The Most Dangerous Creature in the Amazon

(written in 2006, while travelling in Brazil)

It’s a strange feeling plunging into piranha infested waters – but humans are like sheep sometimes, if one does it they all do it. And I did it too. The water a dark reddy brown colour – visibility about 5cm. We were 3 hours by boat from the nearest population base in the Amazon (and presumably hospital). Our guide successfully proved there were piranhas in the water below by catching one with a piece of meat on a hook. Small it was but the teeth are indeed ferocious which he illustrated by putting a leaf in between its open jaws. Snap! OK it was only a leaf but the intense biting instinct was phenomenal as were the razor sharp teeth. In fact Piranhas seem to have binary jaws that exist in either open or closed states – they change with such swiftness that there is no apparent movement or intermediary state. Sometimes they swim in schools of 150 or so their combined biting power is pretty scary. As I bobbed in the water enjoying its cooling effect from the stifling Amazon heat and humidity I did wonder why our guide wasn’t swimming as well. 

So why was I swimming amongst piranhas? Well, like many things in life the poor piranha has been over sensationalized by human desire for exotic stories. In the amazon the rivers go up and down by many many metres with the seasons. When they drop sometimes the piranhas get trapped in relatively small pools. When this happens and after theyve eaten all the other fish, they will in desperation turn to anything as a food source – anything that ventures into the water that is. These rare situations are where the ´flesh devouring´ piranha stories come from. Aside from this they seem pretty harmless. Well in any case, a headcount of our group after swimming revealed no losses.

 

So the most dangerous creature in the Amazon certainly was not the piranha – it was in fact our Amazon jungle guide. Completely pissed he managed to crash our boat into a river tree nearly decapitating the innocent german guy at the front of the boat with a low hanging branch. After that I vowed never to get in a boat with him again (a bold decision since every activity we did from our jungle bungalow involved a boat). One of the planned activities is to sleep over night in the jungle in hammocks and mosquito nets – but after a few hours in the reckless and drunken company of our Guide our group believed we would be safer in the jungle without him.

My suspicions of our guide were first aroused as we were leaving Manaus (the Gateway city to the Amazon) in a van, headed for the port to take us across the river. As we drove through a light industrial area (even though it’s in the amazon, Manaus has a population of 1.6 million) our already drunk guide told us 6 times how Ronda was in the area. After we all stared blankly at him for a while, it all became clear as our rattly VW kombi rounded the next corner. There in the distance was a Honda sign – yes the Amazon makes cars and our guide was proud of it. And then he proceeded to point out the Samsung and LG factories as well. The Amazon indeed had more to offer than I had realised.

My expectations of our guide began to plummet further. He claimed to speak several languages: Portuguese, Spanish, French and English. But there was an unofficial but quite distinct 5th language which was the alcohol induced smearing of the other 4 into some kind of new hybrid tongue. Often when he was speaking I had to concentrate very hard to determine if it was a language I knew – only to find that after a few sentences it did indeed have some distant similarity to English. The main giveaway to this was that he would be staring at me (the only native English speaker) and whacking me on the arm as he repeated his babblish sentence several times at increasing volume. He was truly more annoying than a squadron of Amazonian mosquitoes. I felt sorry for the German couple who were relying on his English – they had no chance. Im not one to knock someone attempting to speak another language. Any attempt is a good attempt and I think its important to be humble for many of us who are mono-tongued. But it was his over confidence at his ability to be multi-lingual that became rapidly irritating. There were French, English and Spanish speakers in our group and no-one could understand him.

Our people of all nations group executed a mutiny on Day 2. Despite our cultural, linguistic, age and socio-economic differences, the people from Spain, France, NZ and Germany were united in their belief that our drunken obnoxious guide had to go. So he got the boot and we got a new guide. The new guide was great: humble, softly spoken, interesting and professional and he looked like an Amazonian Indian too which was a nice touch that always puts a smile on the face of the tourist (nothing like getting the real McCoy is there). On one section of a jungle hike he split open a seed to expose a white kernel that I didnt pay much attention to. He offered it around and said it tasted like coconut. I was at the front and bullishly took a nibble as did the German guy. He then proceeded to tell us that it was a maggot and was a great source of protein while in the jungle. After you realise you are eating a maggot, no matter how vivid your imagination it seems impossible to revert it back to tasting like coconut – some kind of psychological block I suspect. After this I dropped to the back of the group to avoid being within gringo-guineapig distance again. As a result I missed out on how to make a whistle out of some strange tree bark, or drink water from the branch of another – but I was safe. Despite the maggot experience I still liked our new guide, he was infinitely nicer and more tolerable than our sacked one.

I survived another day or so in the Amazon forest before I returned. Interesting as it was, the dark murky rivers and abundant vegetation reminded me enormously of Cape York/Tribulation in Nth QLD Australia. For me the Amazon wasnt holding the kind of mystique that I had hoped for so I cut short my trip…The reggae beats of Sao Luis were calling me.