"It was our sense of parody. The whole technique of exploring has a jargon so flashily impressive and so easily guyed that we found it impossible not to talk of our plans without pretension . . . If Indians approached us, we referred to them as the Oncoming Savages. We never said 'Was that a shot?', but always 'Was that the well-known bark of a Mauser?', All insects of harmless nature and ridiculous appearance we pointed out to each other as creatures 'whose slightest glance spelt Death'.
-Peter Fleming, Brazilian Adventure
There may not be a word that evokes more romance or adventure than 'Amazon'. To me, and countless others, it is dense jungles, killer spiders, murderous piranhas, mysterious sounds and a thousand ways to perish. The ability to vanish without a trace, as Percy Fawcett did in the summer of 1925 (prompting the quoted book and so many others) has left the Amazon with the kind of mystery and treachery that has secured its reputation for generations.
Travel to the Amazon has become tamer. We flew into Manaus comfortably, boated to a lodge in the middle of the floods, and not once were we murdered by a spider, ants, fish, monkeys, or people. To be fair, I'm an out of shape office worker, so I chose not to chart a part of the jungle that is still unmapped. I'm pretty sure there are places still unvisited within the jungle, but for most of us the visit will feel less adventurous than our boyhood conception of the Amazon has led us to expect.
Manaus is oddly representative of the Brazilian city. When demand for rubber made the Amazon the richest forest in the world, Manaus was awash in money. For a decade or two it was one of the most ostentatious cities in the world. It was the first city with electricity in Brazil, boasted a copy of a French operahouse, and was a frequent if out of the way stop on world tours by dignitaries and performance groups. By 1909 synthetic rubber was created and rubber tree seeds had been smuggled out of Brazil, and by the 1930s the natural rubber trade was essentially dead, and Manaus met the same fate as Ouro Preto or early Sao Paulo. The city shows this. There are 4 blocks of historic Manaus, with run-down but once-magnificent buildings. Many are abandoned, and few are in good repair. The rest of the city is grey concrete block buildings. And at all moments there's the suspicion that, given a few minutes of inattention, the jungle will take the place back over.
The river, and the jungle, are a different matter. The grip of civilization loosens disturbingly quickly the further one travels. There is one highway, apart from the river itself, that connects Manaus to the rest of Brazil. It's two lanes, and washes out most years during the floods. The lodge we stayed at required a 30 minute boat ride through flooded trees and reeds, and homes were harder to get to than that. Electricity may have arrived first in Manaus, but electricity 50 miles from Manaus only arrived in homes in 2013.
It was only a few days, but I'm so glad I went. It's a very different Brazil than anything I've seen so far. People's lives in Amazonas are tied to the river, and its fascinating to see how global society, which is distinctly not designed for the Amazon basin, is adopted (or not) by people living there. The experiences of hiking through the jungle, the disturbing call of howler monkeys, our guide Nigel belly flopping onto a caiman, chasing birds along the river in our boat, and the sunsets, they're unforgettable and nearly impossible to replicate. The adventure is there, though substantially tamer. But Fawcett's fate still hasn't been discovered, so there's still room for a new adventure.
