Amazon 2008

Back home

2008-06-17T15:46:00.001-07:00

Well, I'm now back in sunny California! It feels a bit odd to be back. The apartment feels so spacious and clean and white to me that it's like I've gone to the heaven of Hollywood movies; it doesn't feel normal after spending weeks in a hotel room so small I can't spin around without touching the walls (or stand up straight without banging my head). I just drove around on some errands, and that felt odd too. My flight home was very long, about 28 hours in transit all told, but uneventful. They pretended to lose my luggage, but I discovered it where they had hidden it, on the wrong carousel. Such playful people those airline baggage handlers are; it must come from a work environment that revolves (so to speak) around "carousels". It's like they're just happy, mischievous, luggage-destroying clowns.

By the way -- and this is the real reason I'm posting at all today -- I've just added a References Cited section to my talk in this blog, for those who want to look up the primary literature.

Last views of Manaus

2008-06-14T17:02:00.000-07:00

Most of the group left this morning at 6:30 AM on a long trip up the river to try to see boto, the pink Amazonian dolphins. I had seen those on my side trip at Juma Lodge, and it sounded like a very long time in a bus both ways, and the dolphins they would be seeing weren't wild dolphins anyway, but semi-tame ones accustomed to regular feeding by humans. So I stayed in Manaus and bopped around with Dr. Myatt instead.
First we caught a bus back to the Parque Mindu, which had seemed like quite a neat spot. We had gotten rained out there when we went as a group, so Rod and I wanted to try to see it again. We caught the right bus at the bus stop near our hotel, but it was the wrong bus stop, so we took that bus all the way through the downtown area before heading back out, passing the bus stop on the opposite side of the street from where we had caught it, and on northeast towards the edge of Manaus. After a bit we got off and transferred to a second bus which would actually get us to Parque Mindu, and that went pretty smoothly. The buses here are not quite as much of a mystery as they were at first; we now know how much they cost (2 reis, or perhaps $1.50), how to get the bus you need (ask a local, there are no route maps anywhere), how to get off where you need to go (ask the fare collector to warn you, street signs are almost nonexistent and the routes are very complex), and how to avoid being flung about like a sack of potatoes (adopt a very wide stance and hang on with both hands).
Parque Mindu was quite pleasing on the second visit. Since it was Saturday, there were tons of children running around everywhere, but they were well-behaved, so that was fine. As usual the easiest thing to see was insects: a new kind of dragonfly, damselflies in abundance near a small stream, a little yellow beetle (I point it out because it is almost the only beetle we've seen in the Amazon, oddly), lots of caterpillars including one species that seemed to make little houses for itself out of a rolled leaf and then forage from that home base, very handsome little multicolored grasshoppers, and paper wasps buzzing around a little nest they had built. We saw leaves that had been eaten my leaf miners, little insects that actually burrow around within the leaf between the upper and lower layers, leaving winding tracks behind. A huge wasp terrified and fascinated us; it sounded like a helicopter when it flew away. There were spiders in abundance, and little white moths that like to hide in large groups on the undersides of leaves. A strange vine with an undulating, creased surface hung across the trail; even Dr. Myatt, who knows more about plants than I know about everything else in the world combined, found it remarkable.

The crowning glory of our visit, however, was our sighting of the little monkeys that reside in the park, the pied-faced tamarin monkey. If I recall correctly, they are native to the Manaus area, and live wild in the park (and almost nowhere else). They were quite small, not particularly afraid of us, and fairly noisy. They were foraging in the canopy, and ran up and down the trees, hopping from branch to branch with great agility. At one point I was only perhaps three or four meters away from one, but of course I didn't get a good photo then; the photo here is one from a rather larger distance, of a more cooperative monkey.

So that was really neat. There is an orchid house at Parque Mindu too, but a quick look revealed that it was small and none of the orchids were blooming, so we skipped that. After a little drama with losing a pair of glasses (and then finding them by retracing our steps), and getting caught in a sudden downpour (when we serendipitously took shelter in a spot where they were giving out free popsicles to the children, and then to us), we walked out and caught a bus down to INPA.
We have been to INPA many times this trip, so we had a clear mission. Agenda item #1 was to see whether the river otter was more active this visit, and indeed he was; he was having a grand time in his water tank flipping around a little blue plastic water bottle cap. He would toss it in the air, catch it on his nose, chew on it, bat it around, and then deliberately fling it through the bars in front of the enclosure in order to involve the humans in his game. We would dutifully pick it up and toss it back in to him, and he'd do some more antics and then fling it back out to us again. He was absolutely charming. On the other hand, I had my camera inside his enclosure, between the bars, to photograph him, and at one point he made a sudden lunge for it, and if I had been just a hair slower I suspect he would have both gotten the camera and drawn blood. After that we noted his sharp claws and teeth and his very muscular arms, and kept our distance rather more respectfully.

Agenda item #2 was to go back to the indigenous crafts hut to buy more jewelry and such from them. Since we're coming up on the end of the trip, we're trying to make our money come out evenly so we don't have to exchange any reis back to dollars, so we estimated how much we would need for expenses through Sunday night, and blew the rest on their beautiful necklaces, bracelets, belts, earrings, and so forth. That spot has the best and most varied work we've seen in Manaus, and because it's run by INPA the money is all going to the indigenous people themselves, not to middlemen, so we've tried to buy there instead of in the downtown shops. Outside the hut a little raft of ants went by, so I photographed them; they were probably each about an inch long, and were moving together in a group sort of the way that a flock of birds move. We haven't seen proper army ants on this trip, so this was neat to watch -- still not army ants, but perhaps a little like how they would move. There was no clear leader ant, and yet the group as a whole maintained a direction of travel that seemed consistent and purposeful. Individual ants would stray from the group only slightly before returning, and the whole group of perhaps a hundred ants remained very cohesive and tight the whole time we watched them. Very neat.
Agenda item #3 was a return to INPA's ice cream hut. I got my favorite again, the chocolate and orange swirl. Fantastic. I took a photo of it this time; I think I haven't posted one before. We have been to many ice cream places in Manaus, because Rod has an unbelievable sweet tooth. The other night we popped into a place near downtown and all ordered scoops, but while we were all still working on ours, Rod was back at the counter ordering a second one. The INPA ice cream is the best in Manaus, though; great flavor and texture, and very friendly service.
Well, we're coming up on dinner time here now. This will probably be my last posting from Manaus, since I fly back tomorrow night, and tomorrow day will probably be spent packing and organizing and then sitting in the airport. My flight leaves at about 4:30 AM, so the logical thing is to go to the airport with the others, who fly out just after midnight, and sit. Catching a taxi at 1 AM would be unreliable and possibly even unsafe, so I'll just read my book and have food and beer at the airport concessions until they close for the night.
I'm glad I'm leaving tomorrow. It has been a great trip, but I'm ready to go home. My legs are absolutely covered in bites, I'm heartily sick of the monotonous food in Manaus (would you like grilled fish or grilled chicken or grilled beef?), my room seems to be infested with ticks (I've lost count of how many I've been bitten by at this point, but it's somewhere around a dozen), and I may even be reaching my limit on how many insects I can photograph without wanting to do something else for a while.
So I'll be in touch back in the States, and as I've mentioned in passing before, I'll probably post various links to movies, other people's photos, presentation writeups, and other miscellanea here for those who are interested. Thanks for reading!

Insects and Indians

2008-06-13T18:08:00.000-07:00

This morning we went to a botanical garden in a larger biological reserve called the Jardim Botanico Adolpho Ducke. Ducke was an Austrian naturalist and conservationist in Brazil in the 1940s and 1950s who came to be prominent enough to have a reserve named after him. The botanical garden was established quite recently, in 2000.
I took a few flower photos, but mostly pictures of insects. The insect-watching was virtually unparalleled. Pretty bicolored grasshoppers and little orange bees were abundant before we went into the jungle. A blue morpho butterfly seemed to like the margin of the jungle a lot, and flew in and out of the trees repeatedly, eventually settling into a pleasingly photographable behavior of hopping along the ground and slowly opening and closing its wings for no discernible reason. Our guide through the park pointed out a remarkable spiny green caterpillar on a leaf. A species of dragonfly with black-tipped wings liked semi-open areas within the forest. Lots of different species of ants were running around, including a very long-bodied, elegant ant and a huge vicious-looking ant well over an inch long. A large assassin bug sat still on a leaf, perhaps waiting for a victim, while on the underside of the same leaf a huge tan and black spider lurked, perhaps considering making the assassin bug its lunch. Leafhoppers abounded: a small bright red and turquoise species, a yellow species, and a very camouflaged brown species. A huge crane-fly sat on a tree trunk, the joints of its legs elegantly set off in contrasting white. There were lots of fungi too, as always, but the only ones I photographed today looked like little satin umbrellas.

In the afternoon we visited a museum dedicated to the indigenous peoples of the Amazon, the Museo do Indio. Photographs were prohibited in the museum, so I can't show you any of the things I saw (why is it that bureaucrats are so hostile towards photography?), but I can describe a bit. They had displays of pottery, weaving and basketry, dwellings, musical instruments, and dioramas of funeral rites and of Amazonian animals. The taxidermy in the dioramas and displays was shockingly bad -- desiccated and moth eaten birds, contorted squirrels nailed to branches -- but I suppose it's the thought that counts. Some of the displays supported the authenticity of the dance performance we had seen courtesy of INPA a few days before; they showed a large ceremonial house exactly like the one we had been in, and musical instruments like the ones we had heard, and clothes like the ones we had seen worn. They even had photographs in the museum of dance ceremonies in which the men wore the same bright-colored boxing shorts they were wearing when we watched them; those boxing shorts must have been an early cultural transfer from the West! It was nice to see that the ceremonies we had observed hadn't simply been made up from whole cloth for the benefit of tourists. There were also several things that underlined what I've been reading in One River; we saw a very large pot into which people spit chewed fruit, which is then fermented to make an alcoholic beverage, for example. There were a lot of pictures and artifacts from the Yanomami, which was good since Dr. Ouverney had spent time living with them; he was able to vastly supplement the rather threadbare commentary on the signs in the museum with additional information and personal stories.
One thing Dr. Ouverney commented on was how hard the women in indigenous groups often worked. They usually do not get to eat until after the men and the male children have eaten their fill, so they often suffer from malnourishment. At the same time, they do much of the work in the society; Dr. Ouverney says you rarely see a woman who is not carrying a baby on a sling at the same time that she is carrying a load of some kind in a bundle hanging from a strap around her forehead. These stresses combine to produce short lifespan and high mortality, particularly during childbirth. One River, the book I'm working on, speaks to this from a different angle: in the group Wade Davis describes in the part I've been reading, the women are responsible for cultivating and harvesting the coca leaves that are central to their culture, but only the men are allowed to chew the leaves.

Supermarkets and operas

2008-06-12T15:40:00.000-07:00

Yesterday was a down day; most of the others were stayed at the campsite an extra day, so those of us who decided to come back early could do whatever we wanted to do. We headed downtown to do some souvenier shopping; in one shop, I made an instant friendship with a little moth who must have liked the taste of my skin or something; I would try to brush it off, and it would just hop onto the brushing hand and sit there looking very pleased with itself. More determined efforts led to the moth flitting up to my face. At that point I decided I had to take a photo of my friend, so here it is.
I also went to the supermarket again, and since Keewi requested it, here are some photos of the supermarket. Not terribly exciting; it's a pretty typical supermarket. Fairly large Asian food section, which is interesting since we've seen no Asian people and no Asian restaurants in Manaus whatsoever; I'm not sure who is buying the miso and the wacky Japanese snacks!

After that we had a bit of an exciting time. Last night there was an enormous storm, the biggest we've seen on this trip. It was presaged by huge howling winds, and the rain followed soon after. I had gotten back to the hotel from dinner before it started; others were not so lucky, and got the most thorough soaking of their lives, I think. Leaks started in my room immediately. I put out an old water bottle to catch the main drip, and laid down a towel to soak up most of the rest, and then lay back to read as the storm raged outside. The lights flickered repeatedly, and brownouts lasting several seconds occurred repeatedly, but the power never quite went out entirely. Eventually I went to sleep as the storm continued. I didn't hear about it until this morning, but apparently some others had it much worse. Mike got the shortest straw; he got three (count 'em, three!) inches of water in his room, and most of his possessions, including his laptop, got soaked. He wasn't in his room when any of this happened; he just came back from a late dinner, and when he opened his door, a wave of water washed out towards him -- he said it was like Jumanji (although I think Jumanji ripped that off from Delicatessen, myself :->). It's not clear whether his laptop will ever work again, or whether any of this is covered by any sort of travel insurance, or what. There was an awful lot of swearing last night, apparently.
Also last night I discovered a small tick on my leg. I've found ticks crawling on me before, but I've never had one attach; the ones in California are big enough that they tickle me as they crawl, but these guys here are tiny, perhaps about a millimeter long, or slightly more. I put some Neosporin on it, on the theory that the suffocation of the vaseline would make it detach and back out. I don't know if that's just a myth, or what, but my tick did not detach by the next morning, and a more thorough search turned up two more as well. I have no idea where I got them; nobody else has them. I had my pants tucked into my socks the entire time we were at the INPA campsite, even when I was sleeping. So it's a mystery. Anyhow, we used alcohol and hydrogen peroxide and hot sterilized tweezers and all sorts of implements of destruction, and got the ticks removed, probably leaving behind all the little jaw parts and tick feces and everything that you're not supposed to leave behind. Supposedly there are no tick-borne diseases in the Amazon, so the risk of infection of the wound is the main thing. We'll see how that develops.
Anyhow, after all that excitement the group went today to the Parque Mindu, a fairly large park in northern Manaus with some nice stuff in it. It makes no pretense of being wild jungle, but it does have lots of orchids, a river with naturally occurring caimans and electric eels, agouti, and so forth. Mike spotted a glassy-winged sharpshooter, which was interesting; it is an invasive pest in California that causes big headaches for the Central Valley farmers, but perhaps here it's native, I don't know. It's the insect that looks like a leafhopper, but it's quite large, maybe almost two centimeters long. The acai palms had their lovely red roots showing nicely. We saw two wild sloths up in the trees, but they were impossible to photograph since it was raining hard; point your lens up at the sky, and it would immediately get raindrops on it.

Then we went for a tour of the opera house, called Teatro Amazonas, in the center of downtown Manaus. This is a building that was constructed at the height of the rubber boom, just over a century ago now, and it is ostentatious and overblown; not as much as comparable buildings in Europe, to be sure, but considering that it was built in the middle of the rainforest, it's quite a phenomenon. My favorite part was a ballroom in the upper part of the hall; its parquet floor was quite beautiful. We all put on felt overshoes before entering it, so as to not scuff up the varnish, and it was so smooth that walking felt like skating.

We have a group meeting in a couple of hours, at which a few students will do presentations. You may have noticed I haven't been putting up presentation synopses any more; it got to be an oppressive amount of work, since I couldn't have my laptop present for many of them, so I would have to take hand notes and transcribe them. Dr. Ouverney intends to browbeat everyone into typing up their own presentation summaries and putting them up somewhere; I'll link to that on this blog when it becomes available, probably well after the trip itself has ended.

Camping

2008-06-11T07:45:00.000-07:00

Camping was fun. The INPA campground was more developed than we expected; it had decent bathrooms, and a big shelter that we could hold meetings under, and even had chairs and tables. They had told us that they had foam pads of some kind; we expected some kind of foam camping pads such as one might take backpacking, but they turned out to be two-inch-thick gymnasium-style pads; I slept on one of those, with a mosquito net hung over me. I got bitten up a lot at Juma Lodge, mostly, I think, on the canoe rides around dusk; I should've tucked my pants into my socks. So I'm trying to be more careful now. Everybody has lots of bites, and nobody in the group has gotten a tropical disease yet, so I think the risk is low at present. Mostly we're just all very itchy.
The campground was right on a beach that had a little sand above water even now, at the high water mark; I gather it has stunning expanses of white sand at low water. It was pretty scenic, but not nearly as remote as we expected; there was a local village a stone's throw away across a small side river, and we heard music from them until fairly late at night; boats were also putt-putting by all through the evening and the next morning. It was sort of catered camping, as it turned out. Dr. Ouverney had arranged for food to be delivered to us for lunch and dinner, so we had barbecued chicken, rice, fish (your choice of head or tail, I had one of each), and so forth. Simple food, but tasty, and much easier than trying to cook for twenty people. I did only a little birdwatching; kiskadees and tropical kingbirds, but mostly amazing numbers of vultures, traveling in flocks (as in the picture at right, but I don´t know how visible they are) or sitting hunchbacked in trees. We all wondered where there is enough carrion to sustain such a huge population of vultures!
The morning of the 10th we went for a fairly long hike through rainforest a short boat ride away from the campsite. We started more or less in somebody's back yard, and the land was almost completely cleared; then we reached the forest edge, and were in thick, dense secondary forest (you can see how crowded it is in the photo, and how all the trees are thin and young; primary forest is not like that). We hiked perhaps a mile or so to a small waterfall in a pretty little natural clearing, and hiked back on the same trail. It was one of the nicer hikes I've done in the Amazon, actually; it was a good trail, and there was lots to see. Strange fungi were everywhere, in all sorts of colors and sizes and shapes. Beautiful butterflies flitted about, almost never landing for more than an instant. A completely bizarre spider, whose body was flattened like a big tick, managed a complex web next to the trail. A large weevil stood motionless on a tree trunk.

A strange spiky pupa case hung from a thread, waving in the little breezes. Life is simply everywhere in the rain forest; if you're walking, it just looks like green vegetation everywhere, but if you stop and take a minute or two, you start to see things everywhere you look. Tiny spiders spin webs inside the curling ends of climbing vines. Ants are everywhere, busily transporting things and defending their territories. We saw jaguar scat on the trail, full of fur from some animal it had eaten. Birds call all around you, and you occasionally see flashes of motion in the corner of your eye as they flit from branch to branch. But the life is all either tiny or hidden; you have to look carefully to see it.
Later that day we went to visit an indigenous group near the campsite. We were quite skeptical about it at first; we got there by walking around a trail past shanties with TV antennas playing American music. But it turned out to be quite a remarkable experience. They performed perhaps four or five traditional dances for us, playing a wide variety of traditional instruments (generally one instrument per dance, which seemed to be their custom; the instrument is associated with the dance, it appeared). It was, of course, a performance for tourists, but it also seemed important to them. The women danced with their children on their hips, and the older children were playing instruments and participating; they were being raised within their traditional culture, and they clearly knew the songs well and enjoyed performing them. So it was, of course, motivated by a desire for tourist money (they took donations and sold various handmade products at the end of the performance), but at the same time it felt surprisingly genuine and authentic -- much more so than the indigenous visit we had done through Juma Lodge, although that was neat in its way too.
I've been reading a book my mother lent me, One River by Wade Davis, and this visit was interesting from that perspective. The leader of the group said that they were closely related to indigenous groups from Colombia, and had migrated southward in recent times, so they may be similar to the Colombian groups discussed by Davis. The men all had a spray of leaves tied around their waists; I wonder whether those might be connected, in a historical sense, to a tradition of coca-chewing. I don't think they were coca leaves, and I saw no evidence of chewing in this group, but perhaps its symbolic of a past tradition, who knows. Wild speculation. Dr. Ouverney, who has spent a lot of time living with indigenous groups and once took ayahuasca, said that he thought one of the dances they performed for us might have been connected to a traditional ayahuasca ceremony. Many of the other things the chief said reminded me of things I had just read in Davis's book; it was really fascinating.
I took some video of the dances, but the files are much too large to upload from here; the internet connection here is about modem speed. I'll do something with them once I'm back home; watch this blog even after I'm back, as I may post some miscellaneous extras like that.

A dangerous place

2008-06-09T09:25:00.000-07:00

One of the students on the trip, Jonathan, got mugged on Friday, while I was at Juma with Bill and Vida. He had been going to the internet cafe with his laptop regularly, and apparently two young men there noticed that and decided to waylay him, at gunpoint, soon after he came out onto the street. The people at the internet cafe noticed the commotion, rounded up a car, went after the bandits, pretended to be the police, and got them to drop Jonathan's backpack with his laptop in it. It all ended without bloodshed, and Jonathan got his laptop back; but apparently shots got fired at one point, in the midst of the commotion, and it has got everybody frightened. We have been staying in this neighborhood for a long time now, and keeping a pretty high profile, and Dr. Ouverney thinks we have just called too much attention to ourselves and have become targets. We need to be more careful.
We leave today at 3:15 PM -- quite late! -- to camp at the INPA campsite on the Rio Negro. I'm glad for the late departure time; this morning I need to go to the internet cafe and sign up for my fall classes! I'll be taking physics 52 (thermodynamics and optics), botany 165 (plant communities of California), biology 124 (mammalian physiology) and biology 126 (mammalian physiology lab), I think. My next-to-last semester!

