Up the Rio Solimões: Manaus to Peru by Boat

Traveling through the Amazon without papers; Wild nights in a jungle metropolis; Piranha fish-mongers…

Manaus – Gateway to the Green Inferno: With its chaotic and Wild West spirit, I had grown to love Manaus, the city where I had been sojourning in my early twenties. As I stood at the port, the gigantic and once-stately municipal market loomed behind me. Its Parisian-inspired design harkened back to the Amazonian Rubber Boom. In the early twentieth century, Manaus was one of the most extravagant cities in the world, notorious for being a tropical bastion of excess and decadence. Those were the days when rubber barons constructed mansions mirroring villas in France and Italy. Europe’s finest artists and builders arrived there to construct the excessively lavish Theater of the Amazon, and prostitutes came from all corners of the world to get a piece of the wealth that had emerged practically overnight. Rubber was Amazonian gold, and migrant workers from Northeast Brazil—drought-stricken and poor since the era of African slavery—poured into the Amazon by the thousands. They assimilated quickly, intermarrying with local caboclos and amalgamating the cuisine, customs, and music of the Northeast into the culture of the Amazon. Forró, the iconic dance of the Northeast sertão, developed its own style here, more agitated and salacious than the traditional form from Bahia and Ceará.

The orgy of extravagant wealth vanished from Manaus as quickly as it had arrived. A British buccaneer managed to smuggle a ship full of rubber seeds from the Amazon to England, and the Brits figured out how to outcompete the Brazilian rubber barons in British plantations in Southeast Asia. Southeast Asian rubber and then synthetic rubber eventually drove Amazonian rubber out of the market, crumbling the economic pillar of the Brazilian Amazon. Today, the reminders of this gilded age—opulent, brightly colored mansions, stately plazas, and balustrades—stand dilapidated and neglected. Despite the disappearance of its wealth, Manaus maintained its reputation as a fleshpot. Brazilians from other parts of the country are quick to point out the high concentration of brothels as well as the morally-casual reputation of the city’s daughters. The joke was that “the whole city of Manaus smells like sex,” owing only partially to the jungle’s oppressive heat and humidity. My very first night in Manaus found me staying with a buddy, Enrique, I had met while living on the Brazilian coast. After a nice family dinner, Enrique asked me with a wink if I felt like seeing the sights around town. He told his wife, in all seriousness, that we would be back in a few hours and would be taking a walk around the famous Opera House of the Amazon. We did stop at the Plaza of the Opera House but our real destination was one of the plaza’s side streets. Paying my entrance to the most famous strip club (read: brothel) in the city, my buddy turned to me with a grin and exclaimed, “Welcome to the jungle, motherfucker!!”

**

A few days before I was to leave Manaus for the depths of the jungle, I took a moto-taxi from the outskirts of the city to the central plaza. The driver and I talked about the charms of the city and above all else the fame of the Manuara women. As he dropped me off and I paid my fare, he gestured with his head to a woman walking in alone and said, “Gatinha, hein? (Sexy little thing, no?)”

