Adventures of Barbara Keck: 2015

This was essentially a trip to understand the Amazon and what all the fuss is about regarding the Amazon rainforest. For starters, I learned how very BIG is the region I was going to learn more about.

My first glimpse of the Amazon River
March 30, 2015

... As the plane headed to the very modern clean big and efficient airport in Manaus, the capital of the Brazilian state of Amazona, I looked out the window at this vast dark river below, the Rio Negro. Tomorrow I'll see it in the daylight! I am very excited!

…and then there is Manaus... a major port city of the world! ... half modern and part slum ... and I am excited to be in the middle of the Amazon!

My HBS Grad contact, Jaro Pollanen (thank you, Jaro!) arranged for a driver to meet me at the airport ...so very kind of this yet-unmet person...and the hotel Caesar Business is great.

The humidity is a lot like Indiana in August. I'll adapt. No need for the mosquito net tent I packed just in case. I keep forgetting that my hostel days are past ...and that I'm not 27 any more...

Looking forward to these few days in the center of the Amazon basin, and then onward to the trip on the Sea Adventurer.

Manaus
March 31

A day to get over the jetlag and explore the town. A private guide took me to see favelas, the Opera House built in the late 1800’s by rubber barons, the sports stadium built in time to accommodate the recent World Cup, and…the horrific traffic!

Modern Manaus

It’s called the rainy season and the Amazon rainforest for a good reason. The afternoon storm clouds loom over the bridge connecting Manaus with the other side of the Amazon.

Today a quick tour of Manaus that included the historic market built in the early 1900's. I've been reading about a lot Amazon explorers who advanced the cause of ethnobotany and the importance of preserving the rain forest and its healing plants. So I was intrigued to see these displays in the market.

The Teatro Amazonas, or the Opera House, in Manaus was built in the late 1890's by the rubber barons who made a fortune exporting that product around the world from the plantations carved out of the jungles of the Amazon area. It is in great shape today, beautiful inside and outside, and used for performances from jazz to grand opera!

Meeting of the Waters

April 1

“The Meeting of the Waters.” Two rivers join just outside of Manaus to form the main flow of the Amazon toward the Atlantic Ocean. These rivers run in parallel in two different colors for 4 miles until they mingle. Water from the Rio Negro picks up a lot of color from decomposed material on its banks and this turns it dark brown. The Solimoes River picks up silt from clay-based (reddish) soils, and thus is yellowish.

A fisherman makes his way on the Solimoes River
part of the Amazon; you can see in the foreground
the dark waters of the Rio Negro.

So interesting to see “life along the rivers”... floating houses and houses on stilts The people are living not much beyond subsistence level

Waterfalls at Presidente Figueredo

April 2, 2015

With a driver, I ventured about 150 km outside the city to an area of waterfalls, near a resort area called the Presidente Figueredo. No one really recalls who Figueredo was, but apparently he had the foresight to set aside this area for public enjoyment. Kind of the way our National Parks systems in the USA was created, I suppose.

None of these waterfalls are from major rivers that flow into the Amazon, but of course ALL rivers end there eventually. Manaus marks the point where the main course of the Amazon consolidates and moves toward the coast of Brazil and the Atlantic Ocean.

Iracema Falls

On April 3, I flew from Manaus to Belem with several other participants in this Zegrahm tour “South American Mozaic” and settled into my cabin as the Sea Adventurer was at the dockside berth in Belem.

BELEM
April 4

We “early birds” really understood the meaning of that term as we got on the zodiacs early early early and went to see the sun rise over Ilha dos Papagaios (Parrot Island).

The squawking began with the first light, and hundreds of orange-winged Amazon parrots rose from their overnight roosts and flew with their mates to find food for the day. Spectacular!

The late morning tour of Belem took us to a wonderful park, where we got our first glimpse of some of the interesting plants and animals we’ll see throughout the Amazon and the “Wild Coast”, as the Northeast Coast of South America was often called during its early development.

The Agouti, a member of the rodent family, is kind of a combination of
a mouse and a squirrel. As it eats the fruit and seeds dropped
by trees onto the rainforest floor, it "disperses" these plants
through the rainforest by burying them and excreting them.

Snowy egrets -- we saw them frequently
in many places of the Amazon Basin
and the Wild Coast

In the afternoon, we again boarded zodiacs for a trip to an area near Belem called Boa Vista, where we walked through villages of the Amerindians living there. The Brazilian government is encouraging development of acai gathering and other traditional activities. This has allowed cash to come into the villages. I love the washing machine. Seriously, it's only when women get away from such family tasks that they can seek education and develop their potential.

