Up the Amazon in a Hammock Jungle
This is insane! Even for us... It is exactly what I expected, but nonetheless it's nuts. The cargo boat is the usual size around here, about 16m x 4m (50ft by 15ft), as big as a spacious living-room. However, it is set up for about 200 hammocks that hang literally on top of each other. It is a fabric maze of all colors of the rainbow, impossible to walk through in a straight line. A jungle, that's what it is. The Brazilian jungle on my left and right, and another, floating, in the middle. The only difference is that in this fabric jungle the bugs don't bite as much and those hanging from these vines are less likely to drop a coconut on your head.
The boat was to leave around 7pm, but we got here a good twelve hours beforehand to snag the good spots. Nevertheless, my first thought was, "Great. No more room for us," but a local woman showed us how it's done, and in no time we were looking at our "beds" swinging not too far away from a pile of old life jackets. Satisfied, we left the boat to run some errands. There were snacks and water to buy, backpacks to pack, and another round of shots to be administered - doctor's orders. For the past few days I have been sick as a dog, sweating like a pig, and, after running around town, I wanted to be shot like a race horse with a broken leg. I felt a bit melodramatic. Ever since we got off the freezing night-bus that brought us to Belem, I have been running a fever. Alex finally looked down my throat with a flashlight and said, "Alright. We are going to the hospital NOW." Apparently my airway was about to close up. In the hospital the doctor was quick to give her diagnosis and suggest a treatment even before I finished describing my symptoms. "You'll have to get a shot," she said. "In the butt. Well, actually two - one in the butt and another in the vein. Well, technically four: three intravenous and one in the behind." Splendid. Dreading the hospital by this time, we'd done some shopping first and, as I was getting worse and worse in the heat, made our way there.
By now, my fever was gone and my throat cleared up, allowing me to swallow food without pain, but my stomach and back were still giving me trouble, so I agreed to the shots. Unfortunately, this time two factors were against me. First, there was no room for me to lie down for the shot in the butt, as today, a Monday, everybody who failed to be cured by Sunday's prier in church were brought to the hospital, so we had to do it standing up. Not a good idea. Second, this time the shot, painful as it is on its own, was administered not by a cute and careful male nurse, who managed to insert the needle with a minimum amount of pain, but a middle-aged female nurse passing by in a hurry. She jammed the needle in my butt cheek without so much as a warning. For a few minutes I couldn't walk, and a sympathetic doctor walking past said, "Hurt, didn't it? Well yeah. She sort of does that ..." She bit her lip and made a stabbing motion to illustrate her point. "Yeah," I thought. "That she does." I limped back to the hostel and lay on the couch in the bums-up position, at least having some fun freaking people out when they asked what happened. "I got stabbed in the ass," I would say, and hold a dramatic pause, watching their eyes widen and mouths drop open. "With a needle. By a doctor," I would add eventually. Ha-ha.
Through all this, Alex had been a trooper. While I lay tortured in the hostel, tormenting other travelers, he went to the store to get the water, all ten liters of it, and even surprised me with some Pringles and a new folding hairbrush. Our old drugstore one broke many months ago, but even then he managed to fix it by soldering it (!) with a nail he heated up on the gas stove and sewing the parts together with fishing line. That held through another few months, but for the last week or two we've been brushing our hair in the cold shower with our fingers.
Now we were pretty much set and headed into the hammock jungle to hang out for the next five days. Later, in the boat, as I lay in my cocoon having spent half an hour trying to get comfortable (an impossible task), I gazed all around me and decided that this interior view is rather beautiful. The hammocks, strung in a braid-like pattern and stretched by the people inside them, swung calmly with the boat.
Day One
"Crap!" is the first thought flitting through my mind and out of my mouth as I wake up; I shoot out of my hammock. Well, technically it was the second thought as the first, lingering at the edge of my consciousness, was the one that provoked the outburst. "What?" Alex asks from above. "We forgot our underwear; pretty much all of it is still drying on hostel's roof after I washed it." "Damn," Alex confirms my frustration, but we both silently decide not to spend any more energy on it. What's lost is lost. It's not like we can turn the boat around. I will, of course, miss my Victoria's Secret panties and Alex will have to make do with only one pair of quick-drying travel boxers, but such is life. Besides, not all is lost. What's good about underwear is that most of the time one pair is always on you.
