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Yesterday we landed with a bang back in the noise and busyness of Manaus after four days on Lake Juma in the Amazon forest, south of Manaus and the Amazon River. We've absolutely loved it, and are really missing the quiet and beauty of where we've just been...
To get there, we crossed the Amazon and the 'Meeting of the Rivers' (the Negro and Solimoes Rivers - black and white rivers respectively, and noticeably different when you cross over them), and then travelled by VW combi and a little motor boat the rest of the way.
We stayed the first and last nights in a cabin up behind a camphouse and the second night out in the jungle. Our guide was Tim (Brazilian but with grandparents who were from Bristol, British Guiana and Amerindian!), and we were so lucky to get him. He's an ecology student, has grown up in this environment, and knew everything there was to know about where we were, pointing out so many animals and birds especially....
We fished for red-bellied and silver piranhas (I was relieved to catch one... Simon was a bit better!), and went out at night to catch a cayman... We did a hot, sweaty but brilliant walk through jungle another morning - me entirely disorientated, but Tim recognising every tree and plant we walked past... and we camped out for the night in hammocks under a shelter made from palm leaves in the thick of the jungle, lying awake at night to the sounds of birds and monkeys making their way through the trees... bitten to death by mosquitoes around the camp fire as we ate our dinner, but loving lying in the safety of the hammocks under nets at night... and just being there.
My favourite bit has been sitting in the boat, for hours, slowly paddling around spotting wildlife, at sunrise and sunset, with no-one else around and nothing but the sound of birds and howler monkeys... We spent ages watching grey and pink dolphins flipping about, and have seen herons (boat-billed, capped...), egrets, black-collared hawks, snail kites, an osprey, wattled jacanas, sandpipers (migratory birds from the north pole!), lots and lots of kingfishers, and toucans...!! Just fantastic.
It's been too short. We'd do it again, and we'd go to Tim directly. (We have his e-mail if anyone's thinking of doing this...). We're sceptical about the size of the take that the guides and boatmen get relative to that of the agency. The agents are vultures around the city, surviving purely off the natural beauty of the Amazon and mostly the excellence of the guides. They scroll the new versions of the Lonely Planet and Footprint Guides desperate to make sure they're in for another year! Crazy....
So much of the Amazon has been cleared. Brazilians from the north-east of the country settled here during the rubber boom in the early 1900s. Their families still remain, surviving off their farms and tourism, and still clearing the land.
It's about half way through the dry season now. The water level drops 20m - the only river in the world that changes that much - 10cm a day. The homes are high on the banks or floating on the river. Some of the channels we took to get to the lake are becoming impassable... and moreso because of the deforestation. The locals are advised to leave the trees on the banks to keep the soil stable, but they don't always and the channels are full of the cleared trees and the earth from the banks that have washed away, and the channels will eventually become too wide to allow any depth of water, and dry out. It's eye-opening to see it all first hand...
It's a trip we'd recommend to anyone. Tim does month-long treks into the jungle for real hard-core (Ray Mears-type) survival and wildlife spotting (Tim heard a jaguar from where we camped, but that was as close as we got...) and it's definitely something to think about for another trip. We've just been taking it all in since we got back yesterday afternoon, and I'm experiencing that 'sadness' that you feel after the end of something so brill... I think it'll be another big highlight of the trip... Fab.
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