I walked over to the beautiful young woman and asked her about the location of a bar I had been to the night before. Of course, I remembered perfectly well where it was. She had fake blonde hair, and her tits bounced deliciously under a thin shirt with no bra. She had those dark, almond-shaped eyes that you see on Amazonian women and a luscious little body that wanted to burst the seams of her clothes. She gave a shy smile as she introduced herself. My adrenaline rose, and after a few minutes of conversation, I asked her to have a beer with me. “Sure, why not,” she began, and then with more enthusiasm and levity, she added, “it is my day off, after all.” We sat and drank, listening to the bar’s guitarist play Brazilian folk music from the Northeast, and talked and laughed as if we had known each other for years. I paid the tab, and we kissed on the steps of the Opera House. I then asked her if she wanted to go out later; she agreed, as long as she could go back home to change. We hopped in a taxi, and I recognized the name of her neighborhood: it was the most dangerous favela in Manaus—the same one the taxi driver had just warned me never to enter. Drug traffickers maintained a lucrative business regulating the cocaine and pot coming downstream from Colombia and controlled the neighborhood—a frenzy of shanties, electric wires, and laundry lines clinging to the side of a hill. In Latin America, an interesting paradox is that the poorer the neighborhood, the more vitality and flavor it has. Her neighborhood was no exception, with tiny bars blasting music, herds of children playing on the street, and men sitting, drinking, and smoking in plastic chairs on front steps. The view from her bedroom looked down the hill towards the Amazon River and the sprawling city was mesmerizing. My new friend dressed in the tiniest outfit in her wardrobe and took me on a grand tour of the Manuara nightlife. I met some musicians in a bar who invited us as VIP guests to their show at an outdoor dancehall. We danced forró and got drunk, and as the sun came up she told me she was ready to leave. She asked the taxi driver to take us to the nearest love-motel, as nonchalantly as I might have asked to be taken to the airport. There is no privacy in most houses in Brazil: families tend to live in close quarters in small residences. The solution for lovers is drive-in, pay-by-the-hour motels where you just park your car behind a curtain and walk through a door to find a room with a bed, shower, selection of condoms and lubes, and mirrors on the ceilings and walls. The pricier ones even offer Jacuzzis and champagne service. Designed to be the ideal way to spend secret time with a mistress, short-term girlfriend, or prostitute, such motels are all over and perfectly acceptable within the culture. Many could pass for children’s theme parks from their slightly disturbing façades. Over the coming days, she and I patronized a motel with a King Arthur’s Castle theme, and then one modeled after Jurassic Park. The days before leaving Manaus were a bender of sex, beer, and sightseeing. We went to restaurants in the central market and ate fried fish with ice-cold guaraná soda and açaí bowls, chic nightclubs, and classic botecos, bars flaunting hundreds of plastic chairs and live samba, and a floating bar in the middle of the Amazon River. As we drank in the sun, I turned red and she turned cinnamon. Later that day, I dropped her off at her house and caught a boat that would take me much deeper into the Amazon and eventually to Colombia. The Rio Solimões:

So began my journey up the mighty Rio Solimões, one of the major tributaries that becomes the Amazon River proper after Manaus. In contrast to the acidic Rio Negro, the Solimões is muddy, nutrient-rich, and full of large fish. The crew on the cargo-passenger ship I joined would buy titanic pirarucu, the largest freshwater fish in the world, and cook delicious dinners for us two hundred or so passengers. Dinner was served in shifts, for which we were required to remove our hats and say a communal grace before being served rice, beans, fish, and ubiquitous Amazonian farinha, tapioca flour used as a condiment to sop up liquids. On our triple-deckered wooden ship, The Sacred Heart of Christ, the captain maintained a small chapel on board and held mass every evening, during which he would pray for a safe journey to our final destination of Tabatinga, the port on the tri-border of Colombia, Peru, and Brazil. I later learned that piracy of large boats on the Rio Solimões happened frequently, in which the crew and passengers were tied up and thrown in the boat’s hold while armed pirates looted for valuables. Even more discomfiting, these river queens of the Solimões were rickety and lacked modern navigation equipment. Tragic shipwrecks weren’t uncommon and usually happened in the middle of the night when the captain accidentally succumbed to sleep.

I was traveling the Solimões with a long-expired tourist visa, in other words, illegally. I had been warned that because of the heavy narco-traffic on this river, the military patrol would often stop boats to search for drugs and check the papers of the passengers. My buddy on the coast had advised me against traveling this way: “Find a lawyer, Johnny. The military patrol on the Rio Solimões will catch you, and they will either throw you in jail or deport you to Venezuela.” This scenario had been my constant fear, and one night it was nearly realized. As I was falling asleep in my hammock, a barge suddenly pulled up next to our ship and shined spotlights on us. Our captain cut off the engine, and the passengers began to assemble in a queue. I could see through the darkness a file of soldiers, all with assault rifles in their hands. “What’s going on?” I asked as calmly as I could. “Don’t get scared,” one of the passengers assured me. “The soldiers are coming on board to search the boat’s hold and to make sure we all have our documents. It will probably be over in about two hours.” I hid in one of the boat’s bathrooms, sweating and holding my breath until I heard the engine roar up again around midnight. In Tabatinga, on the tri-border of Colombia, Peru, and Brazil, I planned to head directly north into Colombia, but I was informed that there was no such route. Instead, I would have to travel another two weeks by boat through Peru. The first leg of this journey took me to Iquitos, an Amazonian city clanking with rickshaws and teeming with foreigners who wanted “shamans” and ayahuasca. Everything changed upon crossing the border: the ship that carried me through Brazil was crowded but comfortable enough, yet the Peruvian boats were so packed I was amazed that nobody fell from the railings. Passengers slept under and above each other, and most of the hammocks held a pair of occupants sleeping feet to head. Filth was ubiquitous, and my stomach failed me. While in Brazil the meals were excellent, the food in Peru was Spartan: watery gruel and hardtack for breakfast, a small, bony fish for dinner, nothing for lunch. I endured these conditions for an entire week as I traversed the length of Peru on the Rio Napa en route to Ecuador.