Sorry about the avalanche

2008-06-08T14:30:00.000-07:00

Well, that´s it for now. Sorry about all those posts at once! They´re probably quite boring, too, unless you´re a birdwatcher (or maybe even if you are a birdwatcher :->). Anyhow, tomorrow morning the group is supposed to go camping on the Rio Negro for one or two nights, so I´ll probably post another avalanche later in the week. Right now I´m heading back to the pousada to relax before dinner, maybe do some laundry, maybe go to the supermarket...

Back in Manaus

2008-06-08T11:48:00.000-07:00

Back at the pousada in Manaus. The drive back had some lovely birdwatching. Among various birds I had seen before, I saw some new ones: a male anhinga (like a cormorant) spreading its wings on a bare branch, a great egret that caught a large fish and flew off with it in its bill as we watched, two capped herons (I think, but I didn't get a really good look at either), several cocoi herons, a rufescent tiger-heron, and a roadside hawk (that's its name, and it was indeed by the roadside). If we had taken the road at a slower pace, I'm pretty sure I would have seen another dozen species or more. The birding here is really amazing; I've never been an avid birder, but it's hard not to get pulled into it in a place like this! Sorry I didn't get any bird photos for the blog, but you can look them all up on Google anyway. :->
Anyhow, now I'm in my room with the air conditioning running, which is lovely. I'm looking forward to taking a shower this evening and coming out into a cool, dry room instead of the steam bath that was the Juma area. I've felt pretty physically comfortable this whole trip; it hasn't been as hot as I expected it to be. But it was starting to wear me down at Juma.
Now I just need to get my act together, and then I'll go off to the internet cafe and spend a couple of hours posting all this babbling so you can all read it!

Boto and caimans

2008-06-08T05:25:00.000-07:00

Woke up early to pack before breakfast, but the generator is off, so I have no light. So I'll write up what we did yesterday afternoon, instead. We went out in the "canoe" for more than five hours, from a little after three until almost 8:30. By the time we got back, our rear ends were protesting loudly about the wooden seats!
We started out by going to a spot good for seeing boto, the pink Amazon river dolphins. Last time had been unsuccessful, but this time was a roaring success. First we found a mother with a baby, and watched them surface a few times, but they soon vanished on us; probably the mother didn't like people being so close. Then we found a spot where two different groups of boto were swimming, and we saw them surface repeatedly. They were in a playful mood; they blew bubbles under our boat several times, and they surfaced in formation and in rapid succession, letting us see them well. This is somewhat unusual behavior for the usually secretive boto, although by no means unheard of. We all got a good look at their color, which is unusual and hard to describe. Vida called it a "dusty rose," but I think they are redder and darker than that. Perhaps similar to the color of the inside of a guava. They were quite beautiful.
Then we tooled around looking for wildlife, and mostly found only birds. We saw a paradise jacamar again, much more clearly than the first time; they are quite beautiful, with a very long tail and a white collar on green, blue and brown plumage. Both yellow-billed terns and large-billed terns were flying in large numbers, occasionally plunging into the water at high speed to catch things. Egrets were flying in formation in large numbers, but it was difficult to identify which species; from that behavior alone, most likely they were cattle egrets again, but it looked like they had black legs. Who knows. We saw several snail kites near nightfall, both flying and perched, and a yellow-headed caracara, a type of falcon, in a high tree at the water's edge. I managed to pin down the dove/pigeon we've been seeing as a ruddy pigeon, having finally gotten a really good look at one. We saw our first greater ani fly and land, which was quite exciting -- they are very large, almost half a meter long, with dark iridescent green and blue plumage. A couple of black birds seen in silhouette were confidently identified as black-fronted nunbirds by our guide, who was incredibly good; he quickly identified everything we saw without the use of binoculars, often by call as well as appearance, and he was never wrong in all the instances where I was able to check him. Still, perhaps I won't count the nunbirds, since I wouldn't have been able to identify them from what I saw of them. We saw a pair of toucans fly across the river again, but again, they vanished before we could even get binoculars on them. They're incredibly hard to get a good look at. Finally, several tropical kingbirds were in trees near the water.
After the sun set over the water, which was beautiful to watch as always, we went looking for caimans. Our guide stood at the front of the boat and rapidly passed his flashlight along the shoreline, watching for the reflection of the light from a caiman's eyes. He found several that wisely scooted away when our boat approached, so we would plunge into the reeds near the shore and have to laboriously back out into the open water again. The reeds in some places had little glow-worms phosphorescing near the water's surface, which was interesting to see. At one point I saw the flashlight's reflection from a caiman's eyes, at another, a flash of motion as a cayman dove into the water to evade capture. Finally our guide was successful in catching a small caiman, a baby perhaps a half a meter long, by lying down in the front of the boat and scooping up the caiman as the boat plunged into the reeds next to it. It didn't struggle at all, interestingly, but just hung limply in his hand, seemingly patiently awaiting its release ("oh, god, this guy again"). The skin on its belly was very soft and pliable, while its back was very hard and armored. After a couple of minutes he released it back into the water. It hung motionless for just a moment, then disappeared with a flick of its tail.
The boat ride back was an adventure in itself. It was quite dark, with only a crescent moon faintly illuminating the landscape, and we traveled for more than an hour to get back to the lodge. As far as any of us could tell, it all looked the same in every direction: moonlit water followed by dark trees. But our guide unhesitatingly directed the boat, silently flicking his flashlight this way and that to tell the fellow at the back of the boat which way to steer. Sometimes we were out on open water, sometimes passing through narrow channels, sometimes brushing under overhanging trees. I asked our guide how he knew where to go, and he just replied that he has never been lost in his life. He said that in the high water season, all the rivers south of the Solimoes and the Amazon are connected; if we went off course, he said, we would end up one another river. Only when the water is low do they differentiate into truly distinct rivers. People take advantage of these shortcuts; in high water season you can catch a water taxi from Manaus to the Juma lake area that takes about twelve hours via shortcuts, but in low water season the same water taxi takes two days. By the time we got back we were all quite ready for dinner. Dessert was the lime mousse again, very yummy.
Difficult bird-watching this morning; lots of small, flitty, drab birds that I'm not good enough to identify before they disappear. The only one I think I got a handle on at all was a euphonia, but I don't know what species. A flock of what looked like geese flew overhead, but my guidebook lists no geese at all, so that's a mystery. I glimpsed the woodcreeper for a moment when I cam out my door, but it didn't want to be seen, and flew off instantly. I think I hear dolphins blowing in the water right in front of my cabin; I heard howler monkeys earlier. This really is an amazing place.

Birds and palm fronds

2008-06-07T13:15:00.000-07:00

Borrowed a bird book from Bill and Vida this morning. It appears that we've been seeing yellow-billed terns, black-crowned night herons, cattle egrets, wattled jacanas, turkey vultures and black vultures, black-collared hawks, scarlet macaws, blue anis, amazon kingfishers (and perhaps also green kingfishers and/or green-and-rufous kingfishers, but I want to confirm those), either lineated or crimson-crested woodpeckers (I missed the key differentiating characters), and yellow-rumped caciques. Quite a few birds remain unidentified, including the toucans we've been seeing, the various swifts or swallows, and the doves or pigeons we've seen perched in trees above the water, as well as the woodcreeper I've spotted several times outside my cabin. Then there are the vast numbers of small, flitty birds up in the canopy that I never get a clear look at; it would take a better birdwatcher than I to make any progress on them. I think I saw a screaming piha, the bird that makes the wolf-whistle call, near my cabin, but it didn't call while I was watching it, and it's not a distinctive-looking bird so I'm not sure.
The hike turned out to be a long boat ride followed by a very slow machete trek through the forest. Not that I'm complaining; it was my first walk through real primary forest, and it was quite neat. Many very tall trees, including acai palms, brazil nut trees, and several species that smelled absolutely wonderful but whose names I didn't catch. Lots of insect life; dragonflies and damselflies, little fruit flies, a hive of wasps with the larvae exposed and wriggling on the surface. There were lots of small flies that liked to hover in place and that somehow made a white X from their body parts while in flight, perhaps by holding one pair of legs high and one pair of legs low; I wanted to catch one to examine it more closely, but they evaded me. The arachnids were also well represented; we saw a large harvestman with yellow spots on its body, a very large spider that lived in a hole and that our guide lured out for photographs using a stick in a way that the spider seemed to think was prey, little jumping spiders, and a tick that I found crawling up my clothes. One strange thing I saw was what appeared to be a spiky caterpillar metamorphosing into a moth without benefit of any sort of pupa. I don´t recall ever hearing of such a thing before. I put the photo here; can anyone enlighten me about this?
At one point in the hike our guides stopped to show us how the palm fronds are used; they did a quick demonstration of weaving a roof and a basket, and then made all of us little things out of the fronds. I got a star, suitable for use as a Christmas ornament; Vida, who is always everyone's favorite, got an ornate and quite realistic grasshopper made entirely of folded fronds! They don't use the mature fronds for this sort of work; instead, they cut off an inner frond that had not yet unfolded, and separate its leaves by hand. Those fronds are very clean and new, and feel very much like plastic, not like vegetable matter.
The birdwatching on the boat ride back was quite good. We saw several old favorites, plus a blue-crowned trogon and a paradise jacamar, both beautiful birds. Birdwatching in the Amazon is a bit easier than elsewhere, because so many of the species here are brilliantly and distinctively colored; even an ignoramus like me can't help noticing and identifying a blue-crowned trogon! We also saw several blue morpho butterflies that came quite close to the boat; they really are stunning, but they never seem to stop and land so that you can admire them. A huge land snail shell amazed everybody, but we never saw a live one, just the shell, in which a spider seemed to have taken up residence. A couple of capuchin monkeys were moving around in the trees far away, but nobody but the guide ever got a clear look at them; we just saw flashes of motion among the leaves.
Now it is muggy and sweltering. I'm typing in my underwear, and even that feels like too much exertion, so I'm going to go lie down and read.

Morning musings

2008-06-07T06:10:00.000-07:00

Woke before dawn to the sound of howler monkeys in the distance, and enjoyed the slow emergence of dawn with all its sounds. One sound this morning is the sound of music playing in the distance, unfortunately; but it's soft, and doesn't completely obscure the forest sounds. Some tourist party boats went by the lodge yesterday morning and evening, playing load music and making big waves that made the buildings here sway. Amazing that even here one can't escape that sort of thing.
Breakfast is in a little less than an hour, and then we are going on a hike through the forest on Juma Lodge land. They own a lot of land here -- 160,000 hectares, if I recall correctly -- and it is all primary forest, untouched by the loggers. That's a very rare thing anywhere near Manaus! We have been enjoying seeing the big, tall trees that rise above the main canopy; many of them are brazil nut trees, which are protected now by law, but there are others, too, whose names we don't know. Many of the birds really like the tallest trees, for their high vantage point and, I presume, their relative safety from the risk of snakes and such; it is easy to see how logging out the tallest trees would cause immediate harm to the ecosystem, even when the remaining forest still appears dense and healthy. The tallest trees, when they die, also provide the snags that the vultures sit upon; and since they are different species than the lower trees, if they are logged out, those species are no longer represented in the forest at all, so all the species that are closely dependent upon them will become locally extinct.
On a different subject, four new guests arrived yesterday: a couple from Zurich, an older man from Germany, and a mid-thirties woman from Houston who rarely speaks. None of them seem particularly interested in nature, oddly; I'm mystified as to what they are doing here. A big hawk moth (a.k.a. sphinx moth) was on the netting in the dining room last night, and none of them stirred a muscle to look at it; and when we all went out in the boat yesterday, they seemed to take no interest in the birds we were seeing, and didn't want to borrow binoculars to look at them. One of the mysteries of life, I guess. The couple from Zurich was just at the Pantanal, a wetlands in the south, and perhaps the birdwatching here is just boring compared to how it was there; they said they took over 500 bird photos there in just a couple of days.
The record of amazing wildlife right outside my front door in the morning remains unbroken; within seconds of walking outside, a toucan flew by within fifteen feet of where I stood. Remarkable. It feels like being on the Truman show, like somebody somewhere is watching me and saying "He's approaching the door; cue toucan flight sequence...".
I still smell like monkey this morning.

Evening lightning

2008-06-06T20:02:00.000-07:00

I got back to my room after dinner, and as always, a moth of two entered the room with me before I got the door shut. One was sort of fluttering along on the floor near the door, and it wasn't more than fifteen seconds before a hairy black spider the size of my thumb crept out, seized the spider, and dragged it out of sight. It only took a moment; then there was no sign that anything had even happened. How's that for creepy?
The others are going out caiman-hunting tonight (in the sense of finding them, not of killing and eating them), but I'm staying back; I got my fill of that sort of thing in Australia many years ago now, and I think I'd rather read my book and relax. The frogs are making a racket, and my bed looks a lot more alluring than another stint on a hard wooden seat.
Dinner was the usual; dessert was fried bananas with a creamy caramel sauce. They always use bananas at this lodge, not plantains; I don't know why. I have this photo of a different dessert, though, not sure what happened there. This is a guava paste dessert that I think I mention elsewhere in the blog; sorry for the out-of-order photo, but I won´t be able to find it later...
The storm seems to have missed us. Lightning is flashing in the distance every couple of seconds, but we got only a few drops of rain. It's hot and muggy now.

Wildlife watching

2008-06-06T18:30:00.000-07:00

Typing this in bed because my rump hurts from so much sitting on the hard wooden seats of the boats and the dining room. The wildlife tour was somewhat unsuccessful, in the sense that we saw virtually no animal wildlife; just a pair of Saki monkeys in a tree that sat utterly motionless for ten minutes or so and then scampered off. Our guide had wanted to find a sloth, and perhaps a tapir, but they were nowhere to be found. Still, it's nice to have seen Seki monkeys in the wild, not just the half-tame ones near the lodge. For the first hour and a half that we were in the boat, the jungle was utterly still; lots of bird calls, but we never saw a single one. It was very hot, and the sun was beating down mercilessly; the birds simply had more sense than we did, and were staying in dark recessed spots to escape from the heat, I think. Even the turkey vultures, which like to sit on snags and look menacing during the heat of the day, were in hiding. The sounds were wonderful, though. One bird had a call that sounded like three ascending notes being stuck on a big wooden xylophone; another sounded exactly like the wolf whistle that people like to teach parrots (that one was called the "king of the jungle" by the indigenous people, according to our guide; we haven't seen them, only heard them). A third had a flutelike warbling call that sounded strangely off-key and plaintive.
Around five or so, the sun started to go behind clouds and trees more, and the temperature dropped. Big storm clouds started building rapidly on the horizon. At this point the birds started coming out, and we saw several we haven't seen before: a yellow-rumped cacique and a blue ani (or that's what our guide called them), a pair of woodpeckers up high in a dead tree that looked a lot like pileated woodpeckers, a lovely yellow and black flycatcher, lots more kingfishers, lots of swallows way up high or gliding over the water's surface. From a long way away we saw a toucan fly across the river, and from even farther away we saw five macaws in flight. I didn't get any photos of birds at all; I can see them wonderfully in the binoculars, but my camera is completely inadequate. Even Bill, who has a huge stabilized lens on his camera, can't get very many of them; they're so far away that a tripod is really needed.
Now the sun has set, insect and frog sounds have taken over, and it will probably rain soon. Dinner is in fifteen minutes. I eat a lot at every meal, but I am always hungry. It feels like I'm not doing very much besides sitting and looking at things, but perhaps it burns a lot of calories just dealing with the heat. Or perhaps I'm gaining weight. Ah, now the rain has started; that's good, it should cool the air, which is still a bit oppressive. We saw lightning in the distance as we came in, so this may be a fairly big storm.

Going tribal

2008-06-06T12:50:00.000-07:00

Just had lunch; more rice, fish, and chicken, plus a very tasty bean and sausage soup, and an interesting dessert: guava paste (sort of like jelly but so thick it can be cut into cubes) in a creamy sauce. Vida, who grew up in Puerto Rico, says she is accustomed to having guava paste with a slice of cheese, as breakfast. Apparently it's available in the U.S., so I'll have to try that when I get back.
Breakfast, while I'm on the subject of food, was scrambled eggs, slices of sausage, hot dogs cooked in an onion and tomato sauce, and, oh, something else I can't remember. There were several kinds of fruit juice; I had guayaba and aceirola (but I don't know if I'm spelling them right), and both tasted sort of like watery strawberries. The food here is always good; it's quite impressive that they can cook this way in such a remote location. Everything is very fresh; the fish we eat was caught in the lake just hours beforehand, and I expect the fruit is probably locally harvested too. This lodge provides employment for quite a few local people, I expect.
Lily, the little monkey baby adopted by the staff here, was being her charming self again at lunch. She wrapped herself around the leg of one of the staff, and didn't want to let go, so he walked around doing various chores with her hanging on to his leg. Then she decided to wander around, and I played with her for a little while, chasing her and tickling her; she liked to play by running away a step or two and then flopping over on her side, and then trying to get up and scoot away again before I could reach her. I picked her up for a while, and she let me hold her longer today; I think she is getting used to me. Now I smell like monkey, a musky sort of odor, not unpleasant but distinctly animal.
As soon as I walked out my front door this morning on the way to breakfast, I was again confronted by wildlife: a praying mantis was climbing up the wall next to my door! Its front legs were pointed straight forward to give the illusion that they were the end of the twig that its body was camouflaged to look like; at first I thought it was a remarkable stick insect whose eyes and antennae were located an inch down from the end of its body. It was quite placid and slow-moving, so I picked it up, carried it around with me for a while, and showed it to everybody before depositing it on a promising-looking tree. There were also two bats resting on the side of the cabin; they're still there now, so I guess they intend to sleep there until nightfall. Finally, there was a fairly large moth parked above my front door, a warm brown color with subtle markings. Each time I walk out the door I have to take a careful survey of all the critters there!
After breakfast we took a short boat ride to the house of the second-in-command of the local indigenous group. He gave us a tour of the area, starting with a taste of a fruit that our guide called a lime tangerine, and that peeled and looked like a tangerine, but that was perhaps even more tart and acidic than a lime, but quite tasty. Then he showed us a pet sloth he keeps in a tree by his house (I got to hold the sloth, in fact), which had pretty yellow and black markings on its back indicating, we were told, that it is a male. He had found the sloth when it was small, injured by a thorn in its eye, and he adopted it and helped it get better. He kept bees in a hive near his house, and he knocked on the hive to bring them out; they are not a stinging species, apparently, and looked quite different from American honeybees (Apis mellifera). They do still make honey, though; he gave us a taste of it, which was delicious and distinctive. The bees apparently spend a lot of time at the lime tangerine tree, giving their honey a very fruity, tart taste. I think I will try to obtain some to bring back; I forgot to ask at the time.
Then we met a little capuchin monkey he keeps as a pet, and a snake he has, and had a few brazil nuts (which come as segments, like the segments of an orange, from a softball-sized black shell that he cracked open with a machete). Then he gave us a little demonstration with a blowgun and a bow and arrow, and let us try both; he had a styrofoam target set up a ways away which we all had to work quite hard to even reach, much less hit, but which was trivial for him. He painted Vida's face with the red dye from the fruit we had seen the previous day at the rubber tree museum; Vida now looks quite tribal, and the dye doesn't really wash out! He sang two short songs for us in his native language, with us accompanying him on maracas, which was a better experience than it probably sounds reading this. He showed us quite a few medicinal plants and explained what they were for: this one for insect bites, this one for high cholesterol, this one for diarrhea, and so forth. Finally, he introduced us to a pair of small birds and a pair of turtles he kept in his house.
At the end he left us to look at a wall of earrings, bracelets, necklaces, and so forth; he said his wife had made them, which may or may not be true; they looked a great deal like the jewelry that an been for sale an INPA, but perhaps that's just the traditional style. I'm trying not to be too cynical about the whole thing; the tour didn't feel nearly as exploitive or fake as I had expected (I almost stayed back at the lodge, expecting the worst), and he seemed genuinely happy to show us around. Supposedly he receives no compensation at all for doing these tours, except the pittance he makes off selling jewelry; he volunteers to do it because he wants Westerners to see his culture. I think that might even be true, who knows. The animals in his care seemed happy and healthy; it didn't feel like he kept them just for a petting zoo for tourists, he seemed to really love all the animals. Or maybe I'm just making excuses. :->
Anyhow, in a couple of hours we're heading out on a boat tour down some small side channels and little waterways, in the hopes of seeing some wildlife up close. The guide keeps saying "toucans," so maybe I'll get that toucan photo I've been wanting!

