country mouse comes to town
Back home forests are deep cool peace and balm for the soul, the feeling of your chest unclenching and your heart slowing down as you walk out of the jagged noise of the urban world into the quiet greenness. They´re somewhere to go when you´ve been run ragged, to restore yourself and get a treehugging fix to help you cope with the madness outside.
The rainforest is not like that.
Walking into the jungle on the first day of the trip felt more like getting off the airport bus in the middle of Bangkok. A million alien stimuli coming at you at once, some of them dangerous. Your brain spinning up to high speed, labouring to take it all in while also looking out for yourself. This is the pulsing, pounding, frenetic capital of nature. The traffic is mad, the nightlife is high-octane, the crime rate is sky-high (especially in the Murder Zone at the surface of the river where thousands of fish race to devour millions of insects before the birds can devour them) and the most amazing, unlikely, diverse, specialised stuff happens: creatures and plants fill weird little niches the way a big city supports funny little shops, oddball artists and products that only certain subcultures want to buy.
I saw the world in negative. A figure-ground switch where cities became sparsely populated deserts, the patchy woods of London and Oxford were lonely little hick towns, and this was the hub of it all, the swarming heart of the Green. This was where it was at. It was a similar feeling to standing among the high-rise buildings on the banks of the Thames my first day as a Londoner. Being at the centre of everything, the place where it all happens.
It´s a lot to take in at once, and it really isn´t a place to relax. If you hug some of the trees - the ones with the spiky goth-collars of toxic thorns - they can kill you. There are snakes and poisonous frogs and of course the mosquitoes, the pickpockets of the forest´s mean streets. My blood is out there right now, buzzing around in the dark humid spaces between the trees, finding its way inside night birds and tarantulas and everything else that eats mosquitoes, molecules from my body climbing back up the food chain. I was conscious of being a prey animal. Hector who brought me to the Serpentario the day before I went to the jungle said a human was just a bocadito for an anaconda. I don´t have an affinity with the forest, I don´t know how to be at ease in it. That would take time and dedication. I cover up every inch of myself, sweating miniature rivers down the hollow of my back, and watch my clumsy feet, and I marvel that there are people - like Arcel, our eloquent, irrepressible guide, raised in the jungle - for whom living here and getting everything you need from the plants is as second-nature as me knowing what end of the platform to stand on in a tube station in London.
It is, of course, entirely awesome. Not in a "standing in awe in cathedrals of trees" sort of way. You can´t manage that with the constant context-switching required to swat insects and to keep your spatial awareness so you know the thing that bumped softly into your back is a big moth or a leaf rather than, say, a snake´s head. But all the same, like, wow, the stuff I´ve seen the last few days. A big iridescent blue and black moth riding on my shoulder, then when I thought it had left, flying round to sit on my chest. Natural rubber flowing from a crack in a tree trunk and congealing between my fingers. Pods full of vivid red pigment which Arcel used to stripe my face, indicating how many family members I had. Monkeys jumping in the canopy. Mist rising off the river at sunrise as we watched birds dive for fish from a dugout canoe. A tarantula like RIGHT THERE a foot away from me, scuttling round a tree trunk. A young female sloth blinking sleepily at us from nearby and reaching out her long languid three-toed arm towards us, perhaps thinking we were some interesting new kind of tree. Spiral vines caught in a torch beam. Moths with glowing eyes. How huge and bright the full moon is when there´s nothing but oil lamps and fireflies for miles around.
And then there was the soundtrack. The forest sings and chirps and squawks and barks all day and all night. By day it´s a frantic, busy, cheerful cacophony. At night, with different creatures talking, it´s more musical, more haunting, lonelier. I was dozing off in a hammock last night, the edges pulled in around me like a cocoon to keep at least some of the bugs off, and I heard all the different rhythms come together into a song with meaning and structure. There were thousands of loops falling in and out of sync with each other and just for a few moments the crickets were doing four beats to a bar, the bird that went 'ooo-eee' was coming in on the first beat of each one, and the owls and the frogs and everything else were forming a perfect counterpoint. It made me wish I was a musician.
And! I swam in the Amazon. Twice. It was off a sandbar in the middle of the river where the water was clean and unbelievably smooth and cool on the sunburn and the insect bites. I floated on my back with my ears below the water listening to the distant clunking and clicking of the river´s life and thought about the millions of gallons of water pushing their way across the continent to the sea, and was amazed that it felt as if it was cradling me gently. I did feel a little fish nibble at me once and shot out of the water to stand there shaking myself and laughing. I don´t think it was a piranha. Our guides - all jungle boys - had already launched themselves off the boat before we got to the beach, splashing and ducking each other and shaking their pitch-black hair like dogs, exclaiming that the water was muy rico (rico is a word that´s everywhere, seeming to mean deliciousness or freshness or just general aceness; I think it´s a bit like lush). So all of us tourists had the courage to get in too, and oh man, I´m sitting in a stuffy netcafe and I want to be back there right now. Our group was a nice German girl called Annie, three Spanish boys, some Austrian hippies and a bunch of teenage Christian girls from Oklahoma, with missionary T-shirts and all-weather Bibles, and we splashed and flung handfuls of sand at each other and tried to ride on a floating log while the guides played football with some of the guys on the beach. La selva, the forest, versus the rest of the world, they said. The rest of the world won.
