It's one of the fabled journeys, and it doesn't feel quite real, at first. Arriving into Belem is simply too ordinary - hot, to be sure, but nothing anyone who grew up in tropical Australia can't handle. Steamy and busy and dirty and loud, but that's a lot of places. And then you head down to the river to check out the boats, and it suddenly crystallizes into the journey of a lifetime.
Of course we can sleep in hammocks! Get there early, get a good spot and crowding won't be a problem! Why should we mind being the only tourists on the boat - it'll be fun! The Joao Pessoa Lopes was a commuter boat, basically - goods and people up and down the various towns on the river, people climbing on and off all the time, hammocks popping up immediately over your head in the middle of the night.
Three days to Manaus, we were told. But this is Brazil, where the "mas or menos" used everywhere else in South America isn't added in. It goes without saying. Three days turned into eight, but they were also eight of the most remarkable days of our life. We can still hear the giggles of little Leticia, who slept with her mum in the hammock next to ours, and was an excellent education in how to survive a very mischievous toddler. "Le-ti-cia" would come the exasperated cry, and usually followed by a gale of laughter as someone on board plucked Leticia from somewhere she wasn't meant to be. And at one point, moored alongside another boat for several days as we shared supplies, that was a lot of possible hiding places. Health and safety has no real foothold in the Amazon, as we discovered when the two casually lashed together boats actually became a unit for socialising and trading ... and when our boat ran out of my necessary daily ration of Guarana softdrink, my husband joined the crowds shimmying it over the rail to the better supplied vessel. 
On the river, too, commerce thrives, the boats being constantly approached by canoes small and large, with fruit to sell, or meat, or fish. The dexterity with which even the tiniest children (these two couldn't have been more than six) handled the various wooden craft on the river was astonishing - but then, they literally live on the river, in homes and communities that probably haven't changed significantly in the last century, possibly two. Except for the satellite dishes in every yard, of course - "for the futbol!" we were told.
The archaeology of the Amazon River is endlessly fascinating: a museum in Belem first alerted me to the idea that the traditional idea of scattered, nomadic tribes barely subsisting in the rainforest was unlikely to be an accurate representation of the past realities. The work of Brazilian archaeologist Denise Schaan has demonstrated that the islands at the mouth of the Amazon once supported a highly sophisticated network of chiefdoms over a period from around 1000 A.D, enduring well into the colonial period; very recent work in Bolivia has shown the "islands" of vegetation in the Amazonian floodplains have signs of human presence dating back 10,000 years. ('Scientists discover earliest human presence in the Bolivian Amazon', Popular Archaeology.) This article in the Washington Post offers a good overview of a variety of research being conducted into past societies in the Amazon Basin; Schaan's website www.Marajoara.com is also an excellent resource.
This was information that didn't exist or I had no access to at the time; instead I made do by drifting from museum to museum across Brazil, and taking notes wherever I could decode the Portuguese or find someone to chat to in English. Occasionally, I hit the mother lode - in the little town of Sao Raimundo Nonato, several days to the south in Piaui state, I was able to buy the Proceedings of the International Meeting of the Peopling of the Americas that had been held there to honour the amazing discoveries in the Serra di Capivara National Park (I'll cover that under P for Pedra Furada - but the image under my blog title is my photograph of one of the more famous rock art panels there.)
Even a small amount of reading about the archaeological record in northern Brazil makes it very clear that this seemingly timeless landscape has been heavily curated over time, and at various points in its history, supported significant social complexity. Easy enough to believe on the narrow river, when you can see life on the banks, but on the wide river ... nature seems to rule.
No comments:
Post a Comment