Sunrise at Juma

2008-06-06T06:20:00.000-07:00

Bill and I got up at about 5 AM to watch the sunrise. Supposedly someone was going to be at the reception desk all night, and they were going to give us a canoe (a real canoe this time) to take out on the water, but nobody was anywhere to be found. So we watched the sunrise from the dock instead, and that was fine. It was an understated sunrise; just a little red on the horizon that soon disappeared, a gradual lightening, and then it was morning. The wildlife at sunrise was incredible, though. We heard the sound of howler monkeys off in the distance before the sunrise even started, a breathy growling rumble, like a cross between a giant gargling mouthwash and high winds in treetops; that sound came and went for the next hour. All sorts of fantastic bird calls echoed around us; the most remarkable one sounded sort of like a Dr. Seuss machine starting up, beginning with clicks and thumps and rooster-like squawks that built rhythmically into a steady chugging gurgle like a motor running underwater. The many sounds of frogs gradually gave way to the bird calls as the sky lightened. At one point we heard a remarkable call very loudly and clearly from the far shore, and I managed to locate its source: what looked like a toucan, perched at the very top of a very tall dead tree. It was so far away that the time lag between seeing its bill open and hearing the sound was perhaps a half second, but it repeated the call enough times to be quite sure that it was the source. The fish were rising on the lake in staggering profusion; it looked like a light rain was falling! I spotted a night heron quite clearly, and several of what I think are perhaps orioles (bright yellow and black, perhaps the size of a large crow), and little brown and white birds that like to hop upwards along posts or tree trunks. A parrot was at the top of a tree nearby, but it may have been Laurie, the resident parrot that visited at lunch yesterday. A kingfisher just landed on a branch outside my window, and then swooped off with a crackling squawk to drive away another male that had come too close. The birdwatching is just stunning here; it's a shame I'm so bad at it! I've seen a great many birds that I can't identify at all. Bill and Vida apparently have a bird book they brought; I think I will study that today and see if I can't come up to speed on things a bit more. Breakfast is at seven, twenty minutes from now; I think I will walk over slowly and do a bit more birdwatching!

Dolphins and piranha

2008-06-05T20:10:00.000-07:00

Well, the dolphin-viewing was great fun. The guide said he saw a pink dolphin, but I don't think any of the rest of us did. They surface in a very subtle way, sort of rolling over smoothly while hardly breaking the surface; unless they want you to see them, you're unlikely to (although you can hear the sound they make blowing out their blowholes). But we did see other river dolphins, which behave in a more typical dolphin fashion, breaking the surface in a hunched, circular motion with a very visible dorsal fin. We probably saw a dozen or so of them, some swimming in twos and threes, others solitary. Many of them had distinctive markings that let us identify them, but it was very hard to follow any particular dolphin; they swam underwater for a very long time before surfacing again. I didn't even attempt to take pictures of them with my little camera; with the zoom I have on that camera, the dolphins would have looked like just another wave on the lake. But the binoculars I mentioned before -- Canon 15x50 image stabilized all weather binoculars, they don't seem to have an identifying name that I've found -- turn out to be fantastic. The image stabilization works very well, and their magnification is sufficient that I could clearly see birds -- well enough to identify them by plumage -- that I literally could not see with my naked eye at all. The stabilization helps a lot with that; all the uncertainty that comes from hand shake is gone. It's like looking at a still photo. I highly recommend them for any birdwatchers reading this.
Anyhow, enough plugging for Canon. We saw not only dolphins, but lots of birds, and it was a beautiful day for being out on the lake; not too hot, overcast enough so the sun wasn't glaring, but still fairly bright and sunny. We would motor for a bit ("canoe" meant a small uncovered boat with an underpowered motor, as it turned out), coast and dolphin-watch, then when the dolphins had moved on to other areas, we'd motor a bit more to catch up with them. We did that for perhaps an hour and a half.
Then we found a little alcove and tried to fish for piranha. Each of us got a pole (a long stick) with a line, a hook, and some beef for bait. We dangled the poles in the water for a while, but nobody got so much as a nibble. There was a beautiful bird high in a tree quite a distance away that I watched for quite a while, deep prussian blue front and wings, with iridescent turquoise feathers along its back that sparkled and rippled beautifully; I have no idea what it was. Eventually we moved on to a different spot, which proved much more successful piranha-wise. I got lots of tugs and nibbles on my line, but didn't manage to hook one; but Amanda, one of the two Asian girls (Filipino, as it turns out), caught one and got it into the boat. We all took photos of her with it, and then we fished a while more but didn't get another. We motored back to the lodge just after sunset, with night falling fast over the lake. Even spending dusk on the water's edge, we never saw a single mosquito. Amazing.
Dinner was a soup, some lasagna-like pasta, tambaqui (a local fish), chicken and potatoes, rice, and what seemed to be more or less the filling for key lime pie (yum). AND: piranha! They grilled the one Amanda had just caught and served it for dinner, and it was really quite tasty; I'd say it was every bit as good as the other fish we've been eating. Perhaps it's not commonly eaten in the area because the bait (fresh beef is what we used) is expensive, I don't know.
Now I'm in my room, and the frogs and being very noisy outside. It's a wonderful cacophany; I can hear at least half a dozen different species just by the different sounds they're making. I'm going to stop typing soon, though, because I want to get back to reading the book I've just started, One River, by Wade Davis. It's about the Amazon and the experiences of several famous and not-so-famous biologists exploring it, I gather; I haven't really gotten into it far enough yet to quite know what it's really about, but it's a great read so far. My mother highly (very highly!) recommended it to me, and so I brought it along to read when I got a chance -- which would be now. Good night!

Juma Lodge

2008-06-05T11:45:00.000-07:00

Well, here I am at Juma Lodge. So far it has been better than expected. We (Bill, Vida, and I, plus the driver) rolled out at 7 AM, after some last-minute packing, and drove to one of the usual boat launches, next to the fish market. A quick boat trip (20 minutes?) got us across the river with views of distant storms on the horizon. Then we transferred to a minivan, and drove in that for a fairly long time, perhaps an hour or a bit more, making numerous stops: we gave a woman a ride from the marina to somewhere nearby, and got gas, and stopped at a roadside butcher shop but deemed the meat unacceptable, and stopped several times to take photographs of scenic spots. The landscape was flooded forest for the first part of the drive, with treetops sticking out of the water and quite a few giant water lilies. Further on we perhaps gained a little elevation, and got into ranches and pasture. The cows were a different breed than one sees in the U.S., bony and white; I want to call them Brahmas, but I have no idea if that's correct. Anyhow, eventually we turned onto a side road of red dirt and drove a little further, emerging at a little boat launch. After a brief wait a boat appeared, our gear was loaded on, and off we went. This was a smaller boat than before, and fairly maneuverable, and the driver clearly enjoyed his job; he zoomed at high speed between treetops and overhanging branches, generally only slowing down to give us opportunities to photograph. And opportunities to photograph abounded; birds were everywhere, in particular. There had been lots of birds since we first got to the south bank of the Solimoes, in fact: kingfishers and egrets and vultures similar to California's turkey vultures, and smaller white birds that like perching in the trees, and a pair of fairly large eagles (perhaps the size of golden eagles) in the top of a tree by the river, and speedy little black and white streamlined birds that liked to fly alongside our boat, and ducks and something that looked like a cormorant, but with creamy white feathers and a colorful head. I brought my spiffy waterproof image stabilized binoculars on this journey, which I haven't tried using yet (they're a bit heavy to carry on long day hikes and such); I hope to see some amazing birds with them from a canoe this afternoon!
Finally we saw Juma Lodge in the distance: a row of little cabins on the river with balconies and thatched roofs. One of them turned out to be Bill and Vida´s and one mine. We pulled up at a small dock, unloaded, and were immediately served glasses of cupuaçu juice that was very tasty after the long boat ride! It was raining fairly hard, so they escorted us to our rooms with big umbrellas along wooden walkways under the trees.
At that point in my typing, I got up to take a few pictures of the cabin for the blog. When I opened the front door of my cabin, there were two small Saki monkeys sitting right outside, which were not nearly as surprised to see me as I was to see them! They don't seem afraid of humans at all, but I don't think they're tame, either. They didn't beg for food, and weren't particularly interested in me; they were just hanging out on my front step, I guess. They seem very sad because they habitually don't look up; they are always gazing down at the ground, and they move slowly and carefully, so they have a morose air. They let me take photos of them, and when I held out a finger, one of them took it and held it for a while. Remarkably soft, dry palm; it did not feel like a human hand at all. They made little eye contact, and weren't interested in my camera, but they let me take very close-up photos of them. I was really quite a remarkable experience, and quite unexpected!
A little later it was time for lunch. It was served buffet-style: rice, beans, fish, chicken, boiled eggs in a tasty tomato sauce, and fruit salad in a milky base that was quite unusual and good. The dining room is a big cylindrical structure with mosquito netting around the margins and a tall pole in the center; everything here is on posts fifteen meters tall, in order to get it above the water in the wet season. The highest water level this year is right about now, we're told, so the water is close to the bottoms of the walkways and buildings; in the dry season, it's all fifteen meters above the ground. It all feels solidly constructed, but at the same time, being made of wood and being fifteen meters above the bottom of the river, there is always a little flexure in things. You feel a slight swaying from time to time, very subtle and disorienting. The buildings are very simply constructed out of wood and palm fronds here, except for the green mosquito netting; it is not quite rustic, but you can see the water through cracks in the floor. It's quite peaceful and beautiful. Right now it's very quiet; all I can hear is a gentle lapping of waves, occasional bird calls, the sound of dripping water, and my own typing and breathing. My cabin looks out over the lake, which is quite still; there hasn't been a powerboat on it since we arrived.
We met various people at lunch: a young man from Texas who just graduated from college and gave himself a trip to the Amazon as a graduation present, a German man and Brazilian woman who live in Boston and come down to Brazil for vacations regularly, and two Asian women who I didn't really meet since they were at the far end of the table. Everyone was very friendly, and we're the only ones here; it's not a big place to begin with, and the high-water season is not the tourist season anyway. Bill and Vida and I were slated to share a triple cabin, but the staff put us in a double cabin and a single cabin at no extra cost, since they have the room to spare anyway. There are only three people working here at the lodge, as far as I can tell; we met lots of drivers and support people on our way here, but nobody came on the final boat with us except the driver of that boat.
At lunch a parrot got into the dining room, apparently a familiar occurrence. It hopped from person to person and evaded capture until one of the staff lured it away with a chicken bone and got it outside again. Then it sat on the other side of the mosquito netting and made little mournful noises for the rest of the meal. There is also a baby common wooly monkey here, named Lily if I heard correctly; she's two months old, and was apparently bought from some indigenous people who had killed her mother for food (I later found out). Lily has been adopted by the Juma staff, and just runs around being unbelievably cute and acrobatic. I hope they know how to feed her and take care of her; she looks quite healthy and happy, anyhow. She doesn't generally mind being picked up, although she's incredibly squirmy; if you hold her for longer than she wants to be held, she makes that quite clear with ear-piercing shrieks, while if you hold her in an uncomfortable way, she lets you know that with gentle little nips. I held her briefly; Bill got the photos on his camera, so I don't know if they'll make it into this blog.
It's very humid here, but no sign of mosquitoes. Apparently this river is a black water river, like the Rio Negro; it's tannic and acidic (pH 5.3, I think someone said), and so the mosquitoes can't breed in it. We didn't expect that at all; we had been led to believe that the Solimoes and all its tributaries were white water, but apparently, and happily, that is not the case for this particular tributary, at least. So far this entire trip to Brazil I have put insect repellant on only once, and I think I've been bitten only one time; part of that is due to the fact that mosquitoes don't like me anyway, but most of it is due to being on black water, as is the case in Manaus as well. I expected to be absolutely inundated by mosquitoes this whole trip; I'm very glad it isn't that way!
At "3:15 or 3:30" we are supposed to go out in canoes (or one big canoe, I don't know) on the river. We're hoping to see boto, the pink Amazon river dolphins that Bill talked about earlier in this blog. We will undoubtedly see birds, and apparently it's common to see crocodiles and various other wildlife (tapirs?) as well. I'm having a great time here so far; we knew very little about what we had signed up for before we got here, due to the language barrier, but it's turning out remarkably well.

Rubber and insects

2008-06-04T16:00:00.000-07:00

We all had presentation overload from the past two days, so today was a nice change of pace. In the morning we set out for a rubber tree museum. This entailed taking a bus to the five-star hotel we visited before, and catching a boat from the marine nearby up the Rio Negro perhaps twenty minutes or so. At Keewi's urging, I tried to take a lot of pictures today of what Manaus looks like, what ordinary Brazilians look like, etc.; I'll post some of those here. Older couples were very happy to pose for me. I took a bunch of grab shots out of the window of the bus as we drove, too. Stray cats and dogs are everywhere in Manaus, but they are generally well-behaved; I haven't seen a stray dog bark yet, and the cats are very cute and often friendly. In the restaurante photo, the "x-burguer" and other items are relying on the Brazilian pronunciation of "x", which sounds like "shee"; so that's a "shee-burguer", or a cheeseburger. That's quite common; cheese is represented by an x on menus everywhere.

The boat ride was quite beautiful. It was a very clear, sunny day, and the clouds were beautifully reflected in the water. These photos don't do it justice at all. The far side of the Rio Negro has steep cliffs of red earth that you can see in the distance. The Negro is, I would estimate, about the same width as Cayuga Lake here, which means something to those of you familiar with upstate New York. A couple of miles? It's very wide.

The museum, the "Museu Seringal Vila Paraiso," turned out to be quite nifty. It was set up in the ground of what had once been a rubber harvesting operation. The main house, where the owner of the operation had lived, was well-preserved with beautiful furniture, lacework, kitchen utensils, and even skins on the walls. The owner lived extremely well, by essentially enslaving the people who tapped the rubber, as one of the earlier presentations discussed. The surrounding buildings were also preserved; we got to see how rubber was harvested, by gouging a diagonal slash into the side of a tree, and then we got to see where it was processed and stored and so forth. The living quarters of the rubber tappers were also preserved, and were not, of course, on the same plane of existence as the owner's house.
The grounds also had some beautiful gardens, and a good deal of surrounding forest that we wandered through. Mike spotted a remarkable little caterpillar, and a huge grasshopper (easily eight inches from the tips of the antennae to the ends of the hind legs) was crawling up the side of one of the buildings, and a fruit that looked like lychee turned out to have tiny red seeds like a pomegranate that had a powerful red dye in them that was apparently used by the indigenous people of the area; you can see that it would make a good face paint!

Then we went back on the boat. The rest of the group went in to Manaus to shop for camping gear; they are all going camping tomorrow on the Solimoes, which will be nasty and buggy. Bill and Vida and I decided that we're going to leave tomorrow for an eco-lodge where we will stay until Sunday, so we didn't need to shop for camping gear, so we took a taxi to a natural history museum we had heard about. It was not quite as spiffy as we expected -- our guidebooks really pumped up their insect collection in particular, which turned out to be a bit old and ill-maintained and not that large -- but it was still an enjoyable way to spend the afternoon. They had a big fish collection that I didn't attempt to photograph (the light was very yellow and dim); it was fun to see all the fish we've been eating in the local restaurants, and they had some remarkably strange and wonderful fish in their collection. Then we walked through a small aquarium, the star of which were the pirarucu. Those are the huge fish (five feet long) that we saw being farmed on the Rio Negro a couple of days ago; this was the clearest view we had had of them yet. They have amazing patterns on their heads that look like a cross between engravings and Maori tattoos; I would really like to get a better look at those. Finally we entered the insect collection. They had a few grasshoppers and stick insects and katydids and such, some very odd relatives of cicadas called lantern bugs that I don't recall ever seeing before, various beetles, a smattering of spiders; but a good half of their collection was devoted to butterflies. I took a ton of photographs; if anybody is interested, let me know. None of the insects were labelled with place or date of collection, and some weren't even labelled at all; but the bulk of them at least gave genus and species, and often gave the name of the discoverer. A huge number were credited to Linnaeus, who is of course known for having worked a great many students very hard collecting and identifying species, only to take all the credit for himself. One nice thing about their butterfly collection is that they often mounted a given species both right side up and upside down, so you could see how different the patterns were.

Well, as I mentioned before, I'm off to an eco-lodge tomorrow through Sunday. We leave at 7 AM; I have no idea when on Sunday we'll get back. I'll bring my laptop and blog away over there, but I won't have anywhere to connect, so I'll be out of touch until at least Sunday, or possibly later. On Monday the group, including me, leaves on a multi-day camping trip on the Rio Negro, so I'll be out of touch again; so if I don't have a chance to get to the Internet cafe on Sunday, you probably won't hear from me for at least a week! The spot we're going to is on the Rio Juma; you can find that river to the south of Manaus in the image below. We think we will be staying somewhere on the large lake on the north end of the river. I'm not really sure what to expect; it could be very good, or it could be very bad. Either way, it will be very expensive!

Talk: Amanda Wilson

2008-06-03T16:20:00.000-07:00

Amanda Wilson: Chico Mendes

Chico Mendes was born in 1944 in Acre State in Brazil, in a rubber tapping region. His family were rubber tappers, and he started working when he was nine. The tappers at that time used the forest sustainably, tapping trees in the forest without destroying them. In the 1970s Mendes became radicalized by the destruction of rainforest by ranchers and miners. In 1975 Mendes became the general secretary of a tapper's union, and he became a city councilman soon after. In 1980 local ranchers attempted to frame him for murder, but the charges didn't stick. The same year he was accused of inciting landowners to violence, but again avoided prosecution. In 1985 he help a national rubber tappers convention in Brasilia, the first such convention ever held. In 1988 he started a campaign to stop the logging of an area that was slated to become a reserve; that year he received a great many death threats. Two bodyguards were assigned to him, but later that year we was murdered at the front door of his own home.
After his death the Chico Mendes Committee was formed by any local organizations to investigate his murder. The investigation of a prominent rancher led to further murders and intrigues, and charges against Chico Mendes's brother were fabricated. The rancher responsible for Mendes's murder (supposedly) was finally caught, prosecuted, and imprisoned in the 1990s, although some believe that other individuals were actually responsible.
Mendes's life and murder has been the subject of a great many songs, movies, and other cultural works. A memorial garden was dedicated in Los Angles in 1993, but was controversially demolished a few years later. A quote from Mendes: "At first I thought I was fighting to save rubber trees, then I thought I was fighting to save the Amazon rainforest. Now I realize I am fighting for humanity."

Talk: Jonathan Yim

2008-06-03T16:00:00.000-07:00

Jonathan Yim: Biodiversity in the Amazon

The Amazon is the largest tropical rainforest in the world, occupying nine different countries. It has the richest biodiversity of any forest in the world. In just one hectare, more species are present than all of the species present in all of Europe. One tree in the Amazon was found to contain 72 different species of ants! A great many species remain undiscovered. The soil in the Amazon is not very rich; 80% of the nutrients in the Amazon are contained in the vegetation, not in the soil. This is due to the constant flooding and draining of the rivers, which leaches nutrients out of the soil. The Amazon produces many natural resources of use to humans. Plants produce fruits (cupuacu, acai, guarana), oils, and fibers.
Lots of mammals live in the Amazon, including the capybara, the largest rodent in the world. The largest mammal in the Amazon is the jaguar, however. The sloth, the slowest animal in the world, moves only a kilometer a month and sleeps eighteen hours a day. More than 3000 species of fish have been found in the Amazon. There are seventeen tributaries of the Amazon of more than 1000 miles in length; a lot of water! Pirarucu can get up to five meters in length; they are the longest freshwater fish in the world. Over 1000 species of amphibians have been found in the Amazon. Frogs in the Amazon can be found far from bodies of water, because the humidity is so high; in fact, they often lay their eggs on leaves, not in the water. There are more species of insects in the Amazon than any other type of animal. One square mile of rainforest can have 50,000 species of insect, the bulk of which are ants. One third of all the world's bird species are found in the Amazon. The largest is the macaw, and the rarest bird in the world is a type of macaw as well.
Deforestation is threatening this biodiversity, due to exploitation of resources. The Amazon acts as the world's lungs, cleaning the air and absorbing carbon dioxide; its importance is global.

Piatam, etc.