We woke up too late this morning for breakfast, but it in retrospect it was for the best. Snacks and water - that's the only thing I need on a boat. Boats are my diet plan. Out of fear I won't be able to keep much down, I generally eat the minimum necessary for survival and not a gram more. We did make it to lunch, though. The food is the usual mixture of meat, beans, rice, and pasta that you pile on your plate yourself. I take more than I need; I figure I can always pass it to someone else. After I take a few bites and declare myself full, there are no takers, though. Suddenly, a plastic bag with something inside flies into the water. And another, and another. "Locals throwing garbage into the Amazon," I think angrily. We've seen them do it before. My anger doesn't last for long, however. The bags, we notice, are being picked up by little children in dug-out canoes who paddle up to the boat from their houses on the shore. The locals are sharing food! And that is what I do with mine as well. Alex finds a plastic bag; I empty the contents of my plate into it and throw. It lands smack in the middle of a canoe with a family in it. I was hoping to get at least a thankful wave, but it never comes. Oh well, charity is not about gratitude anyway.
Day two
"Good morning, sleeping beauty," Alex wakes me up with a kiss on the lips. "Yeah, right," I think to myself, imagining how I must look all bunched up and cocooned in my hammock. There are no butterflies coming out of this one. Still though, after a greeting like this, it would be a sin to complain. So I don't, life is good. Today, men with machine guns in civilian clothes (shorts and t-shirts) boarded the boat and went through some bags (not ours). We tried asking some people what was all this about, but are yet to get a straight answer. They were probably looking for drugs, we conclude.
Day Three
Eh. When did I become such an old woman? My back is killing me. We kept stopping in all these ports at all hours of the night and I barely got any sleep feeling paranoid that somebody will be getting off the boat with our bag instead of their own "by mistake." As an added bonus, we also found out yesterday that this boat is not going to take us to Manaus, as we had been told. We'll have to change boats in Santarem and maybe also wait there for as long as eighteen hours. On the brighter side, we saw dolphins earlier! There are many gray ones in these waters, and I'm pretty sure I saw the back of a pink one.
The mood on the boat is not a very lively one. People still talk but are running out of things to say. Many of the foreigners are sick. I just got over my flu, but the Germans swinging next to us, Heidi and Sooke, and also a Brazilian girl, are all running a fever. Luckily, the Germans are both nurses and there's also a doctor from the US on board. She is here visiting her daughter, who is riding a bicycle with her Brazilian boyfriend all the way from Sao Paolo (south of Rio De Janeiro) to California. They are doing some sort of Capoeira* research on the way and are planning to get the boyfriend a fiancé visa to get into the US. Finding out about people like these, with unique stories, is one of my favorite things on our voyage.
Day four
Alright. It's official. We are all sick. This time it's our stomachs, making us double over and run to the bathroom every five minutes. I honestly hoped I would never find out what "explosive diarrhea" is, but here, in the middle of the Amazon, I'm experiencing it firsthand, together with locals and foreigners alike. The only consolation is that this boat is better than the last one we were on. It's bigger and better organized. It has hooks instead of just metal bars to tie your hammocks to, which we first thought was a good thing, but after last night, we beg to differ. Whoever emplaced the hooks definitely was not planning to sleep in here as we do at night, packed like sardines. We eventually arranged ourselves in this "tin" alternating heads and feet, but I still have to fight all night for not getting my head crushed by the guy hanging beside me. At first, he was just a noise pollution problem, snoring like a freight train, but then he must have switched from dreaming about the railroad to an Australian kangaroo boxing match, because every few minutes I've been ducking his limbs punching my hammock. It's an interesting match, but I am not looking forward to round two.