So now I´m back in town, planning the next bit. Things like phones and keyboards and roaring mototaxi engines are very peculiar. There´s a lot more, but I itch and I´m sunburnt and I need some dinner. And a beer.
The rainforest is not like that.
Walking into the jungle on the first day of the trip felt more like getting off the airport bus in the middle of Bangkok. A million alien stimuli coming at you at once, some of them dangerous. Your brain spinning up to high speed, labouring to take it all in while also looking out for yourself. This is the pulsing, pounding, frenetic capital of nature. The traffic is mad, the nightlife is high-octane, the crime rate is sky-high (especially in the Murder Zone at the surface of the river where thousands of fish race to devour millions of insects before the birds can devour them) and the most amazing, unlikely, diverse, specialised stuff happens: creatures and plants fill weird little niches the way a big city supports funny little shops, oddball artists and products that only certain subcultures want to buy.
I saw the world in negative. A figure-ground switch where cities became sparsely populated deserts, the patchy woods of London and Oxford were lonely little hick towns, and this was the hub of it all, the swarming heart of the Green. This was where it was at. It was a similar feeling to standing among the high-rise buildings on the banks of the Thames my first day as a Londoner. Being at the centre of everything, the place where it all happens.
It´s a lot to take in at once, and it really isn´t a place to relax. If you hug some of the trees - the ones with the spiky goth-collars of toxic thorns - they can kill you. There are snakes and poisonous frogs and of course the mosquitoes, the pickpockets of the forest´s mean streets. My blood is out there right now, buzzing around in the dark humid spaces between the trees, finding its way inside night birds and tarantulas and everything else that eats mosquitoes, molecules from my body climbing back up the food chain. I was conscious of being a prey animal. Hector who brought me to the Serpentario the day before I went to the jungle said a human was just a bocadito for an anaconda. I don´t have an affinity with the forest, I don´t know how to be at ease in it. That would take time and dedication. I cover up every inch of myself, sweating miniature rivers down the hollow of my back, and watch my clumsy feet, and I marvel that there are people - like Arcel, our eloquent, irrepressible guide, raised in the jungle - for whom living here and getting everything you need from the plants is as second-nature as me knowing what end of the platform to stand on in a tube station in London.
It is, of course, entirely awesome. Not in a "standing in awe in cathedrals of trees" sort of way. You can´t manage that with the constant context-switching required to swat insects and to keep your spatial awareness so you know the thing that bumped softly into your back is a big moth or a leaf rather than, say, a snake´s head. But all the same, like, wow, the stuff I´ve seen the last few days. A big iridescent blue and black moth riding on my shoulder, then when I thought it had left, flying round to sit on my chest. Natural rubber flowing from a crack in a tree trunk and congealing between my fingers. Pods full of vivid red pigment which Arcel used to stripe my face, indicating how many family members I had. Monkeys jumping in the canopy. Mist rising off the river at sunrise as we watched birds dive for fish from a dugout canoe. A tarantula like RIGHT THERE a foot away from me, scuttling round a tree trunk. A young female sloth blinking sleepily at us from nearby and reaching out her long languid three-toed arm towards us, perhaps thinking we were some interesting new kind of tree. Spiral vines caught in a torch beam. Moths with glowing eyes. How huge and bright the full moon is when there´s nothing but oil lamps and fireflies for miles around.
And then there was the soundtrack. The forest sings and chirps and squawks and barks all day and all night. By day it´s a frantic, busy, cheerful cacophony. At night, with different creatures talking, it´s more musical, more haunting, lonelier. I was dozing off in a hammock last night, the edges pulled in around me like a cocoon to keep at least some of the bugs off, and I heard all the different rhythms come together into a song with meaning and structure. There were thousands of loops falling in and out of sync with each other and just for a few moments the crickets were doing four beats to a bar, the bird that went 'ooo-eee' was coming in on the first beat of each one, and the owls and the frogs and everything else were forming a perfect counterpoint. It made me wish I was a musician.
And! I swam in the Amazon. Twice. It was off a sandbar in the middle of the river where the water was clean and unbelievably smooth and cool on the sunburn and the insect bites. I floated on my back with my ears below the water listening to the distant clunking and clicking of the river´s life and thought about the millions of gallons of water pushing their way across the continent to the sea, and was amazed that it felt as if it was cradling me gently. I did feel a little fish nibble at me once and shot out of the water to stand there shaking myself and laughing. I don´t think it was a piranha. Our guides - all jungle boys - had already launched themselves off the boat before we got to the beach, splashing and ducking each other and shaking their pitch-black hair like dogs, exclaiming that the water was muy rico (rico is a word that´s everywhere, seeming to mean deliciousness or freshness or just general aceness; I think it´s a bit like lush). So all of us tourists had the courage to get in too, and oh man, I´m sitting in a stuffy netcafe and I want to be back there right now. Our group was a nice German girl called Annie, three Spanish boys, some Austrian hippies and a bunch of teenage Christian girls from Oklahoma, with missionary T-shirts and all-weather Bibles, and we splashed and flung handfuls of sand at each other and tried to ride on a floating log while the guides played football with some of the guys on the beach. La selva, the forest, versus the rest of the world, they said. The rest of the world won.
So now I´m back in town, planning the next bit. Things like phones and keyboards and roaring mototaxi engines are very peculiar. There´s a lot more, but I itch and I´m sunburnt and I need some dinner. And a beer.