2008-06-03T09:20:00.000-07:00

Brazilians like acronyms. We are at a FUCAPI-affiliated facility today, learning about a research project called Piatam (Inteligencia Socioambiental Estrategica da Industria do Petroleo na Amazonia). A fellow named Alex, a professor at a local university and director of the Piatam project sponsored by Petrobras (the third largest oil company in the world), is talking to us. Piatam is a very large research project started in 2000, with affiliations with many institutions including FUCAPI, INPA, and others both within Brazil and internationally. It is an interdisciplinary project involving many researchers. The objective of the project is to "do the environmental characterization of the Petrobras-controlled area... in the Amazon, building time-series data needed for environmental monitoring... for sustainable actions in the business of Petrobras." The main idea, then, is to survey and build a database of environmental data characterizing the Amazon region in an organized and planned way, in order to be able to minimize environmental impact. They do a lot of environmental modeling of the behavior of the Amazon using mathematical, computational models. The project is also very involved in "social inclusion," meaning helping to improve living conditions for people in the Amazon region (indigenous and otherwise): improvement of health, education, and income increases among ordinary people. They do not actually distribute medicine or money; they try to improve infrastructure and promote self-sufficiency.
They have more than 200 researchers, including doctors, students, technicians, administrators, and so forth. They work from Manaus westward along the Rio Solimoes to a major Petrobras oil extraction site on the Rio Urucu, a Solimoes tributary. Petrobras is exploring for oil about 200km to the west, which would expand Piatam's area of research; they are also contemplating building an oil pipeline through this area of the Amazon, which would similarly expand Piatam's area of interest. Downstream from Manaus, they are involved with the area all the way to the ocean, where Petrobras has offshore oil platforms. Various other areas are also exploited by Petrobras; Piatam is involved in all of those areas. So Piatam's operations are closely tied to those of Petrobras.
Piatam's work is subdivided into economics and management, modeling of the environment, social economics and ethics, archaeology, history, the environmental/physical study of soils, geology, and hydrodynamics, fish ecology, aquatic macrophytes, fish larvae, environmental toxicology, entomology, ethnobotany, mammals, tropical diseases (particularly malaria), information technology, communication with the public, and, of course, management. The data they collect is not currently public; there are issues surrounding the fact that the data was sometimes gathered by affiliates, not by Piatam itself, and some researchers don't want the data to be public because they want to reap the benefits of their work in their own published papers, and the geological data, for example, has proprietary importance for Petrobras, and there are patent issues surrounding some ethnobotany data, and so on. But the management of Piatam would like to make the data public; Alex says that it is recognized that they can't possibly do justice to the data they have gathered otherwise.
They started with just one small boat and twelve researchers; they now have two large boats that can carry 55 people at a time. They gather data four times a year, to assess seasonal changes, and visit nine communities that they work with along the Solimoes. Individual groups, such as the malaria team, go out more frequently to gather data that can't be done on those four main trips. The showed us a picture of a researcher who acts as "human bait" to attract mosquitoes for collection; that man has gotten malaria four or five times now, and is happy when he gets bitten five or six hundred times per hour. Some of Piatam's work will be featured in National Geographic in August 2008 in a four-page article.
Now we're getting some more detailed talks on research projects at Piatam. I won't take notes on them in detail, just list the topics: 1) Classification of high-resolution images from the IKONOS satellite for the area of the Nossa Senhora de Nazare community, 2) Fish ecology in floodplain lakes on the Solimoes, 3) Hydrodynamic modeling, 4) Use of a graph model for resolution of conflicts and disputes among Amazonian fishermen.
We're all feeling a bit skeptical about Piatam, given its primary source of funding and its close connection to the oil industry. We haven't pressed them on this issue, since the people we've been talking to are researchers, and we don't want to put them in an uncomfortable position. The manager who presented at the beginning, Alex, had to run to another meeting as soon as he finished talking; I had wanted to ask him how he felt the research was affected by these issues, but I didn't get the chance. Their educational program for kids, Piatamzinho, is particularly suspicious; we all know what programs like this are really like in the U.S. Hard to say whether Piatam has the same issues or not, from what we've heard.
Now we are at INPA hearing talks from some researchers here. We wandered around INPA a little first, and had lunch there; I got some pretty good photos of some semi-wild macaws that live in nesting boxes at INPA, which was neat. They really are spectacular birds; it was quite exciting seeing them in something resembling their natural habitat. We also got our closest look yet at monkeys up in the canopy; again, they are only semi-wild, this time in the sense that they do raid INPA garbage cans and such, so they are habituated to humans and probably somewhat dependent upon them. Still, very fun to see them leaping from tree to tree. I have no idea what kind of monkeys they were.
Now we are in another auditorium, hearing about MEGA (Monitoramento Ecoambiental do Gasoduto no Amazonas). This is a research project to see whether the installation of a gas pipeline in the Amazon affects the environment in the area. The pipeline will run from a Petrobras station west on the Solimoes, downriver into Manaus. The pipeline will be several hundred kilometers long, and will pass through many of the same areas monitored by Piatam.
The next presentation is on the Biotupé project, which surveys the biological, social and cultural diversity of Tupé's RDS (Reserve of Sustainable Development). This is a project we will be visiting next week and camping at overnight. An RDS is a protected area associated with the sustainable use of its resources, by its local communities, in order to preserve biodiversity. The Tupé RDS is about 30km up the Rio Negro from Manaus, and is almost as big as Manaus itself (approx. 12,000 hectares), with six rural communities inside it of about fifty families each. There is a lake, Tupé Lake, in the reserve, with white sand beaches (at low water) and black water like the Rio Negro (i.e. tannic and acidic, with low nutrient content). It's a very beautiful spot, and a popular tourist destination; its designation as an RDS is, among other thing, motivated by a desire to preserve the area against the onslaught of tourists. The Biotupé project is affiliated with several other local agencies, universities, and institutions, and has members including social scientists, journalists, and architects, not only biologists. They look at vegetation, hydrochemistry, hydrology, zooplankton, phytoplankton, aquatic insects, benthic fauna, fishes, use of natural resources, sponges, fungi, education, sediments, income promotion, local community organization, and education of youth in science. These programs all seem to have remarkably broad goals! Their website is http://biotupe.inpa.gov.br, but I don't know if any of it is in English.
Now we are going to have a couple of student presentations, which I'll post separately as usual.

Talk: Bill Minkel

2008-06-02T15:40:00.000-07:00

Bill Minkel: The Amazonian pink river dolphin

[ Bill had great photos of these dolphins; you might want to do some surfing on Google Images to see what they look like! ]

The Amazonian pink river dolphin (henceforth referred to as a "boto," the local native name; it has many other names) is quite unlike more familiar dolphin species. It has a very wide range, extending into Peru, Bolivia, Venezuela, and Ecuador, and is found in both the Orinoco and Amazon basins. It is found only in rivers; it does not go into salt waters. There are three subspecies which derived from a common ancestor perhaps 8-12 million years ago (longer ago than when salt water dolphins evolved, interestingly); one subspecies is found in the Orinoco, one in the Amazon basin, and one in a tributary of the Amazon above a 500 meter high waterfall barrier that has acted as a cause of allopatric speciation. There are various similar dolphin species around the world that may be distantly related.
The boto has a very flexible body and neck due to unfused vertebrae, unlike mostly marine dolphins. The boto also has very wide pectoral flipper and flukes, and has a very long humerus in its pectoral fin that allows its fin to describe figure eights that allow extremely precise motion. Their dorsal fin is less tall than in marine dolphins, perhaps advantageous for maneuvering in complex river environments. Their rostrum (their "nose") is quite elongate compared to marine dolphins, and vibrissal hairs on their rostra may be used as vibrational sensory structures, or may be vestigial. They have a large, highly flexible melon on their forehead used to focus sounds for echolocation; their echolocation abilities are quite impressive. Their eyes are very small but their vision is good. Their dentition is heterodont (different teeth are different shapes), unlike most marine dolphins, to cope with a wide variety of food; they eat many kinds of fish, some freshwater crustaceans, and even river turtles (whose shells they break with their posterior teeth).
Boto behavior can be playful or aggressive; particularly in mating season, males get aggressive, and they often bear rake scars from the teeth of other males. They porpoise ("dive" upwards into the air) less often than marine dolphins typically do, and are rather less friendly than other dolphins. Their mating pattern is similar to lions: many times in a short period of time (perhaps every four minutes for an hour or so). Boto nurse for about a year and stay with their mother for about two and a half years. Pairs seen together are almost always a mother and calf, but they will occasionally group together for feeding.
Boto live roughly twenty years in the wild (up to 28 or so), but only a few years in captivity. The males grow to about eight feet and 700-800 lbs.; females are 6-6.5 feet long and therefore less massive. Their color varies considerably, but seems to generally change from gray when they are young to pink when they are older. The pink color is often patterned, not uniform, and can be used to identify individuals.
The boto characteristics are probably less derived than those of marine dolphins; they appear to represent an earlier branch in odontocete evolution. The odontocetes are thought to have evolved due to geologic and oceanic changes (particularly sea level changes) since the middle Miocene (~15 mya). At that time, ocean levels were much higher (perhaps 150 meters higher!) than today, and much of the Amazon was open water. At that time, the drainage from the continent seems to have been northward, out of the Orinoco; the northern Andes that now cut the Amazon basin off from the Orinoco had not yet uplifted significantly. The common ancestor of the boto subspecies presumably lived in that area, and as uplift and sea level lowering occurred, populations were isolated and diverged. About 10 mya the Amazon started to drain chiefly to the east, and the areas occupied by the subspecies were probably completely separated.
In native Brazilian folklore, the boto is an incantado, an enchanted being. They inhabit the enchanted world below the surface of the water, but they can transform into humans, especially at night, as botos incantados to walk among people. Male incantados are often described as handsome young men dressed all in white, good dancers and drinkers, on the lookout for young women. Female incantados seduce men to come and live with them in the enchanted world under the surface where life is beautiful and easy. Botos incantados are often used as scapegoats for human activity that is uncomfortable, embarrassing, or inexplicable.
Today botos are doing reasonably well. They are listed as threatened, but their current distribution does not appear to differ significantly from its estimated past distribution. Some loss due to net entanglement has been observed, and they are sometimes used as fish bait; they are also threatened by planned hydroelectric dam development. But today, at least, the current status of boto populations is good.

Talk: Ben Haller

2008-06-02T14:30:00.000-07:00

Ben Haller: Global Climate and the Amazon

This talk has accompanying images. Surf to http://tinyurl.com/4yv4bh and you will be redirected to my Mac.com home page. Double-click on the "amazon" folder and you will see seven JPEG files. Download them using the downward-pointing arrows on the right. They will be explained below. This talk is longer since it's my talk, so there. :->
Major regions such as the Amazon Basin have a large impact upon global climate, and they are greatly affected by global climate patterns; the interaction is bidirectional. These interactions have become of particular importance with the advent of global warming; understanding how climate change will affect the Amazon, and vice versa, is essential to minimizing the impact of global warming and planning for the future. Global warming is an enormous threat to the planet and to human civilization; for more on that, I refer you to Al Gore's recent movie, and to NewScientist's excellent coverage of the issue. In this talk, I will discuss the mechanisms by which global warming occurs, its projected effects upon the Amazon basin, and the Amazon's effects on global climate change.
The way that global warming works is discussed at great length on many websites; no doubt Wikipedia has thorough coverage of it. So I'll just touch on the basics here. Most of the energy from the sun is in the ultraviolet and visible wavelengths of light; other wavelengths are relatively minor contributors. A good deal of ultraviolet gets absorbed by ozone high in Earth's atmosphere; most of the rest of the light makes it to the lower atmosphere and to the surface of the earth, since air is very nearly transparent to visible light. Some (30% is the figure I recall from memory) is reflected directly back into space by clouds, by reflection off the oceans, and by the reflectivity (or "albedo") of land masses. The remainder is absorbed, acting to heat up the oceans and the land. Warm objects emit light, too, however, as blackbody radiation; at the temperature of the Earth, the emitted light is in the infrared. Air is not transparent to infrared radiation; in particular, the greenhouse gases, such as carbon dioxide, methane, and various others absorb infrared light and re-emit it in a random direction. This means that very little of that infrared light makes it back out into space; it is effectively trapped. The more greenhouse gases in the atmosphere, the more heat is trapped.
That's the simple picture. There are a few wrinkles. Water vapor is actually the most important greenhouse gas, but it is rarely discussed because it is not under direct human control; if there's too much water vapor, it rains, if there's too little, it water evaporates from the oceans, so the atmospheric water vapor content is governed by those sorts of factors (which is an oversimplification, like everything in this talk, but there it is). So carbon dioxide, mathane, and various oxides of sulphur and nitrogen -- the "anthropogenic," or human-generated, gases -- are the ones generally focused upon. Another wrinkle is that soot has recently been found to be a major contributor to global warming, contrary to previous thinking; a short piece by Service in Science (2008) discusses this. Aerosols are also quite important, but their effect is poorly understood at present.
The effects of global warming are similarly unclear. The big picture is easy: melting ice, rising sea levels, more extreme weather, water supply problems, and higher average temperatures over the globe. But the small picture, the effects of global warming on local microclimates, is still hard to predict. Most of the results discussed in this talk came out in only the last year or three, and they are preliminary and tentative. In general, however, it can be said that global warming will cause changes in atmospheric and oceanic circulation that will drive many local changes in climate (meaning rainfall, temperature, and seasonality).
What will the effects be on the Amazon specifically? Baettig et al. (2006) looked at the local effects of climate change worldwide, and the three images online from their paper show those effects. The first image essentially shows that everywhere will get hotter; if one takes the hottest year in a baseline period from the 1950s to the 1970s (if I recall correctly), pretty much the whole planet will experience 14-19 out of 20 years as being hotter than that baseline hottest year. What used to be an unusual, once in twenty years event will become the norm. The second image shows shifts in precipitation, and you can see from this that the Amazon will become much drier; many years in any 20-year period will be drier than the driest year in the baseline period. This is an extremely large shift in the climate of the Amazon. (Unfortunately, the same image shows that North America will largely be spared from major effects, so our politicians will be able to continue to ignore the issue.) The third image combines various factors into an overall "climate change index," which reveals that the Amazon will be affected by changing climate more than almost any other area except perhaps the Arctic and southern Africa.
What is driving this warming and drying of the Amazon specifically? I want to mention four factors. One is a shift from pastureland to soybean agriculture (Costa et al., 2007). This is being driven by the U.S. shift towards corn ethanol for biofuel production; land in the U.S. is being converted from soybeans to corn, raising the price of soybeans on the global market and causing Brazilian landowners to shift from cattle grazing to soybean farming. But soybean fields have a greater albedo than pasture; so more incoming sunlight is reflected directly back out into space, which (perhaps unexpectedly) causes less moisture to be retained by the land (I'm not sure how that works, exactly, sorry). This shows how interconnected global forces are, and how policy in the U.S. drives change worldwide in unexpected ways. The second factor is decreasing reflective aerosol production (Cox et al., 2008). For a long time now, dirty industrial activity such as the burning of coal has been emitting a lot of reflective aerosols into the atmosphere. This has had an overall cooling effect worldwide. But unfortunately, as industry cleans up its act and plants and factories become less polluting, the effect of lowered aerosol production will be an accelerated pace of warming. The third factor is deforestation (Malhi et al., 2008). Forest retains moisture; vegetation has a high moisture content, and it recycles precipitation back into the atmosphere. As deforestation progresses, more and more rainfall will go into rivers, and then to the ocean, or will go into underground aquifers; it will no longer be put directly back into the atmosphere by transpiration. The extremely humid environment generated by the trees of Amazonia will be lost. Deforestation along roads in the interior of the Amazon is particularly damaging in this respect, because it fragments the humid zones and drives further deforestation due to insufficient humidity in the interior. The last factor driving warming and drying is a shift in rainfall to a a shift in the position of the Hadley cell circulation in the atmosphere. In essence, incoming sunlight is strongest in the tropics, and this warms the air and causes it to rise. As it rises, it cools, and rain occurs due to the decrease in the amount of water the cooler air can hold. This is why the tropics get so much rain. The cooler, dry air falls back towards the surface at around 30 degrees north and south latitude; this is the reason for the deserts that occur at those latitudes, from the Sahara to the Sonora. But as global warming increases, the northern hemisphere is expected to get warm more quickly than the southern hemisphere, because it has more continental land area; the oceans act to stabilize temperatures and delay temperature changes. This means that global warming will cause the "tropical covergence" where the heavy rainfall occurs to shift northwards. The end result is that the rainfall mostly misses the Amazon; the Amazon will be in the zone that is now the desert zone. The first image from Malhi online shows probabilities of various amounts of rainfall reduction for the Amazon basin at two times of year. In December through February, the dry season in the northern Amazon, the image shows that rainfall is likely to decrease significantly in the northern region, while in June through August, the dry season in the southern Amazon, the image shows that rainfall is likely to decrease in the southern region. In other words, the rainfall will decrease the most during the dry season in each area, when it was needed the most; so the reduction in rainfall will be extremely harmful to the native flora. The second image from Malhi superimposes potential forest loss by 2050 on top of a map of drought probabilities under two different IPCC-defined future climate projections; it shows that heavy deforestation will likely occur in the southeast Amazon, where drought is also most severe. This means that the forest in that area will be hit doubly hard, and will dry out more quickly than the forest in the northwest Amazon.
What will this projected warming and drying of the Amazon do to its flora and fauna? The answer is not good; the expectation is that the forest will disappear, even if humans don't cut it all down, and the area will shift towards a sort of tropical savannah. Thomas et al. (2004) discuss the extinction risk faced by species due to climate change. Worldwide they predict that by 2050 "15-37% of species in [their] sample of regions and taxa will be 'committed to extinction'". The picture for the Amazon is even more dire; of plant taxa in the Amazon, they predict (this time under a maximum climate change scenario, unlike their global extinction prediction, which was based on a midrange scenario) that 69-87% will be committed to extinction by 2050. Their survey of Amazonian extinctions is based on a small number of species and is probably quite imprecise, but it is quite a scary prediction. Williams et al. (2007) compare worldwide climates today to those projected for 2100 and analyze what kinds of changes will occur. If a climate (a particular combination of temperature and rainfall profiles and seasonality) exists somewhere today but will not exist anywhere in 2100, it is called a "disappearing" climate, and species adapted to that climate will go extinct. If a climate will exist somewhere in 2100 but exists nowhere on earth today, it is called a "novel" climate, and will represent an opportunity of sorts for colonization and adaptation (probably by aggressive invasive species). The first image from Williams shows that the Amazonian lowlands will experience a novel climate in 2100: drying and warming will create a new type of savannah-like climate currently unknown in the world. The image also shows that the climate of the highlands near the Andes will disappear: the clouds that define the highland cloud forest will rise in altitude due to global warming until they have lifted right off the tops of the mountains, and the cloud forest will cease to exist, being replaced by a more typical montane climate regime. But this first image fails to capture an important biological aspect: dispersal. If a region changes climate, it doesn't really matter if that climate already exists halfway around the world; the species that are adapted to the new climate probably won't be able to migrate to the area from their refuge thousands of miles away. Species dispersal into new areas is limited by time and distance, and so when talking about novel and disappearing climates, it is really necessary to see whether a climate is novel or disappearing within a localized area in which dispersal of species could realistically occur. This is what the second image from Williams shows, and the picture is quite dire. From the perspective of species trying to migrate, disperse or adapt to climate change, the climate of the Amazon as it is today will disappear almost completely, both in the lowlands and the highlands, and will be replaced by climates that are completely novel for the flora and fauna anywhere nearby. The projection, then is massive extinctions of local flora and fauna, and wholesale conversion of the area to a low-diversity invasive. The local species will simply not be adapted to the climate in which they find themselves.
That, then, is the dismal picture of what the future holds for the Amazon. The other topic I want to briefly discuss is how the Amazon itself affects global climate. As the Amazon changes due to global warming, the changes it undergoes will have further repercussions that it is important to understand.
Malhi et al. (2008) discuss some of these effects; their summary is that the Amazon's "removal by deforestation can itself be a driver of climate change and a positive feedback on externally forced climate change." The rainforest stores a great deal of carbon by capturing carbon dioxide from the atmosphere and converting it into biomass (wood and leaves), a good deal of which ends up semi-permanently stored in the soil. Deforestation both halts the deposition of biomass into the soil layer, and releases all of the carbon that was stored in the trees (assuming the trees are burned, as is typically the case with the slash-and-burn agriculture responsible for much of the Amazonian deforestation). Deforestation will therefore enhance anthropogenic increases in atmospheric carbon dioxide. Rainforest also extracts soil water and returns it to the atmosphere by transpiration; "large-scale forest loss tends to reduce rainfall" as a result, contributing to regional drying as mentioned earlier. Loss of rainforest, according to Malhi et al., will also reduce cloud cover, increase land surface albedo, increase atmospheric aerosol content, and change wind speeds and patterns. The implications of many of these effects for global climate are hotly debated.
A final consideration is the Amazon's effect on the thermohaline circulation (THC). The THC is a global system of oceanic flow that conveys heat from the tropics into the Arctic and Antarctic regions; the Gulf Stream is the best-known component of the THC for most people in North America, but there are many other similar streams, both on the surface of the ocean and at depth. The water that flows out of the Amazon basin in the Atlantic enters the same stream that becomes the Gulf Stream further north (I have no idea what it's called down here). There has been a great deal of speculation that as the Arctic and Greenland ice melts, that massive input of cold freshwater into the THC system may cause it to halt, because its flow is driven by temperature and salinity differences in different parts of the ocean. The effects of a halt (or even a slowing) of the THC would be quite dire, perhaps including glaciation of a good deal of western Europe, which is warmed by the waters of the Gulf Stream. According to Stouffer et al. (2006), however, the input of freshwater from the Amazon has the same effect, even though the input occurs so much farther south. As the Amazon dries and rainfall in the region decreases drastically, the freshwater input from the Amazon basin will decrease accordingly; this decrease may offset the increase in freshwater input in the Arctic region, and prevent a slowdown or stoppage of the THC. Stouffer et al. don't explicitly point out this relationship; I am conjecturing based upon their data, but it seems to me that this is a (single, solitary) positive consequence of the likely disappearance of the Amazon as we know it. It's as silver of a lining as we're likely to see on this topic, so I'll end on that.
People often speak of a tipping point in global climate, a level of atmospheric carbon dioxide, or an amount of temperature increase, below which things will be more or less OK, and above which feedbacks and interactions will cause the Earth's climate to change in profound and irreversible ways. In researching this topic, however, global came to look, to me, more like a series of dominos. The Amazon may be one of the first dominos to fall, since it is being pushed not only by climate change but also by deforestation, and by positive feedbacks inherent to its climate; as the studies I've presented show, there is every reason to believe it will be disappearing fast by 2050 and essentially gone by 2100. The Arctic sea ice is another domino likely to fall soon; some estimates predict that the Arctic may be open ocean i summer as early as 2030, although most predictions fall somewhat later. Both of these dominos will cause further dominos to fall. As Malhi et al. point out, the drying of Amazonia "could greatly expand the area suitable for soy, cattle, and sugarcane, accelerating forest disappearance" and generating more methane, fertilizer runoff, and other drivers of environmental degradation. As the Arctic converts to open ocean, countries are already competing for the rights to drill the vast oil reserves that have long been inaccessible under the Arctic ice, and burning all of that oil will, of course, drive further global warming. In my opinion, then, we should not think in terms of a tipping point, but in terms of dominos, and it is of great importance to try to prevent the first dominos from falling. The Amazon depends upon us for its survival; but conversely, we may also depend upon it for ours.