"The fact that we are floating up THE Amazon is slowly sinking in," says Alex, pointing out that this feels like looking out a train window. I guess the swaying reminds me of it also. The scenery doesn't change much. There are gray wooden houses looking plain, hollow, and empty of residents. Others have some personal touches of color and have people outside or on the patios. A wrinkled cow or a skinny horse here and there, staring at the brown Amazon water that they are suspicious of drinking, but the local children swim in without a worry. Most homes are at least a kilometer away from each other. A few are found clustered together, generally around churches or schools; some of the structures are plain, some fancier. One was even made to look like it's made of stone or clay.
Some women on the boat simply baffle me. We are in less than comfortable, hot, sticky conditions that call for flip flops and cotton tank-tops, but I still spot some who climb the steep steps between the decks in high heels and make up. They clutch little purses in their self-manicured hands and "delicately" smoke cigarettes, the butts of which they chuck overboard as if the Amazon is their personal sewer. I have a feeling this is for them as close to a cruise as it gets, so they intend to act here just like they've seen it done in their beloved tele-novelas. I have to give them their due, though - they take each horrible meal on board as if it came straight from Royal Caribbean's dining room and comb their hair every day, which is more than I can say for myself.
Day Five
Our time here is almost up. We are to arrive in Manaus in late afternoon. So says the Captain, but what does he know? I didn't sleep well tonight at all. My stomach is refusing to settle down. As luck would have it, the only time it didn't make me run to the bathroom in the middle of the night, the boat stopped in yet another port and people were hopping in and out. This caused waves to spread through the hammocks, like that toy with suspended metal balls going clickety-clack when you pull one away and let go. Desperately, I've been wrapping myself tighter and tighter in my sleep sheet, but it was no good. Once again, lucky me. The queen bee, from this "cruise ship's" elite, was in the hammock right next to mine, her chatter interrupted only by cigarette drags. It was three in the morning, but this bleached lady of the Amazon was all dolled up with every square millimeter of her bosom cinched up, front and center, on her sternum. It looked like a midget mooning us from inside her blouse. Nevertheless, I will miss this place. Being a Soviet Jew, this kibbutz, this kommunalka**, if you will, awaken in me some old instinct that went to sleep a long time ago, on a different continent.
*Capoeira - Afro-Brazilian dance/martial art
** komunalka - a communal apartment shared by several unrelated families, most typical in the Soviet Union in the 1920 to 1980
The boat was to leave around 7pm, but we got here a good twelve hours beforehand to snag the good spots. Nevertheless, my first thought was, "Great. No more room for us," but a local woman showed us how it's done, and in no time we were looking at our "beds" swinging not too far away from a pile of old life jackets. Satisfied, we left the boat to run some errands. There were snacks and water to buy, backpacks to pack, and another round of shots to be administered - doctor's orders. For the past few days I have been sick as a dog, sweating like a pig, and, after running around town, I wanted to be shot like a race horse with a broken leg. I felt a bit melodramatic. Ever since we got off the freezing night-bus that brought us to Belem, I have been running a fever. Alex finally looked down my throat with a flashlight and said, "Alright. We are going to the hospital NOW." Apparently my airway was about to close up. In the hospital the doctor was quick to give her diagnosis and suggest a treatment even before I finished describing my symptoms. "You'll have to get a shot," she said. "In the butt. Well, actually two - one in the butt and another in the vein. Well, technically four: three intravenous and one in the behind." Splendid. Dreading the hospital by this time, we'd done some shopping first and, as I was getting worse and worse in the heat, made our way there.
By now, my fever was gone and my throat cleared up, allowing me to swallow food without pain, but my stomach and back were still giving me trouble, so I agreed to the shots. Unfortunately, this time two factors were against me. First, there was no room for me to lie down for the shot in the butt, as today, a Monday, everybody who failed to be cured by Sunday's prier in church were brought to the hospital, so we had to do it standing up. Not a good idea. Second, this time the shot, painful as it is on its own, was administered not by a cute and careful male nurse, who managed to insert the needle with a minimum amount of pain, but a middle-aged female nurse passing by in a hurry. She jammed the needle in my butt cheek without so much as a warning. For a few minutes I couldn't walk, and a sympathetic doctor walking past said, "Hurt, didn't it? Well yeah. She sort of does that ..." She bit her lip and made a stabbing motion to illustrate her point. "Yeah," I thought. "That she does." I limped back to the hostel and lay on the couch in the bums-up position, at least having some fun freaking people out when they asked what happened. "I got stabbed in the ass," I would say, and hold a dramatic pause, watching their eyes widen and mouths drop open. "With a needle. By a doctor," I would add eventually. Ha-ha.