As in Brazil, we stopped in small villages along the way to exchange crates of beer and soda for the same of fruit and fish. I had been living on boats for about a month by this point and was as emaciated as a skeleton. While anchored in villages, locals would come on board to hawk fish wrapped in banana leaves, coconuts, and fresh fruit. I spent most the day reading a bible and occasionally smoking a mapucho, hand-rolled cigarettes sold for a couple of cents each. Amazonian tobacco is a different species from North American tobacco, and contains 15—yes, literally 15— times the amount of nicotine as industrial tobacco. A couple of hits of mapucho left me feeling relaxed and stoned enough to forget that I had not bathed for days and had lost so much weight from having had diarrhea for so long.

The jungle has a way of attracting lunatics of all stripes. I met a beautiful, young woman traveling with her small son to Tefé, an island-city in the middle of the Solimões. Her father was Japanese-Peruvian and had fled to the Brazilian Amazon after killing a man in his Peruvian hometown, and her mother was a cabocla from the Solimões. Knowing that the man’s family would seek revenge, he escaped in the hope he would never be found. The remote city couldn’t protect him, and eventually, the murdered man’s family found out where he was. A hired gun killed him when his daughter was a young girl.

I also met a man from English Guyana who surprised me by asking, in English, what song I was playing on my guitar. His English was not only fluent but he spoke with an African-American accent. He explained that he had lived in Washington, D.C., as a teenager but had been kicked out of the U.S. in the wake of 9/11. He would not reveal exactly what had gotten him deported, just chalking it up to “bad behavior.” He spent his last month in the U.S. maxing out credit cards. Nowadays, he made a living traveling up and down the Rio Solimões, reselling fake gold jewelry purchased from Chinese vendors in Manaus to “these Indians up here who are too dumb to know any better.” Then, there was a Texan I met a few weeks later in Peru who had made good money in the oil boom in the Ecuadorian Amazon, and decided to stay even after retiring. Right next to the main plaza in Iquitos, Peru’s buzzing jungle capital, he opened a two-story, University of Texas sports bar, complete with local Amazonian girls sporting UT cheerleader outfits and a menu with mesquite-barbecued river tortoise and wild jungle boar. A regular at his bar was a fat, gray-haired North American who smoked cigars and had an ice-cold demeanor. When he overheard me say I was going to Medellin, he took his cigar out of his mouth and chimed in, “Medellin, huh? I lived there for a few years but haven’t been back since. I was there during its worst times, when it was the most dangerous city on Earth.” I asked him what he had been doing there. “I sold arms to Pablo Escobar.” He had also chosen to retire permanently to the deep-jungle obscurity and humidity of Iquitos. “It’s a shithole here, but actually pretty nice as far as shitholes go.” The Rio Napa:

Plying deeper and deeper into the Peruvian Amazon, I eventually ran out of bottled water. The faucet water on the boat was pumped directly from the river and not safe to drink. One morning, we stopped in a village to unload cargo, and I noticed a palm tree full of green coconuts next to somebody’s house. I asked the owner, a gray-haired indigenous woman, if I could climb the tree and cut some down. She obliged and handed me a machete, asking me to remove as many coconuts as I could for her and her children as well. I had about five Peruvian soles left in my backpack, and I planned to offer these as payment for the one coconut I would keep, roughly the same price of a coconut in previous villages. When I climbed back down, she informed me that I would pay fifteen soles for each coconut, even the ones I had cut down for her. The amount totaled to about 20 times more money than I had on me. There were no ATMs for days, and I tried to explain in shaky Spanish that I really only had five soles. The woman stormed off with a threat to get the village police. I prayed for a quick departure from this wretched bend of the river and retreated to my hammock on the boat. Finally, after many long hours, the boat engines started, and we continued up the river. I sighed with relief. As I walked the edge of the deck to brush my teeth, the captain spotted me and summoned me over with a shout. “Stupid gringo! What the fuck were you doing back there? The constable came over to the boat asking where you were and demanding that you pay that old lady for coconuts. If I hadn’t given the money to that woman myself, they would have put you in jail!” Then laughing and miming stringing a bow and arrow, he asked rhetorically, “You know what these Indians would have done to you, right?” When we reached a city with a bank, I paid the captain back for the coconuts, plus an extra tip for saving my ass. After one week on the Peruvian Rio Napa, we reached a military base on the border between Peru and Ecuador. Here, the waterways were narrow enough to throw a stone from one bank to the other, and the thick tree canopies above us blocked the sunlight—a stark contrast to the Solimões, where the river was so wide it looked more like an inland sea. On these winding tributaries, I could see monkeys and parrots through the foliage, and bright-pink river dolphins occasionally broke the water’s surface. Colombia was drawing close. We stayed the night in a small town abutting a military base, where vendors on the street roasted massive, white grubs on barbecues. (Apparently, they taste like cheese when you bite into them and burst a white fluid onto your taste buds.) The inhabitants began to look less indigenous and more mestizo and cafuço, the latter a term for those of mixed African and Amerindian ancestry.

The first morning in Ecuador, I rose at four o’clock in the morning and paid 5 USD to hop a large, motorized canoe that would deposit us in the oil town of Coca after an entire day of travel. From Coca, there were roads and bus routes leading out of the Amazon and into the Andes and Colombian border. Local indigenous people packed themselves into the canoe-like sardines and wrapped their belongings in plastic garbage bags. I quickly realized why. Water entered the canoe continuously, and passengers traded off trying to keep it from accumulating with the use of pans. As I sat wet and miserably squeezed between two people, the captain guided the boat up small tributaries and through submerged forest. It had been a month since I departed Manaus and, exhausted and skinny, I still had not quite reached the edge of this never-ending “green inferno.” The story of Ecuador’s Amazon is a sad one, typifying the sacrifice of pristine rainforest and indigenous cultures to resource exploitation and greed. Ecuador had one of the best-preserved and most biodiverse sections of the Amazon and was home to one of the most isolated tribes in the region, the Waorani. Since the Spanish colonization, the Waoroni fiercely protected their land from outsiders and would kill on sight any non-Waorani caught in their territory. In the forest, they would leave two crossed spears in the dirt as a warning to outsiders to turn around. If they did happen to kill a trespasser, the corpse was purposefully propped up and left to rot in the forest, propped upright and full of spears as an example to other prospective intruders. There was frequent violence between this tribe and the oil companies once petroleum was discovered on their land. Needless to say, the spears lost out to the automatic rifles, and the Waorani lost much of their ancestral land. U.S.-backed Ecuadorian petroleum companies dumped millions of tons of petroleum and toxic byproducts into the forest, poisoning the lands and water of indigenous groups and wreaking havoc on the ecosystem. Nowadays, birth defects have become rampant in this part of the Amazon. The petroleum companies, most notably Chevron, have fought tooth and nail in international courts to avoid paying for cleanup initiatives. The scars left by this industry are glaring. As barges loaded with drilling machinery and massive tanks passed up and down the waterways, the stench of petroleum was inescapable. The forest simply looked sick. When we stopped for lunch in a run-down restaurant in an oil town, even the food smelled like petroleum. The scene was deeply saddening; the anger I felt made me want to be an activist. I fell asleep on the bus in the humid jungle and awoke high up in the cold of the Andes. Within the timeframe of a long nap, the oppressively hot rainforest had been replaced by the chill of the mountains. The inhabitants were still indigenous-looking,  but much stockier and squatter and wearing colorful woolen hats and panchos. What awaited me in Colombia, especially my first two weeks there, were among the most intense experiences of my life. But that’s a story for another time.