References cited

Williams, J.W., Jackson, S.T., & Kutzbach, J.E. (2007). Projected distributions of novel and disappearing climates by 2100 AD. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 104(14), 5738-5742.

Thomas, C.D., Cameron, A., Green, R.E., Bakkenes, M., Beaumont, L.J., Collingham, Y.C., et al. (2004). Extinction risk from climate change. Nature, 427(6970), 145-148.

Stouffer, R.J., Yin, J., Gregory, J.M., Dixon, K.W., Spelman, M.J., Hurlin, W., et al. (2006). Investigating the causes of the response of the thermohaline circulation to past and future climate changes. Journal of Climate, 19(8), 1365-1387.

Service, R.F. (2008). Study fingers soot as a major player in global warming. Science, 319(5871), 1745.

Malhi, Y., Roberts, J.T., Betts, R.A., Killeen, T.J., Li, W., & Nobre, C.A. (2008). Climate change, deforestation, and the fate of the Amazon. Science, 319(5860), 169-172.

Cox, P.M., Harris, P.P., Huntingford, C., Betts, R.A., Collins, M., Jones, C.D., et al. (2008). Increasing risk of Amazonian drought due to decreasing aerosol pollution. Nature, 453(7192), 212-215.

Costa, M.H., Yanagi, S.N.M., Souza, P.J.O.P., Ribeiro, A., & Rocha, E.J.P. (2007). Climate change in Amazonia caused by soybean cropland expansion, as compared to caused by pastureland expansion. Geophysical Research Letters, 34, L07706.

Baettig, M.B., Wild, M., & Imboden, D.M. (2007). A climate change index: Where climate change may be most prominent in the 21st century. Geophysical Research Letters, 34, L01705.

Talk: Victoria Johnson

2008-06-02T13:45:00.000-07:00

Victoria Johnson: Rubber

The Para rubber tree, Hevea brasiliensis, is a tree in the family Euphorbiaceae. It grows to about 30 meters, and is endemic to the Amazon rainforest. It has had a huge economic impact as the source of natural rubber. Latex, the source of natural rubber, is also found in other plants (tens of thousands of species), and may be a defense against insect herbivory. Latex is produced by secretory cells called lactifers, located in the inner bark of the tree. Latex vessels spiral up the tree in a layer outside the cambium. Latex can be extracted by cutting with machetes or more sophisticated rubber tapping techniques. Unlike many latex-producing plants, the more damage that is done the more latex flows, making the rubber tree much easier to harvest latex from than other species; the rubber tree is responsible for 98% of the world's natural rubber harvest. The latex is then collected, preserved and stabilized. The wood of the tree, called parawood or rubberwood, is an ecologically sustainable tropical hardwood used for furniture. Cultivation of rubber trees is made more difficult by South American leaf blight, a fungal disease caused by the native ascomycete Microcyclus ulei; this fungus has prevented commercial-scale plantations in South and Central America, but is still absent from Asia.
The Para rubber tree was not domesticated in Brazil, but the Amazonian natives harvested the wild plants. Amazonian Indians leached poison from Para rubber tree seeds and ate them; the cooked seeds are edible. Some Amazonian Indians dipped their feet into latex and dried them over a fire to create perfectly sized sneakers. The waterproofing qualities of rubber were discovered by Europeans on a French expedition to the New World; de la Condamine documented rubber being used for torches, bottles and shoes by natives in Ecuador. Rubber was exported from tropical zones to Mesoamerica. In the Mesoamerican ball game, the ball was solid rubber, weighed up to five pounds, and was about six inches in diameter. Europeans initially believed the bouncing balls were bewitched or inhabited by spirits. The Olmecs (the "rubber people") were the first to cultivate the rubber tree, and are often given credit for having invented the ball game. Rubber balls were symbolic of fertility, and the Aztecs and the Maya equated latex with blood and semen.
Columbus saw rubber in the West Indies, and saw games with bouncing rubber balls in Hispaniola, between 1492 and 1496. Rubber was introduced to Britain in 1730, but it took a long time to catch on, partly because of the chemical instability of natural rubber. In 1827 Brazil exported 31 tons of natural rubber; in 1830 Brazil exported 156 tons. In 1834-1839 vulcanization was developed by Charles Goodyear, making the rubber more stable (and harder), and rubber took off. In 1840 Brazil exported 388 tons, in 1850, 1467 tons, in 1860, 2673 tons, in 1870, 6591 tons. Manaus was at the center of this trade; the rubber export from Brazil went through Manaus, and it caused a huge economic boom. The British were quite unhappy about the Portuguese monopoly on rubber, and Sir Henry Wickham managed to cultivate rubber trees from seeds (smuggled? stolen?) from Brazil. The British began growing rubber trees in tropical spots in the British empire, such as Sri Lanka and Singapore. In Brazil, meanwhile, 8680 tons were exported in 1880, 19000 tons in 1890.
The years of 1890-1920 was the "rubber boom," the Golden Age of Manaus. 120,000 native slaves were used to collect latex, and the rich rubber barons built huge colonial mansions, paved the streets, ran streetcars, introduced electricity, and so forth. The opera house in downtown Manaus dates to this period. The effect on the native people of Brazil was quite negative; brutal labor practices, debt and introduced alcohol were used to control them, and the rubber trade fragmented their society. The population of native peoples dropped precipitously.
But in 1898 the British established a successful rubber tree plantation in Malaysia (after much struggling). The British had an advantage because of the lack of the South American leaf blight in Asia, and rubber prices began to drop. In 1902 rubber plantations were established in India. The maximum output of rubber from Manaus was in 1906-07, when 30,000 tons were exported; things went downhill from there.
From 1920-1945 Henry Ford established Fordlandia, a large rubber tree plantation in Brazil, in an attempt to obtain his own rubber for car tires. It failed, as did all later attempts at large-scale rubber cultivation in Brazil. Ford was oblivious to Brazilian culture; he forced his workers to wear ID badges, eat hamburgers, work 9 to 5 days, and did not allow drinking or smoking. A worker rebellion in 1930 had to be subdued by the Brazilian army. Ford lost $20 million on Fordlandia before giving up.
During World War II the Japanese had control over most areas suitable for growing rubber trees, and the other powers struggled to find alternatives; the Germans experimented with harvesting latex from dandelions! From 1941 to 1953 Richard Evans Schultes, the "Father of Ethnobotany," was sent to South America to find a reliable source of rubber for the U.S. war effort. He remained to discover and catalog 25,000 new botanical species. In 1945 synthetic rubber was developed, made from gas or oil.
In the 1960s world natural rubber prices collapsed,and many landowners in Brazil sold to ranchers. In the 1970s Chico Mendes, a rubber tapper and unionist, united the rubber tappers and opposed the loss of rainforest to cattle ranches. By 1988 Mendes has reached such prominence and importance that he was assassinated by the cattle ranchers; but the seringeuiros, the rubber tappers of Brazil, became heroes in popular culture.
Today, worldwide rubber production is 9.7 million tons. Thailand, Malaysia, and Indonesia are the prime rubber producers in the world, followed by Sri Lanka, India, Liberia, and Nigeria. 90% of world rubber production comes from Asia, because of the South American leaf blight. In 2007, Brazil produced about 1% of the world's natural rubber, which is less than Brazil itself consumes.
Rubber today is used in tires, toy balloons, water bottles, condoms, carpet underlay, belts, wire cables, hoses, rubber bands, erasers, rubber stamps, footballs, golf balls, tennis balls, gloves, Wellington boots, Mackintoshes, waterproof fabrics, rubber bullets, rubber duckies... About 40% of the world's rubber is natural rubber, while the other 60% is synthetic; natural rubber has some properties that synthetic rubber does not, so it is still needed for some uses. 75% of all rubber is used in tire manufacturing.

FUCAPI

2008-06-02T09:30:00.000-07:00

Today we're visiting FUCAPI, the Fundacao Centro de Analise, Pesquisa e Inovacao Tecnologica (The Foundation Center for Analysis, Research and Technological Innovation). I'm in a small auditorium right now with a screen in front, and they are starting a video about FUCAPI that I will try to summarize here.
The Amazon is the planet's largest freshwater reserve, with vast quantities of wood and minerals. Manaus is an economic powerhouse, the eighth largest city in Brazil and the center for 60% of northern Brazil's economic activity, with a total revenue of about $28 billion per year. FUCAPI places itself at the center of all this. They are involved in many areas, from cell phone technology to electronic voting machines to sewage treatment bioreactors to processing of guarana berries. In all cases the overall goal is to help the development of the Amazonas region in ways that are compatible with the rainforest.
Now we're getting a little PowerPoint presentation from a fellow who works here. FUCAPI is now 26 years old. It is a nonprofit private foundation. Its initial focus in 1982 was industrial production analysis, but in 1986 they changed their scope to larger issues. FUCAPI's primary vision is the sustainable development of the Amazonas region through technology and education. Their goal is to become "a benchmark as an educational and technological institute to society, based upon the expertises of its professionals". They have partnerships with many international companies (Oracle, Diebold), government agencies, and small local institutions. They employ about 1500 people now. You can see more about them at http://www.fucapi.br.
A question was asked about their source of funding; it is from organizations (corporations, government agencies) that essentially hire them for their expertise. They receive no bulk funding from the government to support them in general, although individual government agencies do pay them for specific projects.
A question was asked about their involvement in carbon dioxide reductions. Their answer was very long, and made clear that they take the problem seriously and are attacking it on many fronts, from promoting a carbon credit scheme to promoting biodiesel to many other things. They promote reforestation in the south of Brazil, and fight deforestation in the Amazon, and work closely with local people to try to promote sustainable ways of life with a low carbon footprint. They are, however, opposed to the view of the Amazon as a sanctuary; 23 million people live in it and depend upon it for their livelihood, and that is a fact that should not change.
A question was asked about water purification and distribution systems that FUCAPI had been mentioned as producing and promoting; the questioner had visited several small river communities in the past week and had not seen any evidence of such systems in use. The seasonal rise and fall of the Amazon is about 29 meters, and the width of the river can vary by a factor of twenty. People living on the margins of the rivers cannot have normal systems for water or waste, because of these variations; so FUCAPI has been developing water treatment systems to address the needs of these communities. It purifies water from wastewater on-site, can be submerged without any problems, and works using aerobic and anaerobic bacteria and ultraviolet light. The reactors are made from recycled PET plastic from plastic water bottles; about 1500 water bottles are used to make one reactor. The reactors use no electricity. The resulting water is very nearly pure. These systems have been installed in companies, hotels, hospitals, universities, small floating river restaurants, and floating hotels; they have models for small houses as well, at a cost of about $4000 for a five-house treatment unit. The use of these reactors will soon be required by law, if I understood correctly. Right now only a small percentage of the wastewater from Manaus is treated; most is released into the rivers, and in some areas the pollution is extreme. A shift to these bioreactors provides a huge opportunity; the hope is that in five years the rivers will be clean again. Applications for this technology may reach far beyond Brazil in the future.
A question was asked about FUCAPI's involvement in hydroelectric power (which provides most of the electrical power in the Amazonas region), and what measures are taken to minimize the ecological impact of hydroelectric generation. Because the Amazonas region is so flat, the area flooded by dams is much larger than it would be in other regions. Problems with hydroelectric power involve submerging of forest, disruption of indigenous communities, and effects upon river fish. Projects at FUCAPI include increasing efficiency of hydroelectric generation, finding ways to decrease the flooded area, new fish ladder technologies, and turbine innovations to allow generation from a lesser height differential. The impact upon indigenous people is addressed chiefly by not siting dams in their areas; no planned hydroelectric plants will impact indigenous people. By 2025 Brazil will be the world's fifth largest economy, so Brazil will need a huge amount of energy. They are focusing on hydroelectric energy and renewable energies, particularly biodiesel from ethanol; they don't want to use nuclear power. Brazil also has large oil reserves, but they are trying to focus on biofuels, not fossil fuels.
A question was asked about FUCAPI's involvement in education. They are involved from high school to postgraduate and MBA work. They help about 4000 students currently, and offer classes in many different areas, with a focus on technology. Night classes are offered for those who work during the day. FUCAPI partners with international and American universities, including San Jose State University. One current goal is to bring 18 US students to Brazil and 18 Brazilian students to the US in the next four years, on an exchange program. The exchange program currently centers on students in management and technology.
Next we wandered over to a building at FUCAPI called the Tropical Design Center. They design furniture and other items out of tropical woods, and then promulgate those designs to people (indigenous and otherwise) in rural areas of Brazil for manufacture. The goal is to use fallen trees, wood scrap, and other sustainable materials to produce high-quality (and high-priced!) items for export. They had some stuff on display, and it was really quite beautiful. Their website is http://www.nativeoriginal.com.br/, although it seems to only be in Portuguese, to offer other products not made by FUCAPI, and not to have prices (in any currency) on the site. Possibly if my Portuguese were better I could find that information somewhere.
Now we're in a highly air-conditioned computer classroom at FUCAPI where we're all busily checking email and surfing. I'm going to give my presentation in a couple of minutes, and then two others will present as well; so I'll end this blog entry here, and put up separate entries for the presentations.

Another INPA visit

2008-06-01T18:00:00.000-07:00

Well, I'm almost caught up with my blogging -- whew! Today I returned to INPA, the center for scientific research in the Amazon, with a few others. We took things at a slower pace today, which was nice since it meant I could find a lot more insects; they're small and camouflaged, so you have to go slowly if you're going to see them. Rather than giving you a blow-by-blow description of things, I think I'll just post a bunch of photos I took today, and let you all figure out what they are!

Well, I´m all caught up with my posting! Whew. Tomorrow is supposed to be rainy, so three people will supposedly give presentations, including myself. Brace yourselves. As compensation in advance, I will leave you with a picture of four kinds of local beer:

Bacchanalia

2008-06-01T17:40:00.000-07:00

I've been blogging like mad, but haven't had a chance to get to the internet cafe, so the last several days will get posted in one big wave. Sorry about that!
This entry is about what we all did last night: we went to a big festival called Bar do Boi, or Bibim Bap, or something like that. Well, not quite; the full-on festival is a little ways away. What we went to was a rehearsal, really. The festival involves two teams whose mascots are bulls, so you have the red bull and the blue bull teams. Each team has musicians, singers, dancers, and presumably set and costume designers, choreographers, and who knows what else. The teams perform on alternate weekends, and get judged by the people who attend their concerts. In the end, as Dr. Ouverney put it, one of the two teams wins, and whichever one it is, that's cause for another several weeks of celebration.
So we went to a place called the Sambodroma (the "place where samba is," perhaps similar to the English words hippodrome and aerodrome and so forth). It was essentially a large dance hall, with the musicians in the front, platforms for the team dancers next, and then a big area for people to dance. We got there soon after 10 PM, when the ball was just beginning to roll, and the place was pretty empty; but after an hour or so the pace picked up, the music got more interesting, and the performance got more complex. Costumed dancers with various props came out and danced around the arena, and the bull (not a real bull, but a person in a large bull costume) was driven out on a float. Fireworks started being set off, and the arena filled with smoke, and people were screaming and dancing wildly; it had quite a Bacchanalian mood!
Eventually the costumed dancers and the bull went up onto the stage in front, and the band launched into some very bouncy, catchy music. The music had a specific dance that one was supposed to do to it, which I gather had been choreographed by the blue team ahead of time; the team dancers in the front would do that dance, and the Brazilians in the front rows were watching carefully and learning the moves so they would be ready when the real festival arrived. I, not being Brazilian, did not attempt to learn the moves, but I did wiggle my butt a little from time to time.
Some of the costumes were quite interesting; the lead dancer was a woman in a sort of frilly blue mock-colonial dress with a very wide-brimmed hat, and there were two very young girls (I would guess perhaps eight years old) who danced right up in front in brilliantly colored costumes, one an orange-feathered indigenous tribal sort of get-up, the other a green dress with appliqued flowers. Many of the other people in the blue team were dressed in sailor outfits, for no clear reason.
It was unspeakably loud; Brazilians are a remarkably noisy people. I put earplugs in early on, and even then my ears were ringing for more than an hour after we left at about 12:30 AM. The music was great, but there were long interludes of advertising for Coca-Cola, who apparently put up a lot of money for the blue team, and since I'd gotten up around 6:30 that morning, I eventually ran out of gas. Others in our expedition stayed on for another hour or so; the Brazilians, being Brazilian, apparently kept going until dawn!