The Breves Straits: deluge and delights
April 5, 2015 (Easter Sunday)

We boarded the Zodiac rafts for a cruise on byways of the Amazon in an area called the Breves Straits just in time for the afternoon deluge. As the expedition guides grinned and said, “It IS the rainy season you know”, off we went! It was really fascinating. I have seen a lot of birds -- parrots, tanagers, hawks, and others I can't remember the names of -- and there are a lot of avid birders on board so that is good for me.

Today (April 6) featured a morning expedition (wake up call 5:30, board Zodiacs 6:15ish). It was humid but not raining -- a pleasant 76 degrees and a mere 95% humidity -- and we were able to take a closer look at vegetation, insects, flowers that the trees produce to attract insects, a few birds. The guide on our Zodiac was a sweet young hippy-ish guy born in Westchester County who's been exploring/expedition guiding for a dozen years, and who has also been a teacher. He pulled into a small village centered around the Congregation New Canaan (I cannot reproduce the Portuguese name, sorry) and the community is busily producing wood for broomsticks using a fast-growing native tree. The children were so inquisitive in a good way, and the adults friends. Our guide endeared himself by playing a riff on the drum set in the church! Although this is an important economic activity for this community, the devastation of the rainforest through this illegal lumbering is increasing, and it will be sad to see the effects over time.

All this wood... for broomstick handles!

We had a buffet lunch on deck of the Sea Adventurer ... it poured halfway through ... but, oh well.

Our lecture today was on a fellow named Wallace and his sidekick Bates (who has "Batesian mimicry" named after him...google it...) both of whom explored the Amazon in the mid 1800's collecting plants and insects and birds and mammal speciments as they went. Wallace predated Darwin in his elucidation of the theory of evolution, but gave Darwin (who was better known) the credit so the theory could be more readily accepted. Very interesting.

On April 7, we docked near the town of Atua and took zodiacs to visit. The whole town is built above the water on boardwalks – there is no land in this town -- as the tide rises and falls significantly at the mouth of the Amazon on this part of the Brazilian coast. The choice of transportation in Atua is thus limited: bicycles (individual or 4-seater taxis), wheelbarrows, or foot.

Later, we bid farewell to the Amazon and then crossed the equator as we set sail for French Guiana,

A bumpy ride on the South Atlantic
April 8, 2015 : all day at sea!

The voyage between Atua on the Brazilian coast and the countries of “the Wild Coast” (NE South America) means going out to the South Atlantic.

It was a bumpy 30-hour ride to the anchorage at Iles du Salut in French Guiana. A good 30% of my fellow passengers are seasick, and I confess to taking a Pepto myself. The good news is that the expedition organizers are filling the day with interesting lectures by our 6 on-board naturalists.

The Devils Island, French Guiana
April 9, 2015

Solitary Confinement!

Iles du Salut was made famous by the movie “Papillion”, based on the (contested) story of Henri Charriere who escaped from this notorious French penal colony called the Devil’s Island. We had an expedition outing there, via Zodiac ride, to the landing at the Iles du Salut, still a department of France. We saw a fair number of birds, capuchin monkeys, iguana, and many old buildings with a lingering aura of horror and despair about them.

In the afternoon, we set sail for Paramaribo, Suriname.

Now that we are closer to the coast of South America, the seas are a bit calmer.

It continues hot hot hot and sticky with one or two showers a day required depending on the number of excursions, and constant washing of sweaty clothes in the little cabin sink. And to think... I get to pay the big bucks for this!

Suriname
April 10, 2015

We docked near Paramaribo in Suriname. I opted to take a tour inland to the small town of Moengo which is putting a lot of energy into encouraging artworks for public display and small art galleries. There is a museum in an abandoned warehouse with some interesting "installations" on the themes of social justice.

fter a tour of Moengo, we got into dugout canoes for a 40 minute journey up the Cottica River. The interior of Suriname is the heart of the old Maroon culture, a result
of runaway slaves who could not endure the harsh conditions and punishments of the plantation life. We walked through a small village, saw a demonstration of cassava bread making, looked at traditional houses. Of course, every clothesline or drying-bush had soccer jerseys on it, and there was a satellite TV dish too. It seems that no part of the world is untouched by Western technology.

Making bread from cassava, a process
that involves many steps.

Kids swim in the river near where our dugouts docked

Near and in Georgetown, Guyana

April 11, 2015

Today, we are in Guyana, a former British colony where cars still drive on the "wrong" side of the road, and where English is the official language. The country has a population of around 750,000 and 300,00 of those citizens lives in Georgetown, the capital. The economy rests primarily on mining, rice exports and cane sugar production but much of the backbone of the economic system here comes from "remittances" -- money sent back to Guyana by those who have left for other outposts of the British empire (Canada, the UK, etc) and have found jobs there. Unemployment among those Guyanese citizens who remain is almost 40%. Despite that, the city of Georgetown has a happy Caribbean feeling, with brightly painted buildings and colorful dresses.

