TANGLED JUNGLES

A Voyage to Amazonia

AUTHOR: LOIS GRAY

PHOTOS: KAY GILMOUR

COUNTRIES: Brazil, French Guiana, Suriname, Guyana, Venezuela & Trinidad

RIVERS: The Amazon, The Suriname, The Essequibo, and The Orinoco.

March 22 to April 5, 2007

Travel Agent: Zegrahm Expeditions

Introduction

A fabulous experience with riotous growth, thickly entwined vines, branches grasping for sunlight, brilliant flashes of intermittent outrageously vivid color, a background sound of singing & buzzing insects, raucous throaty parrot shrieks, every possible and impossible shade of green, unrelenting blue sky overhead, moisture dripping constantly from every surface, even the hairy backs of sloths, and heat rising from the damp earth and pouring down from the merciless sun combining to create a sauna to melt all creation into one roiling, bubbling broth! Wonder and excitement, beauty and brutality, surprise and satisfaction the “wild coast” of South America, the northern coasts of Brazil, French Guiana, Suriname, Guyana, Venezuela, and the overwhelmingly huge rivers pouring from them into the Atlantic and Caribbean: the Amazon, the Suriname, the Essequibo, and the Orinoco It is not just the thick and tightly enmeshed vegetation that makes for “tangles” either. We learned during this wonderful exploration that there are many subjects here that produce strange twists and turns and impenetrable puzzles The convoluted jungle growth is a ready metaphor for all the other problems and enigmas we discovered What a delightful way to uncover and unravel all these braids and knots!

Our Ship

Our gallant ship was the Clipper Adventurer, about 400 ft. long and well equipped for ocean-going as well as river runs. It had once been a Russian vessel, as evidenced by the Cyrillic letters spelling out instructions covering lifeboat stations and drills as well as the proper way to don life jackets. Luckily, we were not expected to read Russian for our safety we received good translations of everything The crew is not Russian anymore; instead we had German officers and Filipino crewmembers; but English was our common tongue. There were about 80 passengers coming from all over the globe, though the majority were US citizens since the company running the trip is American. Sometimes it seemed we had as many naturalists with us as fellow travelers and they also were from everywhere in the world A quite cosmopolitan complement for the trip.

Birds And Animals

Amazonian birds are truly astonishing in their variety and their colorations! The “hard core birders” among the passengers were always stupefied after their special explorations with the professional birders. They were constantly showing off their digital photos of the parrots, toucans, hawks, egrets, songbirds, hummingbirds and ducks they had seen We could hear them chortling among themselves as they compared experiences and checked off birds on their life lists Kay also enjoys photographing the birds and she also got some pretty wonderful shots herself a couple of them good enough that the professional bird scientists (Peter & Mark) asked her to send them copies of her shots!

Mammals are much harder to see from zodiacs than are birds. Though the region has many varieties of animals, we knew not to expect too much of this part of the trip A jaguar sighting would have been a true miracle, as would a look at a margay or ocelot or any other feline And we did not see them The closest we came was on Saxacalli when we walked the jungle path and saw a feline paw print probably an ocelot but maybe a jaguar, according to the naturalists with us and the native guides as well The black and spectacled caimans were seen but only in miniature young and small ones. We never got even a glimpse of the giant river otters and that was a disappointment since we had anticipated seeing at least one We also never saw any piranha fish but we did learn that their fearsome reputation is almost entirely unearned. Though some shy small snakes were spotted at various times during the explorations, we never saw an anaconda of any size, much less the biggies we had heard about. We were lucky to see the pink dolphins though!

Though we had a plant expert with us as a naturalist, we finally gave up trying to remember the numerous names he gave us to identify the plants around us We were also hopeless at actually recognizing the species he had already introduced us to. Finally, we just agreed that the jungle vegetation is incredibly dense, amazingly varied in species, wonderfully tangled together, and altogether satisfying to see. We, unlike Adam, did not feel the need to name everything we saw!