Talk: Vida Kenk

2008-06-01T17:00:00.000-07:00

Vida Kenk: Fauna of epiphytic bromeliads

An epiphyte is a plant that grows on another plant for support (i.e. not in a parasitic sense). Big trees often collect a good deal of dirt, leaf litter, water, and other good stuff in the crotches between branches, and even in depressions along the tops of branches. These spots provide everything a plant needs to grow, and are even, by virtue of being up in the canopy, better illuminated than spots on the forest floor. So there are plants, epiphytes, that take advantage of this opportunity.
Bromeliads are a type of flowering plants, members of the pineapple family. There are more than 2600 species of bromeliad in 56 genera; they diverged from a common ancestor about 20 million years ago (mya). They seem to have met with a great deal of success due to their use of CAM photosynthesis (a special, efficient type of photosynthesis) and their evolution of the ability to live as epiphytes. They are nearly exclusively neotropical (i.e. New World tropical); there is one species in West Africa that may have rafted over on a floating mat of vegetation. Bromeliads now occur in many habitats: granitic outcrops, coastal dune fields, high altitude cloud forests, and rain forests. 26 of the 56 genera of bromeliads include epiphytes as over half of their species, so it is a very common habit among the bromeliads.
Bromeliads grow with a ring or "whorl" of leaves that enclose a central "tank" where water is stored (think of a pineapple's leaves). Water and organic debris from above accumulate in the tank, creating a microhabitat suitable for all sorts of life. Bromeliads dominate the epiphytic vascular flora of the neotropics; their biomass exceeds that of all the other angiosperm families combined (such as orchids). In a Colombian cloud forest, over 175,000 mature bromeliads may occur in a single hectare, resulting in the storage of perhaps 50,000 liters of water per hectare in bromeliad tanks (the largest bromeliads can hold 45 liters each, although most are much smaller). This means that bromeliads create an ephemeral island-like freshwater habitat for other species. It also means that countless millions of semi-isolated habitats exist simultaneously; this may have caused rapid evolutionary radiation among species that use bromeliad tanks, since each tank is a sort of independent experiment.
Bromeliads possess these tanks for a reason: they are "animal-assisted saprophytes". As organic debris such as leaf litter falls into the tank, it is decomposed by microorganisms, and the various decomposition products are eventually absorbed by the bromeliad through specialized trichomes. Due to this evolution towards absorption of nutrients from decomposition products in their tanks, it is thought that the bromeliads are currently evolving towards carnivory, along a path similar to that taken by the pitcher plants one often sees in bogs.
More than 500 animal species have been described within bromeliad tanks, about 470 of which are insects. Protozoa, bacteria and fungi are also commonly seen. A wide variety of species are found in bromeliad tanks; they include a great many ants, somewhat less beetle larvae and fly larvae, and occasional observations of taxa as diverse as amphibians, annelids, all sorts of arachnids (more pseudoscorpions than spiders, interestingly), isopod crustaceans, butterflies, molluscs, nematodes, and even one onychophoran worm. Some of these organisms use bromeliad tanks facultatively, meaning that the tanks are not essential to their life cycle: mosquito larvae can breed in bromeliad tanks, for example, but there are many other places with stagnant pools of water where they can also breed. Other species appear to be obligate users of bromeliad tanks, meaning that they rely exclusively upon them in some way, and cannot survive or reproduce without them: three clades of diving beetles have been found, for example, that appear to have evolved in close association with the original evolutionary radiation of the bromeliads 20 mya, and now live exclusively in the tanks. Some species spend only part of their life cycle in bromeliad tanks, usually in a larval phase; the family of tree frogs that includes the poison dart frogs, Hylidae, sometimes lays its eggs in tanks, or transports its eggs to tanks after laying them elsewhere, and then feeds their tadpoles with additional eggs (fertilized or unfertilized) as they grow in the tanks.
An interesting question that remains largely unanswered is how these species (particularly those living in bromeliads obligately) disperse to new sites. Bromeliads die, like any plant, and their tank then disappears; so all of the organisms that use or rely upon them must have a means of finding and dispersing to new bromeliad tanks. Some organisms, such as most insects, are motile: the adults can simply explore and find new tanks in which to lay eggs, for example. The non-motile, obligately aquatic animals, from ostracods to annelids, may be carried on the skin of motile animals such as frogs, or may be carried by being eaten and emerging unharmed in fecal material. Other organisms may disperse by being windblown as cysts.
Bromeliad tanks are related to human health, interestingly, because they provide a breeding ground for mosquitoes that act as vectors for important diseases such as dengue and yellow fever. Even when extensive urban control measures are taken, the bromeliads in nearby forest can act as a reservoir for mosquito breeding populations.

Fruit and street food

2008-05-31T18:40:00.000-07:00

Back from my wanderings downtown. We started out by sampling a bunch of fruit stands. The first photo, with fruit that look like red bell peppers with little brown hats, are actually cashew fruits. The brown hat on top is the cashew nut; the nut we're familiar with in the States is inside that. The rest of the fruit is also edible, though; I've been having cashew juice at breakfast every morning since we got here. It's a little bit bitter; some people stir sugar into it, but I've been mixing it with guava juice to good effect. The next fruit, the spiky yellow one, is, Dr. Myatt tells me, a relative of the banana; it has a pulpy white interior with a mild taste, around cherry pit sized black seeds. The last one we tried, which look a bit like lemons with a complexion problem, were very strange. You peel off the skin, which is brittle and comes off very easily in pieces. Inside that is a white, fibrous-looking layer which you might try to peel off and discard if you're ignorant like me; it looks a lot like the bitter white layer of an orange. That layer, however, is the fruit; it turns out that from one to three very large seeds occupy the bulk of the interior, and that white fibrous stuff is all there is besides those seeds. So you pop it all in your mouth, and the white stuff turns out to be much more flavorful and juicy than it looked; very tart and tangy, like a citrus fruit (although I have no idea whether it is, in fact, a citrus).
Then we tried some street food. For just one real (about 60 cents) I got a large sort of pocket bread filled with diced potato, carrot, and (I'm told) minced shrimp. It was a fair amount of food, and quite tasty; washed down with a Fanta grape soda, it staved off starvation for another day. Dr. Ouverney got a plate of food including rice, a sort of shrimp curry thing, mixed vegetables with dried fish and manioc (we think) with a strip of bacon on top, and a little mayonnaised vegetable side. The veggies with dried fish was pretty good, if somewhat salty. I don't mind the salt, though, since we're sweating just about constantly here.
We then spent a couple of hours shopping; we wandered up and down crowded market-filled streets buying various knickknacks and oddments, jewelry and dresses. I shan't bore you with any details of that! Tonight we will be going to a big Brazilian festival in Manaus, but the description of that will have to wait for another post!

Waterfalls

2008-05-31T11:55:00.000-07:00

OK, so speaking of being behind on my blogging, this entry is about what we did yesterday, Friday the 30th. At about 7:30 in the morning we all piled onto a tour bus that Dr. Ouverney had arranged, and drove north out of the city. There's a road that runs from Manaus all the way up to Venezuela, and we took that road for a couple of hours, well out of Manaus. It's hard to see primary rainforest anywhere near a road in the area of Manaus, and even on this drive all of the areas we saw were logged; the biggest trees were absent.
We stopped at a roadside restaurant that had some yummy banana bread made with yuca flour (it's surprising to me how universal yuca is in the food in Manaus, since I don't expect it grows anywhere near there; perhaps it's an imported taste from the more southern parts of Brazil). They also had various other curiosities, like candied cupuaçu; we had a good time sampling their various offerings.
Then we moved on to a spot where we could hike in to a waterfall a short way into the jungle. It was a lovely hike. We saw bees busily pollinating, tiny frogs, what seemed to be ant-lion colonies with hundreds of pits in fairly close proximity (the ants must regard that area quite warily!), lots of spiders, caves that hosted bats, a charming little yellow wasp, lots of fungi of all sorts, and a moth as big as my hand. When we reached the waterfall, it was a surging, torrential flow; we were a bit surprised by its vigor, since it is no longer the wet season, and since we had seen so little rain during our visit. The water were deeply colored by tannins, which in some spots made it look creamy (when it was foamy), in other spots like wine, and in the deepest waters, simply black. We hiked out along a different trail that went right alongside the waterfall, providing some dramatic views of the torrent from just feet away. There were lots of bromeliads on the way out. Bromeliads are a type of plant that often lives on other plants, although not parasitically; they just perch on top of other plants and grow there. Pineapples are the best-known example, and other bromeliads often look similar, with the spiky leaves arranged in a spiral.
One waterfall is good, but two waterfalls are better, so we piled back on the bus and went to another spot for a little more hiking. This area was more developed, with bigger trails, some benches, and even a (closed) restaurant part of the way along. The waterfall itself was quite spectacular; with several cascades side by side merging into a single roaring deluge. In the middle of all this was a little shrine to the Virgin Mary; it is difficult to imagine how somebody got that shrine there, unless they used a crane. This hike wasn't quite as rich in wildlife, or perhaps we were just getting tired; but there were some very pleasing orange fungi, and we saw what seemed to perhaps be a lone soldier army ant with an absolutely enormous head and set of mandibles, and a molted skin from a cicada that was quite perfectly preserved intact, and of course lots of exciting plants that I'm unable to describe since I know so little botany.
After this hike we went on to dinner, which was outdoors in a little tourist area next to a river (everything is more or less next to a river in Amazonia, it seems). Before we sat down we discovered a huge scarab beetle, about as long as my index finger, slowly making its way across the grass; we all agreed that it was the biggest beetle we had ever seen in the wild! The food was good; barbecued chicken, a churrasco platter (not sure if I'm remembering the word quite right) with grilled sausage, beef, and more chicken, a dish of fish cooked in coconut milk and palm oil that was very yummy (and probably about a million calories per bite), and the usual tasty rice with beans. It tasted very good after all that hiking.
At the end of the meal Dr. Vida Kenk gave a presentation about bromeliads and the fauna that live inside them; I'll post that as a separate entry as usual. We had planned to go to a local festival after dinner, dedicated to the cupuaçu fruit, but after dinner it started to rain very hard, and we found out the festival wouldn't really get underway for several hours (Brazilians seem to begin their festivals around 10 PM), and so the decision was made to drive back to home base. This decision was influenced by the fact that the road to Manaus had nearly washed out in one spot due to the rains in that region the previous night, and the bus driver was worried that if we waited too long, the road might prove impassable given the strength of the ongoing storm. In any case, we got back home safe but soaked!

2008-05-31T11:45:00.000-07:00

Today is a bit of a rest day, since it's Saturday; on the weekends we can all do as we please. Mike and Danielle decided to be hard-core; they have headed off on a four-hour boat trip down the Amazon, where they will then camp deep in primary rainforest and explore the flora with a guide. I'm taking it easier; I washed some of my clothes in the sink this morning and hung them up to dry, then went to a supermarket to buy essentials like beer, as well as miscellaneous Brazilian curiosities (palm hearts, local hot sauce) for presents for folks back home. The local brand of toilet paper is called "Snob", which is rather amusing. I think I'll go back to the supermarket again before I leave, now that I know where it is, and get some Brazilian candy and fruit juice and such, and see what I can bring back into the U.S. There are many kinds of fruit juice available here that one could, of course, never find in the U.S.
In a little while, I'll be heading downtown with Dr. Ouverney and Dr. Myatt and perhaps others, to change money (which is surprisingly hard to do here!) and to perhaps do some shopping and have lunch. Right now Dr. Ouverney is arranging a side trip to an expensive eco-lodge for some of the other group members (Bob and Victoria), so I'm using the time to catch up on my blogging, which I've fallen behind on. I realized I hadn't taken a photo of the hotel yet, so here one is. It's not at all a bad place, especially considering how cheap it is; Dr. Ouverney did some good bargain-hunting when he planned this trip!

Hotels and beaches

2008-05-29T21:15:00.000-07:00

Today has been an adventure-filled day! Last night after I posted the last blog entries, several of us were walking back from the Internet cafe and spotted both an enormous cockroach (the biggest we've yet seen here) and, in a different place, an enormous assassin bug. I'll spare you the picture of the cockroach; available upon request. The assassin bug didn't seem very well; when we walked by the next morning, he had only moved a few leaves over, so we photographed him some more.
We hopped onto a local bus and went over to a fancy five-star hotel to see how the other half lives. On our way there we got caught in a tropical shower; we were all overjoyed, and many of us stripped down to bathing suits or shorts and wandered around blissfully in the rain. It was the first rain we had seen thus far in the trip, oddly enough (this being, after all, tropical rainforest!) so we were all very happy. It was only a shower, intense but brief, and ofter it ended we went on to the hotel.
It was tall and palatial, with a glass elevator and some balconies from which we could see the Rio Negro stretching away into the distance; at the spot we were at, it seemed to be several miles across. The clouds over the water were beautiful, but of course virtually impossible to photograph. The hotel also had a zoo onsite with a big sign that claimed that the zoo housed only rescued and injured animals, but I don't believe a word of it; the cages were tiny, the animals looked maltreated, and I think the zoo just put up the sign to make the wealthy tourists feel better. A jaguar paced endlessly in a cage only a few times longer than the length of its body, and the little monkeys they had reached for Mike's hand with sad grimaces of despair. The only exhibit that I enjoyed was a large cage with a nesting pair of birds (herons?) that had an interesting behavior: they would stretch their necks out as far as they could, and moo like cows! At first I thought this might be a mating behavior (and the female of the pair even seemed to present for mating at one point), but later the very same behavior seemed to be used in a threatening manner when I got too close to the cage, so I don't know now. After having a snake draped around my neck for a photo op, it was time to move on.
We took a boat to a beach a little ways down the river. The beach was set up for partying Brazilian style: loud music, salty food, lots of beer, and swimming on the beach. Since I didn't inherit the party animal gene, I headed off into the pseudo-jungle (nowhere near primary forest) with a few others. It soon became clear that, with no outhouses on the island, the trail was used by the locals primarily as a latrine, and we eventually turned back out of revulsion, but Mike and Danielle did spot lots of interesting plants, and I got photos of some neat insects, including lovely red and black dragonflies that drew their wings upwards at rest in an unusual manner.
When we got back from our hike, the professors were partying in the water with a bevy of cute girls; that's Dr. Myatt, a botanist at SJSU, enjoying a taste of semi-retirement in the photo at right. Then we had lunch (delicious grilled fish, french fries, and the usual rice and bean mixture), washed down with plenty of Skol, and we headed back to home base. I'll leave you with a photo of me as I would look if I had dreadlocks, courtesy of a tree near the hotel!

Talk: Bob Johnson

2008-05-28T16:45:00.000-07:00

Bob Johnson: An overview of the geological history of the Amazon Basin

The Amazon basin is slightly larger than the continental U.S.; a rather large piece of land. Charles Darwin wrote three books on the geology of the Amazon, long before the theory of continental drift revolutionized geology in the 1960s. According to continental drift theory, about 500 million years ago (mya) the four southern continents were a single chunk of land, Gondwanaland. The land we know now as Manaus has always been near the equator, even as other continental plate action occurred. About 135 mya, the other continents collided with Gondwanaland to form a single supercontinent, Pangaea. After that the mid-Atlantic rift opened up and spread North and South America apart from Eurasia and Africa; this spread started in the north first, splitting North America off from South America and isolating South America from the other continents for most of the last 135 million years. When the South American plate hit the Pacific plate, the Andes formed due to subduction. Before this point, the water in the Amazon region flowed very slowly westward and drained into the Pacific, so the area was essentially a big brackish marsh; but as the Andes uplift progressed, the westward flow stopped and then reversed towards the Atlantic. For a long time a great deal of water was trapped by shields (the Guayana and Brazilian shields) to the east, creating a huge freshwater lake; this state of affairs lasted until about 23 mya. Even now, however, the Amazon basin is in a sense the largest inland body of water in the world; ships can sail all the way to Peru, and the difference in elevation of the water across the Amazon basin from the Atlantic to the border with Peru is only about 600 feet, so it can be viewed as a very large, marshy lake with an outflow to the Atlantic ocean. Today, sediment-rich waters from the Andes provide the "white water" of the Solimoes; nutrient-poor waters from the Guayana shield area color the waters of the Rio Negro.
During ice ages, water levels have fallen and the Amazon has turned into savannah; species survived in refugia at higher elevation, particularly in the western Amazon. At the end of each ice age, the water levels rise, the savannah floods, and species recolonized the area. The connection between North and South America through Panama formed some time between 3.1 (traditional estimate) and 1.8 (most recent estimate) mya; apart from migration via vegetation rafts and such, communication of species between the continents was limited before this occurred, although an island archipelago must have formed between the continents somewhat earlier, and some birds and insects could migrate between continents all along.
In summary, the Amazon basin has always been near the equator, has always been essentially flat, and has had a great deal of unique flora (no flowering plants) and fauna (marsupials) due to its isolation.

Talk: Rod Myatt

2008-05-28T16:15:00.000-07:00

(These talk posts will always just be my notes on the presentations; the original talks were of course much better, and all errors are my responsibility...)

Rod Myatt: An Introduction to Tropical Habitats

There are a great many habitats in the tropics, despite the appearance of uniformity from the air or the river. There are several types of climate in the tropics. Due to the tilt of the earth, the amount of incident sunlight varies by latitude and by season. The tropics receive the most heating, producing rising warm currents of air that cool as they rise, producing storms. The wet season of the tropics follows the sun, since the rain is driven by the incident sunlight, so now the southern Amazon is entering the dry season as the sun is moving northward for winter. Temperatures between the wet and the dry seasons don't actually differ much; this is one thing that is characteristic of a tropical climate. Rainfall can be very high, typically giving more water than plants are capable of using, so there is a great deal of excess precipitation (unlike many other climates).
So that's the basic picture of tropical climate. But there are many microclimates. The trade winds blow along the equator from east to west; this is the source of all incoming moisture entering the tropics. So in the Amazon region, the winds are coming from the Atlantic across the Amazon basin, slowly depositing their rainfall from the east coast all the way to the Andes. At about 5000-6000 feet elevation, the air masses cool to their point where clouds form and precipitation is highest; this is the cloud forest on the slopes of the Andes. Lowland rainforest, such as surrounds Manaus, is lower than montane rainforest (cooler and wetter), which is lower than cloud forest (coolest and wettest). So there are gradients of temperature and humidity based upon elevation. Above the cloud forest it is very dry and cold, and typically vegetation goes from shrubs up to alpine species. Similarly, the far side of the Andes lies in the rain shadow of the mountains, are are drier and colder. The more seasonality there is in the climate, the more deciduous the vegetation will be, so in the lowland rainforest vegetation is not generally deciduous, while in Peru, for example, you see tropical deciduous forest.
There is also microclimate variation due to local terrains; the land has some texture and slope, so some areas are north-facing or south facing slopes, some areas get water runoff and others don't, soils can vary quite a lot based upon such factors, some areas have volcanic influences, and so forth. The geology of the tropics is quite variable; there are many kinds of soil, and the statement that "tropical soils are poor" is an overgeneralization. But because of the long history of weathering of rock in the tropics, and the excess rainfall, many minerals have been leached out of the soils and have been lost; this is the source of the overgeneralization. Other less soluble minerals remain behind. Clay soil is composed of particles that are typically negatively charged, so minerals with positive charge are retained, while negative ions (often oxidized ions such as nitrates, sulfates, phosphates, and carbonates) are lost. The rapid buildup of organic debris in lowland rainforest also leads to faster loss of nutrients, because they are taken up by plants before they can become incorporated into the soil. This process is accelerated by the fungi that are often symbiotic with tropical plants that allow for extremely rapid and efficient absorption of minerals; in effect, plants are competing for insufficient minerals in the top layer of organic material, rather than getting minerals from the actual soil. Most of the nutrients in the tropics are in the plants, not in the soil.
This is what drives the slash-and-burn agriculture of the native peoples of the Amazon. It is not a matter of ignorance, it is actually the logical way to farm given low nutrient content in the soil and a lack of fertilizer. After a patch of forest is cleared, crops will grow well for only a few years before the soil is exhausted. The native peoples then move on to a new patch, clear it, and farm it for another few years, and so forth. Given a small population, this is actually perfectly fine; the forest recovers from clearance of small areas, and the native people have been practicing this sort of agriculture for quite a long time. The problem arises when population rises, agricultural demands rise, and the forest begins to be cleared faster than it is able to recover: deforestation. When small gaps are created, as happens naturally due to tree falls even without agriculture, it also creates microhabitats (open area, edge area, and so forth) and succession from one type of vegetation to the next. Another source of diversity in habitats involves difference in humidity, temperature, and light depending upon the height you are at, from the soil up to the canopy. Mike will be talking about this more later in detail.
So the big message is that there is a great deal more heterogeneity in tropical habitats than one might expect. The species in each habitat will differ; this is part (but not the whole) explanation for the high biodiversity of the tropics.