Georgetown itself is almost 8 feet below sea level: the sea is kept at bay by a system of dikes and seawalls that were built when the Dutch controlled this country.

A real delight was stumbling on an Easter Hat contest in the public gardens. What a festive event, with dozens of thrilled little girls and their moms enjoying a bright and hot day.

We had a bit of a fluff-up with port authorities in Georgetown, as our ship draws 4.7 meters aft and the authorities had recently changed the regulation to 4.5 meters for navigation up the Essequibo River. But some wining and dining of the Minister of Tourism resulted in the local-pilot assenting to do the voyage, so we left our anchorage at the Georgetown pier, went seaward for a bit, and are now headed for the Essequibo. The attraction here is a rain forest that supports 1000 species of trees and 1200 species of mammals, reptiles and birds.

Essequibo River and Kaieteur Falls, Guyana

April 12

We are docked in the Essequibo River, and we exited the ship by jetboat to the small airstrip near Baganara, a eco-resort island.

Boarding the small planes, we flew inland to the heart of Guyana to look at Kaieteur Falls. These falls are 300 feet wide and 741 feet high -- almost five times the height of Niagara Falls. The birders on the trip are very excited, as this is habitat for the rare cock-of-the-rock.

Flying over the rainforest here, we can look down and see strip mining operations. They are like a knife-slash-wound in this beautiful forest area.

The trip to Kaieture Falls in the heart of Guyana provided a really spectacular sight of powerful and fast-moving water that flows along the twisty-turny far-away-from-Georgetown part of the Essequibo River and dumps with a roar over these wide and tall Falls -- and the sight was especially awesome from the 12 passenger prop planes we were in; as they approach the Falls, they fly low over the forest canopy and buzz the Falls before they land on the just-long-enough red-dirt-packed airstrip at the entrance to this National Park. The plane ride from the eco-resort of Baganara is 45 minutes, through clouds and blue skies and sudden rainbursts: quite exciting!

The walk to the Falls is about 40 minutes, but then it took so long in part because we and our naturalist guides dallied along the way to identify incredible foliage, to look for and spot the tiny green frog (about the size of a dime) that lives in the base of a palm-like plant and will spit its venom at you if you disturb it and get too close, and VERY LUCKY FOR US -- to spot the elusive bright-orange bird called the Cock of the Rock.

I'm sure it has a proper scientific name, but
I'd just called it THE TOILET PAPER PLANT.
The soft red fuzz on the plant's leaves make it
a perfect household product for the rainforest peoples.

Altogether, a wonderful excursion!

Unexpected blossoms along the way

This trip has featured some spectacular sights. I fear I am becoming a naturalist, as I've learned to see the land, trees, sea, rivers, insects, mammals, birds in a totally newer and deeper way.

Last night, about half the passengers went out on the Zodiacs for a moonlight ride along the islands and near the mainland of the Essequibo River that's opposite the settled area of Georgetown. Our Zodiac got stranded in a sandbar near an island and we had to be "rescued" by another Zodiac, towed out a bit, and then we transferred in the middle of the river to an empty Zodiac to continue our tour.

In the forest, the cicadas were loud, and some birds were just going to sleep. The bats, however, were whizzing around feeding on the insects of the night. Did you know that bats have the most species in the mammal kingdom? Most bats eat insects, often consuming an amount of insects equal to the bat's weight each night. The vampire bat does in fact exist, feeding on small mammals and birds -- not located where we are -- but one of our naturalists gave a presentation about mammals of the Neotropics showing some ancient pottery jugs that feature vampire bats in scary detail.

We returned to the boat by 9 p.m., drenched completely by one of those rainy season deluges that are of the heavens-opening type: from zero to full bore and then back again to zero, all in the course of 15 minutes. Nothing a glass or two of white wine with dinner couldn't remedy :-)

Zodiac delights in Guyana
Monday, April 13, 2015

This was the last day of this Expedition for extensive Zodiac trips. We were given a wake-up call at 4:30, gulped down some coffee and rolls in the lounge, and boarded the Zodiacs by 5:30. The sun rose at 5:45, and as it did the forest/jungle came alive! Scores of orange-winged parrots scolded us as we motored slowly past the trees in which they had roosted for the night. By 7:30, when we turned back to the ship, things had quieted down and the birds had retreated to the coolness of the lower canopy.