Through all this, Alex had been a trooper. While I lay tortured in the hostel, tormenting other travelers, he went to the store to get the water, all ten liters of it, and even surprised me with some Pringles and a new folding hairbrush. Our old drugstore one broke many months ago, but even then he managed to fix it by soldering it (!) with a nail he heated up on the gas stove and sewing the parts together with fishing line. That held through another few months, but for the last week or two we've been brushing our hair in the cold shower with our fingers.
Now we were pretty much set and headed into the hammock jungle to hang out for the next five days. Later, in the boat, as I lay in my cocoon having spent half an hour trying to get comfortable (an impossible task), I gazed all around me and decided that this interior view is rather beautiful. The hammocks, strung in a braid-like pattern and stretched by the people inside them, swung calmly with the boat.
Day One
"Crap!" is the first thought flitting through my mind and out of my mouth as I wake up; I shoot out of my hammock. Well, technically it was the second thought as the first, lingering at the edge of my consciousness, was the one that provoked the outburst. "What?" Alex asks from above. "We forgot our underwear; pretty much all of it is still drying on hostel's roof after I washed it." "Damn," Alex confirms my frustration, but we both silently decide not to spend any more energy on it. What's lost is lost. It's not like we can turn the boat around. I will, of course, miss my Victoria's Secret panties and Alex will have to make do with only one pair of quick-drying travel boxers, but such is life. Besides, not all is lost. What's good about underwear is that most of the time one pair is always on you.
We woke up too late this morning for breakfast, but it in retrospect it was for the best. Snacks and water - that's the only thing I need on a boat. Boats are my diet plan. Out of fear I won't be able to keep much down, I generally eat the minimum necessary for survival and not a gram more. We did make it to lunch, though. The food is the usual mixture of meat, beans, rice, and pasta that you pile on your plate yourself. I take more than I need; I figure I can always pass it to someone else. After I take a few bites and declare myself full, there are no takers, though. Suddenly, a plastic bag with something inside flies into the water. And another, and another. "Locals throwing garbage into the Amazon," I think angrily. We've seen them do it before. My anger doesn't last for long, however. The bags, we notice, are being picked up by little children in dug-out canoes who paddle up to the boat from their houses on the shore. The locals are sharing food! And that is what I do with mine as well. Alex finds a plastic bag; I empty the contents of my plate into it and throw. It lands smack in the middle of a canoe with a family in it. I was hoping to get at least a thankful wave, but it never comes. Oh well, charity is not about gratitude anyway.
Day two
"Good morning, sleeping beauty," Alex wakes me up with a kiss on the lips. "Yeah, right," I think to myself, imagining how I must look all bunched up and cocooned in my hammock. There are no butterflies coming out of this one. Still though, after a greeting like this, it would be a sin to complain. So I don't, life is good. Today, men with machine guns in civilian clothes (shorts and t-shirts) boarded the boat and went through some bags (not ours). We tried asking some people what was all this about, but are yet to get a straight answer. They were probably looking for drugs, we conclude.
Day Three
Eh. When did I become such an old woman? My back is killing me. We kept stopping in all these ports at all hours of the night and I barely got any sleep feeling paranoid that somebody will be getting off the boat with our bag instead of their own "by mistake." As an added bonus, we also found out yesterday that this boat is not going to take us to Manaus, as we had been told. We'll have to change boats in Santarem and maybe also wait there for as long as eighteen hours. On the brighter side, we saw dolphins earlier! There are many gray ones in these waters, and I'm pretty sure I saw the back of a pink one.