The confluence of rivers

2008-05-28T15:06:00.000-07:00

The boat trip today was really good. Before we got on the boat, we spent a little time in a fish market next to the dock; all sorts of exotic fish were on display. One species of fish looked very primordial, like a coelacanth; they also had big catfish, almost three feet long, and various more conventional-looking fish. One booth had piranhas; a boy at the market held open the jaw of one for me to photograph the teeth. Some of the fish were being breaded and grilled next to the market; they looked very tasty, but we had to move on.
The confluence of the Rio Negro and the Solimoes (the local name for the Amazon upstream from the confluence) was beautiful. The waters stay quite separated for quite a distance due to different levels of salinity, temperatures, and so forth, so there is a large area in which the black waters of the Rio Negro sit side by side with the cafe-au-lait waters of the Solimoes. Floating mats of vegetation were everywhere, with many different species of plants and several species of birds. Mike, one of our resident botanists, was fishing all sorts of exotic plants right out of the wake of the boat as we motored around.
Then we went for a brief stop at a local spot where a very large fish called piraracu was being farmed. They had sections of the river cordoned off with fencing that went down to the floor of the river, far below, and had dozens of the fish trapped in their corrals. The piraracu are black with large red-edged scales, and they grow perhaps as much as four and a half feet long. We scoped out the corrals for a little while, and then the men who worked there started trying to drag the fish a little out of the water, using baited lines, for us to see. The fish were so large, and fought so hard, that we only got occasional glimpses of them before they escaped back into the water, but they were quite remarkable! On the trip back we saw the houses of lots of Brazilians who live on the river (presumably fisherpeople); their houses were often painted brilliant colors, and were quite scenic.
Then we came back into Manaus and had a delicious lunch of grilled fish, fish stew, and lots of beer. The local beer is called Skol; it's very light and fairly bitter. The fish stew was absolutely fantastic; perhaps from the influence of Portuguese culture, it came with a boiled egg in it, but it also came with grated dried yucca (common in Brazil). The grilled fish was also delicious; salty and perfectly cooked. The food came with a rice and bean side that was also very tasty.

We ended the day with a pair of lectures by two members of our group; I´ll post them as separate entries for easy reading.

INPA and downtown

2008-05-27T20:45:00.000-07:00

It has been quite a day. Things started off slowly, since so many people were so short on sleep; we finally rolled out of the hotel around noon, I think, after a nice long breakfast, running some errands, and various cat-herding activities. We took a bus up to a place called INPA that is the center for scientific research in the Amazon. We will be back there again later in the trip to meet with some of the scientists who work there, but we spent today exploring their grounds.
And their grounds are amazing. INPA is within Manauas, so the rain forest there is long gone; but they have done their best to reconstruct a facsimile of rain forest within their grounds, and it seemed pretty good to me. (We´ll see the real thing soon enough.) We saw all sorts of critters, from leaf-cutter ants to some very friendly turtles to crocodiles, all in captivity (well, maybe not the ants), as well as many very exotic plants (I don´t know much about botany, but the two botanists in our group were practically foaming with excitement). There was also an incredible sort of gift shop at INPA consisting entirely of goods made and sold by native people of the Amazon. A different tribe gets showcased each week, on a rotating basis; I don´t know about the work of other tribes, but this week´s products were amazingly beautiful, and staggeringly cheap. I spent a lot of money; much more of it goes directly to the native people through INPA than it would in any other sort of store in Brazil, so it was a wonderful win-win situation, as far as I can see.
Then we took a bus to downtown and walked around there a bit. I got to see the waters of the Rio Negro for the first time, and we had drinks and dinner in a huge plaza that was very European. Manaus´s downtown is really quite nice. There was a huge covered market; Manaus has historically always been a center of trade in Brazil, and it shows. We took a group photo in front of the old opera house in Manaus; on Thursday we will actually see an opera there (not inside the opera house, but in the plaza in front of it). That should be great fun!
I don´t know what the plan is for tomorrow; one day at a time. For now, it´s time to get some sleep.

Impressions of Manaus

2008-05-27T07:45:00.000-07:00

Hello from Brazil! I've been here since yesterday afternoon. Dr. Ouverney met me at the airport, which I initially thought was an unnecessary but nice gesture, but when I am now very glad of. It turns out that my Spanish, as humble as it is, was extraordinarily useful; you don't really realize what you have until you have lost it. I can't understand more than maybe one word in a hundred in Portuguese, and can't speak at all, apart from a few key phrases I've had Dr. Ouverney teach me. I feel quite adrift. If I got lost, all I could really do would be to show strangers the card for my hotel and look inquisitive, and perhaps say "taxi" and "por favor". It's a bit scary. We will all be so dependent upon Dr. Ouverney; he will be on full-time translation duty for twenty people. I don't envy him.
Then, too, he is being run a bit ragged. He had a fever of 104 last night, but he had to get up in the middle of the night to meet an incoming airplane with the remaining twelve students, so he got very little sleep. This morning he was already up when I came down for breakfast; he said he couldn't sleep because he was too congested to breathe. He says he feels fine right now, but expects to run out of steam later today.
After I got in yesterday we took a bus from the airport that cornered unbelievably hard; I was practically thrown across the bus, and held on very tightly after that. It was hard to believe the bus didn't tip over, the way it was being driven. Then from the bus terminal in town we caught a taxi, which drove very slowly and cautiously to the hotel. After a brief regrouping, we went out with the intention of running lots of errands, but we got stuck on our first one (after having a quick lunch of beans, noodles, and a very crunchy fried fish). That was a trip to a bank, where Dr. Ouverney was trying to arrange a transfer of funds. In typical third world fashion, it took several hours, with endless consultations and phone calls. He was required to sign his name the way he had signed it when he was fourteen, so that it matched the signature on his Brazilian identification card, which he had received as a teenager; since his signature has evolved a great deal since then, he had to look at his ID card and do his best to forge the signature. This was done under the gaze of the bank employee who had objected to his first signature; having done a sufficiently good job of forgery, Dr. Ouverney finally received his money.
By then it was so late that we needed to leave for the airport again to pick up two more incoming students, girls named Amy and Hannah. That went smoothly enough, although their flight was delayed by an hour. After a bit of regrouping at the hotel, we went for dinner to a nearby restaurant that Dr. Ouverney had discovered, and ordered beers, little fried appetizers with fish in them, and a very tasty fish cooked in coconut milk (all of which I forgot to photograph, sorry Keewi!). Then Dr. Ouverney limped off to try to get a bit of sleep (this is the point at which he had a 104 fever); he didn't eat with us.
After dinner we walked south towards the downtown area. The sun rises at six and sets at six here; we are only three degrees south of the equator. So it was already quite dark, but early enough that things were quite busy. My chief impression so far is that Manaus is poorer and dirtier than Caracas, but less threatening. I think perhaps the key difference is in the gulf between rich and poor. In Caracas, the rich people are so rich, and the live right alongside the poorest people. In Manaus, it doesn't seem to be that way; I haven't seen any obviously, ostentatiously wealthy people here, as I saw everywhere I went in Caracas. I've seen scientific studies that indicate that what makes people unhappy is not so much being poor, in some absolute sense, but only being poor relative to other people that they see around them. It's the gap, not the level of wealth itself. So I think the conditions in Manauas may not breed to discontent and hostility that Caracas seemed to have.
Anyhow, speculation aside, we saw lots of little bars, lots of street vendors serving grilled meats of various sorts, lots of hotels that seemed to be doing business by the hour, lots of stray cats and dogs, lots of people milling around. We walked past a university, with floods of students entering its large walled compound using a key-card system. We walked past a hospital situated in a huge, grand old colonial building; at first I thought it must be the city hall or some such. Finally we decided to turn around; theoretically we ought to have been quite close to the river at that point, but we never saw it, and we decided we were too tired and sweaty to keep going right then. The river in question is not actually the Amazon; Manaus is built at the confluence of the Amazon (which the locals don't call the Amazon above the point of confluence) and the Rio Negro, which comes in from the north, and Manaus is built on the banks of the Rio Negro. This is because the Rio Negro is full of acidic, toxic tannins (making its waters dark, thus its name), and those tannins cut down on the breeding of mosquitoes.
I'm typing this at my breakfast table at our hotel. It's a reasonably nice place; budget third world accommodations, but quite good by those standards. The room has air conditioning, which is key, and the bathroom is very clean and modern. Breakfast this morning was pretty good actually; they cooked eggs to order, and had cheese and meat and bread and a grill press sort of thing to make grilled sandwiches, and two kinds of juice, and hot dogs with a tomato, onion and celery mixture (I think), and cake. We'll be having breakfast here every morning, so I expect I'll get quite used to this routine. I've learned how to order a scrambled egg in Portuguese. In a little while we'll have the first meeting of our class, and then I expect things will start to get busy!

Buena vista

2008-05-25T12:42:00.000-07:00

Well, I'm set up at my transition hotel, the Buena Vista Inn near the airport. The view out my window is only marginally buena; I can see the ocean, but most of the view is of some big ugly concrete apartment buildings whose view is more buena than mine is. It's out in the middle of nowhere, but the guy at the desk says I can order a pizza to be delivered, so that's fine. In another hour or so, when the sun is a bit lower, I'll walk over to the beach and see whatever can be seen. They are doing a load of laundry for me, apparently gratis, which is very nice; I don't really need it yet, but it will be one less thing to have to do in Manaus right away. Best of all, though, they have Wi-Fi! So if there's anybody who is itching to chat with me, or maybe even have a voice conversation, send me a message through Skype (user: cloudkom) and if I'm not out beach-combing or something, I'll answer. Offer valid for the next five hours or so only, though, and then I'm going to bed. The taxi picks me up at 4:30 AM. Will the fun never end?

Viva Caracas!

2008-05-25T12:30:00.000-07:00

The man at the hotel desk steered me towards a little place about five blocks away that was serving empanadas, and had bottled water and yogurt, so I've staved off death for another day. Church seems to have let out next door, and now very loud music is playing in the Plaza Bolivar; for about half an hour now it has been the same song, a sort of triumphant, bouncy rock song of some sort, apparently with a great many verses and a very catchy chorus. I'll be hearing it in my dreams tonight. At the climactic point of the song, the church started tolling its bell, which actually went quite well with the mood of the music, like the victorious ringing of freedom across the jubilant lands. Now a street vendor has starting ringing his bicycle bell, and the rock ballad has ended, and, bizarrely, the church seems to be playing Gregorian chant through a loudspeaker system. This is the most diversely noisy hotel room I have ever stayed in, and I've given you just a random sampling from one morning; I've also heard crazy people screaming in the plaza in the middle of the night, political rabble-rousers using megaphones, and once, what sounded like an explosion. Viva Caracas!

Limbo

2008-05-25T10:30:00.000-07:00

Well, Carmelo and I did go out last night as planned. Caraquenos take their partying seriously! I was out until 4 AM; since I had gotten up at about 6 AM, that means I was up for 22 hours, including a ten-mile hike. I didn't sleep well, either, for some reason, so I'm in a bit of a fog this morning.
Contributing to this surreal sensation is the fact that it's Sunday. Apparently, that means that virtually everything is closed; no restaurants, no stores, no internet cafe, no nothing. Except shoe stores. I just took a little walk around the neighborhood, and every single storefront for blocks around was closed, with the exception of every shoe store; those were all open for business, at least a half dozen of them that I walked past. Perhaps every shoe store in the area is owned by the same person, and that person has decreed that they will be open Sunday? Anyhow, it's clearly a bad business decision; there's absolutely nobody out on the streets, it's deserted. Not a lot of shoes getting sold, despite massive effort.
Also making the mood a bit surreal is the fact that it's raining. It started to rain soon after I got back to the hotel last night, and has been drizzling continuously ever since. I didn't think the tropics did this; I thought it was always short, intense showers. But here we are; it's overcast, and shows every indication that it will rain for quite a while longer. Much of the trail I took in Avila yesterday must be "un rio" today; I feel very lucky to have timed my hike as I did.
Well, I have a bit of a problem now: I am completely out of bottled water, and have nothing to eat but granola bars, and there seems to be nothing at all open for miles. I'm not sure what to do, except slowly perish from thirst and hunger. And I am getting quite thirsty and hungry, the aftermath of a vast overconsumption of scotch last night with Carmelo. Even the hotel's own restaurant seems to be closed today, which I had assumed would not be the case. What to do?
Carmelo has made arrangements for me to be picked up from the hotel today at 1:00 and driven out to a hotel next to the airport. I'll stay there tonight, where there will presumably be absolutely nothing open as well, and then I'll fly out to Manaus early tomorrow morning. So it looks like today will be a day both lost in transit and sacrificed at the altar of religion. Well, I guess I needed time to finish preparing my presentation for class anyhow, and I still have a couple of New York Reviews in my suitcase to read. (Plowing through those has been occupying all my down time on planes and in my hotel room; I got behind by almost a full semester's worth, since this past semester was too busy for me to keep up on my reading!)
Hmm, well. A few musings, and then I'll sign off and see if the hotel staff knows of an open restaurant anywhere in a ten-mile radius.
Noises of Caracas: constant talking out in the hallways of my hotel, all day and most of the night, I'm not sure why (why don't they talk in a room?). The chimes of the cathedral across the street, every fifteen minutes, oddly variable in their tunelessness, as if they had been programmed to chime a different random sequence every time; they repeatedly startled me out of sleep the first night I was here, but I don't even notice them now most of the time. Lots of beeping from the traffic; Venezuelans are not as horn-happy as some, but neither are they a silent people. Then there is the ringing, outside in the Plaza Bolivar, of bells that sound like bicycle bells, due to the vendors at various carts hawking their wares. There is a wide variety of music here, too. Right now a man is singing outside in the Plaza in a way that sounds sort of traditionally Caribbean to me. I can also hear the congregation singing hymns in the cathedral. Earlier this morning a woman was singing what sounded like opera, in a beautiful high voice; perhaps she was a soloist in the church service, but it didn't sound like religious music to me. The fancy restaurant I went to the other day, on the other hand, had very cheesy music; I remember them playing a song from the Fantastiks ("Try to remember the kind of September..." -- I've always liked that song, actually, ever since I saw the Fantastiks as a kid), as well as "Fernando" ("There was something in the air that night, the stars so bright, Fernando..." -- can't remember who sings that, Linda Ronstadt maybe?). Last night in the clubs it was pretty much all reggaeton, which got a bit repetitive, but apparently it's the fad here.
Smells of Caracas: I'm sorry to say the principal smell that springs to mind is exhaust fumes. In that way Caracas is a lot like Rome, minus the scooters; lots of very loud smelly traffic that can seem inescapable in some parts of town. But there are also the smells of the food the street vendors sell: empanadas and arepas, and a wide variety of other things I don't know the names of (and didn't sample, for fear of gastrointestinal consequences). And the smells of the people: lots of perfume and cologne, although perhaps no more than would be encountered in, say, New York City. Notable for its absence: the smell of cigarette smoke. I expected Venezuelans to smoke like chimneys, but I have only seen a handful of smokers in my entire visit, and smoking inside places like restaurants seems uncommon.
OK, that's enough babbling for now. Off to try to find nourishment before I collapse.

Hiking in La Avila

2008-05-24T14:15:00.000-07:00

Carmelo couldn't make it out last night, so I got to bed early. That turned out to be a good thing, since I decided to get up before dawn to go hiking. By 6:30 I was out of my hotel; I walked to the metro and took it to Altamira, the rich neighborhood at the foot of the big mountain to the north of Caracas, La Avila. The metro was uneventful, as was the walk up to the park; people I met along the way were very friendly, and pointed me down the right path to get to the park entrance.
At the entrance, I had another curious encounter like that at the museum of art yesterday. There were two guards stationed at the entrance, and my guidebook says they would collect some sort of nominal fee, but no mention was ever made of it. And although my guidebook makes a big deal about how getting a map of the park is necessary, I didn't bother, and when I asked the guards what route I ought to take for a good hike, they told me that there was really only one route through the park anyway, so I shouldn't worry about it. Which turned out to be essentially true; there were occasional paths off to the side, but I never saw anyone at all take them, and when I asked someone what the difference was between the main path and one of those side paths, he just pointed at the side path and said "no". Ours not to reason why.
There was a poster of endemic birds of Avila at the entrance, which I photographed, but the very first bird I saw, while I was still at the entrance station, was not on the poster. The guards told me it was named something like "Querraquerra," presumably for the sound it makes. Very colorful, with a yellow front, green wings, a complex head with patches of blue, black, white, and yellow. That kind of bird was the only one I got a boog look at; there were some extremely noisy birds that I heard for the whole first half of the hike, but that I only got (galliform?) glimpses of, and I think I saw a bird called a "cattle tyrant" flying a ways off (perhaps identifiable because it's bright orange).
Anyhow, enough on birds. It was a lovely hike. For the first stretch I was on open ground hiking on reddish earth with eucalyptus and such around me; it quite reminded me of Australia. The trail was quite busy for that part. After a pretty strenuous uphill climb, I came to a sort of rest area, where lots of people were doing exercises -- chin-ups, sit-ups, all manner of things. It was very strange. None of them seemed inclined to hike any further; the exercise area must have been their goal. They were all terribly trim and fit-looking in lycra; the wealthy Caraquenos, such as would hike up from Altamira, seem a bit on the vain side. Most of them were listening to portable music players, which seemed like a shame since they couldn't hear the birds, which were truly riotous.
At this point I asked various people where the trail continued (there seemed to be many possibilities), but everybody told me it didn't continue at all; they said it was washed out (to be precise, they said it was "un rio", a river). Feeling skeptical, I just pressed on up the most clearly uphill path I could locate, and soon got to a junction. One branch was indeed closed by yellow tape, and I later confirmed that that was the "rio" due to spring flooding; but another branch headed down the opposite side of the ridge I'd just climbed. After some hemming and hawing about safety and not having a map and so forth, I decided to press on. Things got much greener and shadier now. After about 30 minutes I got to a nice little waterfall crossing the trail. I stopped to drink water and eat some granola bars, and was reluctantly coming to the conclusion that I ought to head back, when a fellow came bounding along the trail the same way I'd come. After some halting exchanges in Spanish, he realized that I spoke and English and switch to that, which was his preference as well, and after that we got along swimmingly. He was Iranian, but had left Iran after the revolution (which he said was "very tough at first") and moved to Panama, where he had lived ever since. He visited Caracas often, because its climate was much cooler than Panama's, and he hiked through Avila every week or so. He assured me that the trail would continue past the waterfall and exit the park after a few hours of hiking, and it turned out he was going that way too, so we hiked together for quite a while. Eventually he took a turnoff, but told me how to keep going, and after another hour's hike or so I reached the end of the line, at the Hotel Avila northeast of my own hotel. The cicadas were almost deafening for the last part of the hike, which got back into dry, open terrain.
I popped in at the Hotel Avila, one of the fancier hotels in Caracas, and drank a liter of water by their pool, and then headed own downhill towards the downtown area. On the way, I chanced upon a neighborhood barbecue restaurant, and had one of the better barbecue chickens (well, half-chickens) I've had in my life, accompanied by cooked yucca (which was quite nice, very starchy and fibrous but an excellent vehicle for tasty hot sauce) and washed down with Solera beer. A fantastic meal; my food experiences have definitely taken a turn for the better since the rather poor arepas (pita sandwiches, sort of) I had my first day here!
Then I walked the rest of the way back to my hotel, getting back about 1:00. Since I left at 6:30, that's 5.5 hours in transit; an hour for eating, so I hiked for 4.5 hours, so probably about ten miles, or a little less. This whole day I never felt endangered at all, even walking to the metro just after dawn. I think I'm getting the hang of Caracas; today has been just lovely, and I think I'm developing a sense for which blocks to walk down and which blocks to avoid. My Spanish is definitely getting better too; I'm starting to recall some old vocabulary from grade school, and I'm managing to communicate productively with everybody I talk to. Everyone has been stunningly friendly to me, and it's an easy city to be a tourist in: small enough to walk everywhere, but with an excellent metro system, restaurants and stores with bottled water in vast profusion, Movistars everyone to make phone calls from, and so on. I'm very pleased with my decision to stop off here; I was apprehensive beforehand, but it has turned out really well. I may come back the next time I'm planning a South American trip (which I hope isn't too far from now)!
Well, I am now going to make a real effort to find a place where I can post all this verbiage, as well as change some money and generally get organized. Carmelo assured me last night that he would be able to go out tonight, so I'll call him in a couple of hours and see how plans are firming up. There's a bar at the top of a tall hotel in Altamira that he wants to take me to, with a 360-degree view of the city and good people-watching. He has been such a help, and he no longer seems to view things as a guide-tourist relationship; he just wants to hang out and have fun. I've promised him that I'll show him around the U.S. if he makes it up there (which he never has, despite being quite widely traveled in Europe and even Australia).

OK, now I´m online

2008-05-24T12:57:00.000-07:00

Hi everybody. Sorry for the dead air followed by today´s deluge of posts. I haven´t attempted to attach photos to my posts yet, I may try that shortly (so photos may appear in posts you have already read). [Just added photos, not so hard really...]

