St. Croix and the Dominican Republic. But perhaps we'll leave those for another time, as my main goal was Manaus and the Amazon.

Without Michael and Kathy, the voyage would have been far less enjoyable, so here they are one evening. Our 'sundowners' are nearby and it has been a most pleasant day on this greatest of rivers.

In 1859, after spending eleven years in the Amazon rain forest, the zoologist Henry Walter Bates began his voyage home to England. He wrote: " ... about 400 miles from the mouth of the main Amazons, we passed numerous patches of floating grass ... this was the last I saw of the Great River." A hundred and fifty years later, I, too, spotted drifting evidence of the rain forest far out to sea.

You didn't expect me to end without a concluding Amazon sunset shot, did you?

Sunday, January 11, 2009

Amazon voyage - part two

Christmas Eve and, well out to sea, Atlantic blue had become Amazon brown. The river's mouth is hundreds of kilometres wide and an outbound freighter was off to port. After all my time at sea, I am still fascinated by ships. Name and home port? What's it carrying? Where is it from and going to?

A few hours later, we began to see the Amazon's banks.



What to say about the Amazon that hasn’t already been said? What impressive statistics to state that you haven’t already heard? The Amazon is the world’s largest and most powerful river system. It drains an area bigger than the Continental U.S. From the Andes, it runs nearly 6,500 kilometres to the Atlantic. The river is so wide that, so far as I am aware, no bridge spans it.

Late at night, we crossed into the Southern Hemisphere.

0630 Christmas morning. A year ago, I was on a tall ship a day's sail from Tahiti. Today I am on the world's mightiest river.

And we have some visitors.





Everyone knows how I feel about Christmas, so, suffice it to say, the day passed in the low-key way I had hoped when plotting my escape six months previously.

The trip encouraged me to search my library for H.M. Tomlinson’s ‘The Sea and the Jungle’, his extraordinary account of a 1909 voyage from Wales to the Amazon. I also read Richard Collier’s ‘The River that God Forgot’ and extracts from Henry Walter Bates’ 1863 book, ‘The Naturalist on the River Amazons’ (sic). Bates was succinct: “The prospect of being swamped in this hideous solitude was by no means pleasant…”

Tomlinson describes it as feverish and pestilential, a ‘white man’s graveyard’, and preserve of natives with poison-tipped arrows. It still is. A voyage up the Amazon requires a yellow fever shot and anti-malarial drugs. And, not far from where I was leaning on the Explorer’s railing, perhaps an Indian was aiming his blowgun - with any luck, not at me.

Occasionally we sighted huts and small settlements. For someone from a major city, they seemed inexpressibly remote. Come to think of it, they are.

Women doing laundry in the river; children running to watch us pass; cows sheltering from the muggy tropical heat.

More than a sixteen hundred kilometres up the river we came to the 'meeting of the waters' where the black of the Rio Negro intersects with the brown of the Amazon. For some distance, there is a clear demarcation.



Around the bend is the fabled city of Manaus. Here's Manaus in 1900 – a thousand miles from the Atlantic and jungle just two miles from the city centre. Only the river to get in or out.

Electric streetcars and street lights. Twenty-three high class department stores for a city of 36,000. A customs house that was shipped - massive stone by stone - from Britain.

Stores with the latest fashions from London and Paris. Laundry sent to Europe for cleaning. More diamonds were said to be sold here than anywhere else in the world.

All built on the backs of what was virtually slave labour. Tomlinson writes of rubber – “the damnable commodity which is its [Manaus'] ruin”.

Below is a rubber tree; you can see the cuts, which are made periodically, and from which comes the latex.

In 1896, on the proceeds of rubber, an extraordinary opera house was completed in Manaus. The workers, designers, most of the materials came from the other side of the Atlantic. Wood for some of the flooring was shipped from Brazil, carved in Europe and sent back to Brazil.

Here, for a few, short years, were scenes of elegance to rival any in Europe and then the rubber boom collapsed. What had been the 5th richest city in the world became a tropical backwater and the opera house a warehouse.