The mood on the boat is not a very lively one. People still talk but are running out of things to say. Many of the foreigners are sick. I just got over my flu, but the Germans swinging next to us, Heidi and Sooke, and also a Brazilian girl, are all running a fever. Luckily, the Germans are both nurses and there's also a doctor from the US on board. She is here visiting her daughter, who is riding a bicycle with her Brazilian boyfriend all the way from Sao Paolo (south of Rio De Janeiro) to California. They are doing some sort of Capoeira* research on the way and are planning to get the boyfriend a fiancé visa to get into the US. Finding out about people like these, with unique stories, is one of my favorite things on our voyage.
Day four
Alright. It's official. We are all sick. This time it's our stomachs, making us double over and run to the bathroom every five minutes. I honestly hoped I would never find out what "explosive diarrhea" is, but here, in the middle of the Amazon, I'm experiencing it firsthand, together with locals and foreigners alike. The only consolation is that this boat is better than the last one we were on. It's bigger and better organized. It has hooks instead of just metal bars to tie your hammocks to, which we first thought was a good thing, but after last night, we beg to differ. Whoever emplaced the hooks definitely was not planning to sleep in here as we do at night, packed like sardines. We eventually arranged ourselves in this "tin" alternating heads and feet, but I still have to fight all night for not getting my head crushed by the guy hanging beside me. At first, he was just a noise pollution problem, snoring like a freight train, but then he must have switched from dreaming about the railroad to an Australian kangaroo boxing match, because every few minutes I've been ducking his limbs punching my hammock. It's an interesting match, but I am not looking forward to round two.
"The fact that we are floating up THE Amazon is slowly sinking in," says Alex, pointing out that this feels like looking out a train window. I guess the swaying reminds me of it also. The scenery doesn't change much. There are gray wooden houses looking plain, hollow, and empty of residents. Others have some personal touches of color and have people outside or on the patios. A wrinkled cow or a skinny horse here and there, staring at the brown Amazon water that they are suspicious of drinking, but the local children swim in without a worry. Most homes are at least a kilometer away from each other. A few are found clustered together, generally around churches or schools; some of the structures are plain, some fancier. One was even made to look like it's made of stone or clay.
Some women on the boat simply baffle me. We are in less than comfortable, hot, sticky conditions that call for flip flops and cotton tank-tops, but I still spot some who climb the steep steps between the decks in high heels and make up. They clutch little purses in their self-manicured hands and "delicately" smoke cigarettes, the butts of which they chuck overboard as if the Amazon is their personal sewer. I have a feeling this is for them as close to a cruise as it gets, so they intend to act here just like they've seen it done in their beloved tele-novelas. I have to give them their due, though - they take each horrible meal on board as if it came straight from Royal Caribbean's dining room and comb their hair every day, which is more than I can say for myself.
Day Five
Our time here is almost up. We are to arrive in Manaus in late afternoon. So says the Captain, but what does he know? I didn't sleep well tonight at all. My stomach is refusing to settle down. As luck would have it, the only time it didn't make me run to the bathroom in the middle of the night, the boat stopped in yet another port and people were hopping in and out. This caused waves to spread through the hammocks, like that toy with suspended metal balls going clickety-clack when you pull one away and let go. Desperately, I've been wrapping myself tighter and tighter in my sleep sheet, but it was no good. Once again, lucky me. The queen bee, from this "cruise ship's" elite, was in the hammock right next to mine, her chatter interrupted only by cigarette drags. It was three in the morning, but this bleached lady of the Amazon was all dolled up with every square millimeter of her bosom cinched up, front and center, on her sternum. It looked like a midget mooning us from inside her blouse. Nevertheless, I will miss this place. Being a Soviet Jew, this kibbutz, this kommunalka**, if you will, awaken in me some old instinct that went to sleep a long time ago, on a different continent.
*Capoeira - Afro-Brazilian dance/martial art
** komunalka - a communal apartment shared by several unrelated families, most typical in the Soviet Union in the 1920 to 1980