We had to be on board by 8 a.m. as the tide would be at its highest then, and we needed that additional depth to move the Clipper Sea Adventurer out of the mouth of the Essequibo which is otherwise filled with sandbars. Silt from the Amazon flows north and west to Guyana, and other silt from the Orinoco (in Argentina) flows south to Guyana. The water in the Essequibo is thus partly salty near the mouth, light brown, and nicely warm.

So here is what we saw this morning in our Zodiac with our guide, Conrad, a talented naturalist from Costa Rica:

* Green Kingfisher
* Orange-winged parrots
* the Red-Billed White-Throated Toucan
* the Four-Tailed Flycatcher
* Swifts (they are small and swift -- too swift to identify the species!)
* the Scarlet-Rumped Carique.
* the Mangrove Swallow
... and one other, but I can't read my notes, as it is hard to take notes in a bumping-along Zodiac!

The Cariques were quite interesting. They build pendulous nests in trees where wasps also build nests. They eat primarily fruit, and were bringing back something orange to feed to the chicks. There must have been 20 of them in the one busy tree at riverside.

We also saw a three-toed sloth, suspended from the top of a bare-limbed tree, just starting to wake up from his night's sleep. His fur was greenish-looking as moss grows on it, and he lifted his head when Conrad mimicked an eagle whistle. Eagles eat sloths, and although sloths do indeed move very slowly, they try to reposition to a leafy area when an eagle is hunting. When we came back past the sloth-in-the-tree, he had his belly to the sun. Sloths take two weeks to digest a meal and the warmth of the sun on their bellies helps activate the digestive bacteria that help with that process; seems they don't get enough exercise to otherwise move things through their bowels. (perhaps he should travel with a small bag of prunes, as I do...)

Three-toed sloth, seen through a spotting 'scope
They don't move much, or often, and rely on
the sun's warmth to assist their digestion

As I write, the depth-finder on the ship just indicated we are beyond the shallows of the Essequibo River and en route out to the Caribbean. So we've left the South American continent. Next and final stop: Trinidad & Tobago. We have a day and a half of sailing to reach our last ports of call.

TRINIDAD & TOBAGO: A DIFFERENT KIND OF RAINFOREST; AND THE SCARLET IBIS SPECTACLE

April 15 & 16

We left the South American continent when we sailed away from Guyana and toward the island nation of Trinidad & Tobago. There are two islands in this nation. Tobago is the smaller island, and not very developed. No port to dock at there, so the Sea Explorer anchored in the bay off Charlotteville, Tobago. We joined a variety of other boats, including this guy who was bailing like mad!

This was a hot spot in downtown Charlotteville...

The walk through the rainforest in Tobago was on the Gilpin Trace Trail, and it is part of the Tobago Main Ridge Forest Reserve, the oldest legally protected forest reserved geared specifically towards conservation in the West hemisphere – established in 1776 by the British crown. This rainforest is much different in feeling from the rainforests on the continent, but equally interesting. We saw a bird, a MotMot, harassing a hummingbird nest – the Motmots eat the hummingbird chicks – and the hummingbirds trying to divert it.

April 16 we awoke at dockside at Port Of Spain, Trinidad.

This city has a distinct Caribbean vibe.

Our last day started with a 7 a.m. bus ride up into the hills of Trinidad, to the Asa Wright Nature Center, one of the first not-for-profit nature centers to be established in the Caribbean. Off the deck of the lodge, hummingbirds abound. Our walk down the trails nearby took us past marches of leaf-cutter ants, beautiful flowers, and the spotting of a shy bird.

The grand finale of the tour was a visit to the Caroni Bird Sanctuary, located on the west coast of Trinidad. This is a swampy are with narrow waterways through dense mangroves, and we spotted herons, hawks, an owl, a 6-foot long boa, an anteater, crabs, spiders, egrets, etc.

Blue heron

The Caroni Bird Santuary is characterized by
mangrove trees in its swampy byways

But the real thrill was seeing the flocks of Scarlet Ibis which arrived at sunset to an island. Their red plumage and the white egrets also feeding on the delights of the sandbars which revealed themselves at low tide made some folks say that the whole island it looked like a decorated Christmas tree.

(thanks Wikipedia...no way to get close myself!)

A wonderful way to end this trip!

A wakeup call 2 a.m. found about half the passengers bleary-eyed but ready to go on the early American Airlines flight to Miami and then onward home.

I don’t know about you, but regardless of where I travel, the best words in a trip are the “Welcome Home” that US immigration officers say. Always good to be back in the USA!

Wings over Miami - back in the USA

Adventures of Barbara Keck

Sudan 2003- Remote desert, Khartoum, sources of the Nile, and travel during Ramadan

Amazon, Amazon Basin, and The Wild Coast of Northern South America