Museums and Miche

2008-05-23T18:20:00.000-07:00

So I headed off to the Museo de Arte Contemporaneo, which I found after spending a considerable time lost in an underground pedestrian mall. The museum was somewhat mystifying; nobody took an admission fee from me, or gave me a brochure, or anything. They just sort of shooed me through a doorway and told me to go down five flights of stairs. But as soon as I was through the doorway I was in the museum, so I decided perhaps I'd pay my admission at the end, rather than going on a quest through the museum just to do so. In the end, no admissions desk materialized at the bottom of the museum either; rather, they informed me that I had reached the end of the museum, and now had to go back the same way to get out. So I did. Ours not to reason why.
It's a really wonderful museum, though, confusion aside. It's not tiny, but not huge either; looking at least cursorily at everything they had on display took me only a couple of hours. They have some very famous works on display -- some Chagalls, some Mondrians, one Miro -- but most famously, they have a big room full of Picassos. All of the above were nice enough, but I liked best a few pieces by artists I've never heard of before. One, by Miguel von Dangel titled "El monumento," is a rather disturbing sculpture of a horse that is somewhere between decaying and mummified, with a bloody spike protruding from its chest and barbed wire hooked through its mouth and around its forelegs. It was quite powerful, although I have no idea what it was intended to be a monument to. The other piece I particularly liked was a sculpture of a reclining figure by one Henry Moore; I wouldn't be surprised to learn that he's terribly famous, but I've never heard of him. It was made of bronze, and had a Cubist feeling to it somehow, despite being a sculpture; but a rounded, sort sort of Cubism. Anyhow, with any luck I'll manage to attach photos to this blog once I figure out how to post it. At present I'm too busy enjoying Caracas to bother finding a Wi-Fi spot and spending hours posting all this. You ravening hordes, keening for the next installment of my blog, will simply have to be patient.
After the museum I had a bit of time to kill; I had expected to be there until it closed, but I ran out of things to look at. So I decided to go on a bit of a gastronomic adventure to a restaurant my guidebook recommends, but that is in a somewhat sketchy part of town. After getting some walking route advice from a woman at the museum (who implored me to be careful -- warning six!), I set off. I quickly got off route, and missed a pedestrian bridge I was supposed to have taken, and on one or two blocks I did feel that I was being eyed evaluatively by a few tough-looking young guys; but I got through without mishap to the Plaza la Candelaria, near my intended destination. It's a funny thing in Caracas how quickly the mood of the streets changes; I went from feeling in significant danger, on a side street near the plaza, to feeling completely safe at the Plaza itself, over a distance of just a few dozen paces.
At the Plaza was a fine equestrian statue (the second so far; one is in the Plaza Bolivar right next to my hotel), which I photographed. Nearby were several tables of chess players. Yesterday, in my travels with Carmelo, we walked by an area with several dozen chess tables going at once, but this was smaller. I watched a five-minute blitz game, which was quite enjoyable; an interesting mate threat forced a queen trade which appeared to give black the advantage, but white very skillfully constructed a winning endgame with a passed pawn, and black resigned. Nobody invited me to play, though, so I wandered onwards to the restaurant: La Cocina de Francy. As soon as I left the plaza I was back in dangerous-feeling streets, but after a couple of blocks, there was the restaurant, perched among closed shopfronts, car repair shops, electronics stores, and various unidentifiable buildings.
Coming through the door was, again like being enveloped in peace and safety. Venezuela is certainly a country of contrasts, as Carmelo emphasized. I had a wonderful meal there. My first course was a sort of stew of chicken and rice called "Pelao Guayanes," which reminded me of gumbo but without the dark roux; it was based on a thinner, more buttery broth, and had what seemed to be pesto on top, as well as an unidentifiable red sauce. Extremely tasty. Next I had "Lomito en Salsa de Tamarindo," a steak in a peppery tamarind sauce with fried fritters of plaintains on the side. It was delicious; I expected the sauce to be sweet (tamarind, after all), but it was mostly creamy and peppery, with only a note of tamarind in it, and it went very well with the steak and plantains. I had a Solera, the beer Carmelo had turned me on to yesterday, and decided not to get dessert, so I expected to get the check, but then things took an unexpected turn.
A waiter -- not my waiter -- had been sitting at the bar the whole time, staring balefully at me with what I thought was hostility. But I guess it was just curiosity, for when I had finished my food, he got up and disappeared, and a few minutes later reappeared with a little shot glass of something that he made clear was on the house (perhaps he was pleased that I had ordered and finished two entire entrees). I expected it to be Scotch (did you know that Venezuela drinks more Scotch per capita than any other country besides Scotland? So Carmelo claims!), but instead it was a spicy, sweet liqueur with a licorice taste. I enjoyed it quite a bit, and got my own waiter (a very friendly and patient man who had tackled the menu with me in a spirit of great cooperation) to tell me about it. He said the name of it, but I didn't understand, so I opened my guidebook to have him write, on its page, what it was called, and I showed him the review of his restaurant in the guidebook. At that point, things really got exciting. He rushed off with my guidebook to the back of the restaurant, where a bunch of the staff were gathered, and started waving the guidebook around, and there was much laughter, and then my waiter re-emerged with the owner of the restaurant and his wife in tow. I don't think they thought I was a reviewer for the restaurant -- I'm pretty sure of that, form things said later -- but they were enormously friendly and enthusiastic nevertheless. They wrote down the name of the drink, and told me how to make it:

Miche

Start with a bottle of Anis. To the bottle, add several whole sticks of cinnamon; some chunks of lemongrass (the Thai stuff; they showed me a piece); some mint (this is the ingredient I'm least sure of; they called it "Ment" and said it was a tree, but when I said "una planta, verde, una herba" (in my abysmal Spanish that consists of adding "a" to the ends of English words) they agreed with that; and some cloves. Combine all this in your bottle of Anis and set it aside for perhaps 15 days. I asked how much of each ingredient to use, and they waved the question aside as more or less self-evident; just use "a good amount, not too much, not too little".

This surreal episode ended with them bringing me a little plastic water bottle filled almost full (maybe 0.6 liters) with Miche. I will try to make it last until I get back to the States, so some of you will have a chance to taste it, but I can make no promises. :-> So I left them a honking big tip, and staggered back out into the beating sun and wilting humidity and choking traffic fumes.
A brief hike back to my hotel, all this typing, and now supposedly I'm going out for the evening with Carmelo, although it sounds like his girlfriend may be placing unreasonable demands upon his time that may constrain our activities somewhat. We shall see. More later! I really do need to post this stuff soon, this is getting ridiculous. Tomorrow.

Walking tour of Caracas

2008-05-23T11:30:00.000-07:00

Well, yesterday was quite a whirlwind. On the 21st I had called a man recommended by my Lonely Planet guidebook as providing walking tours with a "less conventional view of Caracas". He was busy, but he recommended a friend of his, Carmelo Velasquez (0412-375-1388). I called Carmelo and we agreed that he would meet me at 6:30 AM at my hotel, and we'd spend the day walking around looking at things for the princely sum of $60 US.
I wasn't sure what to expect, but it turned out to be absolutely great. Carmelo is a friendly, voluble and knowledgeable young man who spends the bulk of his time doing translation services, using his excellent English, for foreign dignitaries and celebrities (Naomi Campbell, recently, apparently) and for oil companies and other big corporate interests. But he says that if he were a rich man, and didn't need to earn money, he'd spend his time giving people tours of Caracas, and I believe it. He was incredibly helpful to me; he translated a few key phrases to the staff of my hotel that smoothed over some difficulties I had been having, exchanged money for me through a shadowy friend of his (who I never even saw) at well above the official rate, and made reservations for me with a trustworthy taxi driver to get me back to the airport at the end of my stay.
And the walking tour itself was great too! We started out by climbing a long flight of outdoor stairs in a sort of park called the Parque el Calvario overlooking the center of the city. A few photos from there, including one of the place where Hugo Chavez apparently spends much of his time (I was only allowed to take one photo of that, and yes, there was a friendly but watchful armed policeman standing nearby to ensure compliance). Then we walked around the center of town for a while, seeing various buildings designed by famous architects, catedrals, and so forth.
The tour quickly turned political; I had hoped to coax Carmelo into discussing politics a bit, and it didn't take much coaxing. He himself is somewhat left-leaning but with a good splash of globalism and economic realism thrown in; he believes that reforming Venezuela so as to make it a better tourism destination is an essential step for progress, and he shakes his head over many of the unfriendly or dangerous aspects of Caracas. He's cautiously optimistic about Chavez, but thinks his power is in fact very limited; he is not at all the omnipotent dictator that the Western mdeia presents. As an example, he said that Chavez had actually wanted to raise the price of gasoline in Venezuela (which is absurdly low), but public protests had forced him to abandon the idea. He thinks that whether Chavez is successful in helping the country or not depends greatly upon his ability to compromise with, or outmaneuver, the many vested interests in Venezuela that limit his actions. For that reason, he rolled his eyes when I mentioned the speech in which Chavez called Bush the devil; that is not the way, he seemed to feel, for Venezuela to build the international alliances and goodwill that it will need to succeed in the global economy.

He took me to see several very political sites in Venezuela. One is a statue commemorating those killed during a recent period of political unrest (I won't try to get into the exact history, since I don't understand it); he showed me bullet holes in a wall near the statue. Another was a big mural of the PSUV (Chavez's political party), personified as a man in a red shirt and green cap, and a snake labeled "IMPERIALISMO" with George Bush's head; the man is strangling the snake while kicking away rats and hunchbacked stooges with various labels. The last political site was huge, wonderful mural depicting Venezuela's history from pre-Columbian times through to the beginning of the Chavez era. It was very depressing; the parade of exploitive, corrupt dictators that Venezuela has endured is a long one. But it was also very funny; Ferdinand and Elisabeth are shown above a big poster that says "La Guerra Justa" (the just war), with a tiny subtitle reading "O Matanza del Indigeno Caribe" (or, the massacre of the indigenous Carribeans"); El Dorado is depicted with the subtitle "La Maravillosa Ciudad de Oro que Solo Existo en la Cabeza del Conquistador" (The marvellous city of gold that existed only in the minds of the conquistadors); a Catholic priest, depicted as a fat ogre in a Franciscan robe, shouts "Tened FE!" (have faith!), and the natives before him mumble "...also que nos dejen tener..." (at least they let us have something...). And so forth, onwards into the 19th and 20th centuries. At the center of the whole thing is Bolivar, who is revered in Venezuela almost as a deity.
Well, onward. We visited a mosque; besides speaking Spanish and English, Carmelo also speaks French, Italian, and German, and has been taking Arabic from one of the officials at the mosque for the past six months, so we got to go inside and look around. It was similar to the other mosque I've been in (in California): simple and spare, but aesthetic. It had a huge, beautiful chandelier hanging from the ceiling with ornate geometric ironwork, quite an exceptional work. The mosque was built by a prominent sheik from Saudi Arabia, I gather, and Caracas has a significant Muslim population (enough that there is a Shi'ite mosque across town to complement this mosque, which is Sunni).
Then we walked though a long park towards the university, and then around the university itself; both the park and the university had sculptures and other works of art dotted around, and both were populated with occasional students making out on benches. Carmelo said he had done the same when he was a student, and intimated that the darker corners of the park were often utilized by students unable to afford hotel rooms for their trysts. We visited a botanical garden next to the university, and it was much the same; it also had a nice section of xerophytes that reminded me of California.
We had lunch at the university, a "typical plate" of beans, rice, plantains, and a spiced (but not picante) mixture of fish, peppers, butter, and perhaps other things. It was quite tasty; the best food I've had in Caracas thus far, in fact. At other spots I've eaten, the food has been quite greasy and full of cheese. Carmelo confirms that Venezuelans love cheese, although it's not quite what Americans or Europeans would call cheese; it's a slightly tart white substance perhaps vaguely reminiscent of Indian paneer. The university's architecture was quite distinctive and interesting, if not really to my taste; the focus was on concrete used creatively, which was the fad at the time, I guess. Some spaces were very well-developed, though; it had an openness that was pleasing, and the omnipresence of art around the campus made it feel avant garde. The gorgeous young ladies attending the university also contributed to an aesthetic ambience, I must say; Carmelo is justifiably proud of the beauty of Venezuelan women!
At this point we were both sweaty and tired, so we went to Carmelo's apartment (shared with a variety of extended family members) on the south side of town, cleaned up a bit, drank vast quantities of cold filtered water (well, I did; Carmelo does not seem to require water), and logged on to the internet briefly to check email (but not to post to my blog, since I wasn't prepared to do so there). We went up to the roof of his apartment building (he lives on the 23rd floor, and the roof is above the 25th floor, and the elevator wasn't working that day!) to see the views, where were spectacular. From the spot he lives, nearly half of the horizon is taken by land owned by the Venezuelan military (with the house of the head of the military perched on the top of a hill in the midst of that area, surrounded by nothing but green expanses for miles around); much of the rest of the horizon is barrios. Carmelo explained to me that in most of Latin America, "barrio" means simply "neighborhood", but in Venezuela, as in the U.S., it has come to mean poor neighborhoods in particular. The terms "ranchos" is also used in Venezuela for the poorest areas, which sounds very odd to my New Mexico-tuned ears. The barrios look almost like the peublos of the Anasazi at Mesa Verde: tiny rectilinear dwellings stacked and jumbled together to form a continuous high-density blanket of housing covering the land. All that is missing are the kivas and the ladders. They are decrepit and forlorn, and according to Carmelo, so dangerous that even the police won't venture into them beyond a certain point (fourth warning from a native; I am starting to take all this seriously :->).
To end the day, we went to a neighborhood to the east called Sabana Grande and had some very tasty beers (Solera was the brand) and some little cheese filled rolls (I want to say they were called taquitos, but that's not quite right; Carmelo says they are typical wedding food in Venezuela, and can also be had at cafes and bars). Then we went on to Altamira, a very wealthy district (according to Carmelo, probably the richest neighborhood in all of South America), where we had dinner (at a Sicilian restuarant, where I got some unexceptional gnocchi) and saw a big obelisk, one of the clutch of obelisks that the French under Mitterand sprinkled around the globe as a goodwill gesture. (I know I've seen perhaps three others in my travels, although I'm not sure exactly where; perhaps one in Egypt, one in Italy, and one in Paris?) This obelisk was lit at the top, which I don't recall the others being.
I took a taxi back to my hotel with Carmelo; the taxi driver was quite a character. He seemed to be a very good story-teller, and had Carmelo laughing and trying to translate the whole way. He's a policeman in some sort of special forces unit specializing in disassembling bombs, but they don't pay much so he moonlights running a taxi business on the side. (Carmelo said that's quite common, and in fact said he intends to do the same once he's saved enough money to buy a car.) So he was telling stories about crazy taxi customers, and about criminals shooting at him with machine guns (the police only have Glocks), and about how annoyed he is that the police are supposed to wear red in support of Chavez or some such -- the police should be above politics and taking sides like that, he said vehemently -- and about how dangerous the barrios are (warning five).
Well, enough sitting in my hotel room typing (I haven't found a good spot to sit and use my laptop yet; I haven't seen a single person using a laptop publicly in Caracas, so I don't feel safe doing so anywhere). I'm going to go to a museum now, and then meet up with Carmelo for dinner, if things go according to plan. I may go hiking up in the mountains above Caracas tomorrow with a fellow who works at my hotel, if that plan goes off properly. More later!

Arrival

2008-05-21T19:12:00.000-07:00

Well, apart from about two hours of shut-eye on the flight to Miami, I've been up for a day and a half now. I'm about to go to bed, but I wanted to jot down some impressions first.
Miami and San Juan were blurs. As my plane was approaching Caracas, the woman next to me asked me "Caracas?" I took that to mean, was I planning to stay in Caracas, so I said yes; and she said "se cuida!" (or some such; my Spanish is almost non-existent). Subsequent hand-waving established that meant "be careful!" So that's my second warning from a Caracas native, the first being from my friend Leo.
For a brief but panicked interval, I thought they had lost my big checked bag in Miami; when I got to Caracas it never came off the conveyor. A very helpful young woman from Colombia helped me find the desk at which to inquire, and there, for who knows what reason, was my suitcase. Imagine my relief. So I changed a bit of money, and got out through customs without problems.
Then getting a taxi was the usual third-world bustle of dozens of random strangers grabbing my arm and grabbing my luggage and urging me towards their cousin's car and offering to change money and so forth; but I followed my guidebook's advice and got one of the "official" taxis, big black SUVs with yellow decals on the side, and that seemed like a good decision; the driver was really nice and spoke a bit of English, and pointed a few things out to me on the way in, and I felt quite safe. (Supposedly getting mugged on your way to or from the airport is fairly common. I have no idea how seriously to take such warnings.) The taxi driver who took me in to town emphasized how dangerous most areas of Caracas are (three warnings and counting...). He kept pointing out hillsides and exclaiming "barrios!"
And they were barrios; I haven't seen neighborhoods that run-down in a long time. At the same time, the houses were perched on hillsides with gorgeous views out towards the ocean; Americans would pay a pretty penny for such views. I guess there just aren't enough wealthy Venezuelans to drive gentrification of such neighborhoods; apparently all the ricos are concentrated in two neighborhoods of Caracas closer to the downtown (with no ocean views, I think).
The traffic got worse and worse as we got close to my hotel, and eventually it became clear that there was a big anti-Chavez rally happening a block from my hotel (the street next to my hotel is pictured). My taxi driver eventually gave up and dropped me off about a block and a half away, and I hoofed it from there. I'm quite surprised by the amount of anti-Chavez sentiment here; not just that rally, but signs up everywhere and people in the park shouting about what seems to be politics. I was under the impression that Chavez had just gotten re-elected in an election that was thought to be fair, but the discontent here is quite strong. My guidebook warns me not to talk about politics with anyone, but I'm doing a walking tour with a guide tomorrow who speaks good English, and I think I'm going to try to gently broach the topic and see if I can't find out what's going on.
I wandered around for a while. Took a few photos of what I think was the house where Bolivar was born (pictured); it seems to have been made into a bit of a museum, with huge paintings of events from Bolivar´s life on the walls. A mime was working a big crowd in front of what I think is the capital building (my taxi driver pointed to it and said "Hugo Chavez" as we drove in); the mime was imitating people walking down the street. One woman he was walking close behind suddenly noticed him and was so startled she screamed, and then collapsed laughing, along with the crowd. I didn't see any sort of money collection for the mime; I'm not sure why.
Ate a slice of pizza, which had corn on it, which reminded me that I really am in South America; it evoked nice memories of pizza in Brazil. Figured out how to place phone calls; you go into these little shops called Movistars (I'm not sure if they're implying a "movie star" image, or what), and they give you access to a numbered booth (one of perhaps forty), and you place as many calls as you want on the phone in the booth, and then you come out and pay for the whole thing. Now that I've figured it out, it's really quite nice, considering my cell phone doesn't work here. (I think I could get a SIMM card for it or something, but I'm not here long enough to bother). Set up my walking tour for tomorrow, bought a bunch of bottled water, and now I'm about to collapse from exhaustion, so... signing off! (No idea when I'll actually be able to post this, I'm not sure if there are any public Wi-Fi access points here...)

Welcome to Amazon 2008!

2008-05-20T16:22:00.000-07:00

Hi everybody! Welcome to the new blog I've just set up for my trip to the Amazon. I'm flying out tonight, and will arrive in Caracas (Venezuela) tomorrow afternoon; I'll be there until the 26th, when I'll go on to Manaus, in the heart of the Amazon. I'll return June 16th.

The Caracas portion of my trip is just a fun side jaunt. There's supposed to be good hiking in the mountains to the north of the city, as well as great restaurants and some interesting architecture. The Brazilian part of the trip is a class through San Jose State University, where I'm working on an undergrad degree in biology (conservation/organismal emphasis). The class will focus on the Amazon: its flora, fauna, and ecology, its native inhabitants, its relationship to global climate, the politics surrounding it, its history, and anything else we can think of to talk about. We'll be based in Manaus, staying at a cheap-o hotel downtown, and we'll mostly take day trips out from there; maybe one or two overnight trips, we shall see.

I've gotten all my travel shots (a distant but painful memory), and I'm almost completely packed now, which is good since my friends Joe and Lisa come to pick me up and take me to the airport in an hour and a half. I've definitely overpacked, but I figure since we're staying at the same hotel for three weeks, there's little harm in that. Most importantly, I've got two kinds of bug repellant, lots of sunscreen, several good hats, and a waterproof camera. :->

I'm hoping to get some interesting photos, and I'll post the best here; I'm also planning to write a lot about the science topics we talk about in class. I'm actually keeping this blog to satisfy a journaling requirement for the class, so I may post some things that aren't of general interest. But if you're interested in the Amazon, then I hope this blog will cover a lot of fascinating things. Feel free to leave comments, I'd love to hear from all of you; and feel free to pass this blog's address on to others who might be interested.

OK, signing off for now. Next stop, Caracas!