The flash of a 'point and shoot’ camera does no justice to the opulent interiors, so here's a shot I've 'borrowed'.

No opera, but how often do I go to the opera in Toronto? Instead, we attended a wonderful performance combining classical strings with contemporary regional percussion. Seated on a red velvet chair in a box once the preserve of evening clothes and gowns, it was hard not to reflect on the irony of, even now, this being only a short distance from the jungle.

And here, on a sweatily humid morning, is the nearby rain forest.

And, with the sun out, here’s some more.

This may be botanical heresy, but, to me, one rain forest is much like another. Sorry, I'm not a flora & fauna person, but I’ll tell you one thing – the vegetation is so thick, you can’t see the rain forest for the trees. Tomlinson says “ … I was told that once a man had gone merely within the screen of leaves, and then no doubt had lost, for a few moments, his sense of direction for the camp, for he was never seen again.”

Architecture interests me more than trackless jungle and poisonous frogs. Evidence of the rubber era is easy to find in Manaus. This mansion was built by one of the rubber barons.







And there are superb old tiles, weather worn reminders of when isolated Manaus was a strange combination of South American 'Wild West' and tropical haute société.


Saturday, January 10, 2009

Amazon voyage - part one

A year or so ago, a friend, a retired British sea captain, sent me a wonderful, early morning picture he had taken of riverboats in Santarém, Brazil. It evoked a longing, the sort that comes when you’re safely at home in a comfortable armchair and not dripping buckets of sweat and slapping at mosquitoes.

It reminded me that I wanted to go up the Amazon and attend the opera. I wanted a small ship for the voyage. And I wanted to be away for Christmas and New Year. How to combine the three?

One of the attractions was the ship, the MV Explorer, a floating 'campus' of the University of Virginia. In term time, she carries students all over the world. Between terms - with the usual cruise ship cabins, restaurants, entertainment and lounges, plus an 8,000 volume research library - she takes older passengers.

In mid-December, I flew to Nassau and, unlike a normal cruise ship, was able to board a day early. Joining me were my friends Mike and Kathy from California and Statia in the Caribbean.

The Explorer may look big, but she's not. She's less than a third the size of the old QE2, a sixth the size of the new Queen Mary 2 and, by next year, when the world's largest liner is in service, will be a ninth the tonnage of that. With a modest complement of passengers, seven academic lecturers and the freedom to bring aboard your own booze, what more could I want?

Here's my cabin window on the first day. A stiff wind's bending the dockside palms; my well-travelled beach ball globe is by the window and I'm ready to go.

In the forward lounge, one passenger was checking his laptop (the ship has WiFi) and chuckling. He was reading the day's 'Doonesbury' cartoon. Apparently, the punch line was, "Who would you like to throw shoes at?"

In fact, this type of voyage seemed to attract a decidedly liberal passenger list. Early one morning, while having a breakfast out on deck, a distinguished-looking gent with an 'Impeach Bush-Cheney' T-shirt sat nearby.

Even on a smallish ship, you can always find a place to yourself. On a quiet morning, I had the pool to myself.

I didn't take a lot of shots in Nassau, but liked this 'safe sex' sign.

And I admired this handsome Nassau street light - perhaps from the 1930s.

Nassau ... St. Barth's ... Barbados. I'm quite fond of this dockside shot of the towers for loading sugar in Bridgetown.

Having been introduced to it on a previous trip, I'm also overly fond of the excellent Cockspur's (“Est'd 1884”) Barbados rum punch, which you can purchase pre-mixed. I stocked up on a number of bottles. The potency may account for the picture.

As we headed south, I attended lectures on 'Candomblé: The Afro-Brazilian religion', 'Art and Architecture of Brazil' and 'Manaus from the Rubber Boom of the 19th Century to Modern Days'.

Progressing along the coast of Brazil, decorations appeared around the ship. Here's the Christmas tree on the bridge.

I've spent a lot of hours on freighter bridges, but this was only the second time I've been on a liner's bridge. Citing security, most cruise lines no longer allow passengers in the wheelhouse.

Here's a shot of the ultra-modern layout and one of the quartermasters who acts as lookout.