The one thing which we seek with insatiable desire is to forget ourselves, to be surprised out of our propriety, to lose our sempiternal memory, and to do something without knowing how or why... Nothing great was ever achieved without enthusiasm. The way of life is wonderful: it is by abandonment.
- Ralph Waldo Emerson

"Jacaré," our guide murmured behind me. Alligator.

I couldn't tell if the heron had been killed or merely frightened. We were in the heart of the Amazon, a mysterious, wondrous wilderness still largely untouched by man - an amazing tangle of waterways and forest that covers two and one-half million square miles across nine South American countries.

It was our first trip to the Amazon. My father and I came close to missing the boat. Literally. United Airlines was in the midst of a pilot slowdown. Our flight, which was supposed to get us to the boat in time, was cancelled. Without much hope, I rose at 5:30 the next morning and called our boat captain, Moacir, in Brazil.

"No problem," he said. "Catch the next flight and my son will drive you to the boat."

Our boat, the Harpy Eagle

Little knowing how that could be possible (driving in the Amazon?), Pops and I grabbed our bags and headed out on what turned out to be an adventure of a lifetime. Not only was Mo's son waiting for us at the airport, he graciously took us home so we could shower, then drove us onto a car ferry to cross the mighty Amazon - the first leg of a 90-mile journey to catch up with the boat in Manacapurú, the last outpost on the paved highway.

But the true highway is the Amazon itself – virtually all travel and commerce is done on the river. Ferries, the "buses" of the Amazon, are called birdcages: open-sided boats hung with the hammocks of travelers who lay back in quiet repose as the river flows by, distances being measured in days rather than minutes or hours or even miles.

Although our fellow travelers took a day out of their itinerary to pick us up, they greeted us warmly as the boat glided up to the dock in Manacapurú. As the trip unfolded, so did our knowledge of our companions: a mix of college professors, school teachers, photographers, a doctor, a lawyer and an artist who ranged in age from their twenties to seventies. Also, there were two young travelers who slung their hammocks up on deck - Bård, a 23-year old tourism major from Norway and Mike, a seasoned traveler of 19 who spent high school skipping out of school as an exchange student in Thailand so he could learn Thai kickboxing in the streets.

Mike was the only one who could translate his transcripts when he returned (which said he'd flunked out of school) – he graduated high school with honors! He went on to become the heartthrob of 13- and 14-year old girls in the small towns along the river, the girls running alongside calling "Mikey, Mikey!" as we pulled away from the docks. Needless to say his fellow travelers teased him unmercifully, but he took it in stride with an infectious grin.

As soon as my father and I boarded, the boat slipped away from the dock. By sunset we had left civilization behind. The floodwaters around us seemed like an endless sea dotted with shrubs but the captain enlightened me – we were not in fact floating past shrubs - we were floating in the tree canopy. The floodwaters of the Amazon rise as much as 70 feet in a season and the resilient trees have learned to survive being submerged for a good part of the year.

After nearly 30 hours of traveling, I was exhausted but I couldn't bear to go to bed. The world around me was so incredibly alien, it was almost disorienting and I wanted to stay up and soak it all in.

Marston Bates once said,

It is a humbling experience, and surely a healthy one, to enter a landscape that man has not been able to alter, to dominate, to twist to his own purpose.

It must have been here that he was speaking of. The vastness of the water and the wilderness dwarfed me. No matter where I looked, there was no sign of humanity - no towns, no houses, no boats. Every sense was assailed by newness - the sights, the smell of water and jungle, the feel of warm tropical air against my skin.

I could see iguanas clinging to the treetops, their prehistoric silhouettes against the last, fading light of the sky showing clearly they were the inspiration for Godzilla. They are incredibly shy creatures and easily frightened. As we ventured out in canoes, we had to be extremely quiet or they would plunge from the tops of trees in a horrendous belly flop to escape us. On occasion they would strike a branch or other protruding object that surely must have injured them.

Even the sky was different. For the first time in my life I saw the Southern Cross and the Big Dipper, which hangs high in the sky back home. Here they barely rise above the horizon. Being from the big city, I am used to seeing only the stellar bodies that can outshine city lights – Venus, Mars, a handful of others scattered across the sky. The stars now filled the sky by the thousands and through some optical trick, seemed to hang low enough to touch.

It seemed I scarcely went to bed before Mo was waking us for a pre-dawn canoe ride, the first of many forays. The forest lay silent as we motored through the dark, but as the sun tinged the horizon, it came alive. Whole trees erupted with squawking parakeets. Parrots screeched overhead and in the distance, a dull roar made me think I was hearing jet engines. In a moment of dimwittedness, I wondered how on earth they had gotten a runway into the jungle. It was only as we got closer and I glimpsed them flitting through the trees that I realized the dull roar came from howler monkeys - the largest of the primates in the Amazon.

Giant lily pads

Mo never tired of taking us out in the canoes. He took genuine pleasure in sharing the treasures of the Amazon with us - bromeliads growing high in the trees, delicate orchids clinging to tree trunks, giant lily pads that, when pulled from the water and held up, were as tall as Mo and covered with fierce thorns.

He taught us about the prehistoric hoatzin - a rotund, bald-faced bird that is a terrible flyer - and the horned screamer which has one strange claw on each of its wings and a "horn" protruding from its forehead. We found one exhausted in the middle of a lake and after patiently letting Mo show us its nearly 6-foot wingspan, the screamer perched on our cooler, content for a lift to the nearest island.

Our excursions became a lesson in observation. In short order I was convinced I was blind as people would ooh and ahh over things I couldn't see, or saw just the instant before they disappeared - monkeys peering from the foliage, macaws a distant splash of scarlet in the trees. Our guides showed great patience with me – smiling indulgently as I searched every distant tree for the iguana I was told was there, only to find it three feet away and as plain as day once I knew where to look.

Hoatzin, the rotund bird that flies rather poorly

One guide tried repeatedly to point out some bats to me as we rested in the shade of a tree. I searched for them in vain, oblivious to the fact they were clinging to the tree in front of me, a scant foot or so from my face. To my untrained eyes they had looked like some kind of fungus growing on the side of the tree and I had dismissed them. We grinned in triumph that, at least this once, we had conquered my unseeing eyes.

Our patient guides were also our canoe drivers. I was amazed at their skill. They could plow through the forest in pitch blackness without a disaster and they could always find their way back to the boat, no matter how far into the forest we went or how devious a path we took.

Only once were we lost and that was in broad daylight. What started out as a short canoe ride in search of a Cormorant nesting site turned into a 6-hour paddle. Those who brought snacks were hailed as heroes. What a sight to behold. The place was filled with thousands of Cormorant nests in every nook and cranny of every tree as far as we could see. The adult Cormorants - huge black fishing birds that look a bit like a Heron - lurked awkwardly near their nests, nervous at our intrusion, surrounding us with noise and exuberance and life.

Every day provided new revelations - a rare Harpy Eagle, the most powerful bird on the planet (capable of lifting a sloth or pig in its talons and flying to the tops of the trees), was glowering down at us from its perch, fiercer than the Bald Eagle.

An Emerald Boa coiled layer upon layer on a tree limb, glowing an iridescent green in the darkness as if from some internal light. Pink dolphins were playing in the wake of our boat. A narrow passageway of deepest green suddenly filled with hundreds of Snowy Egrets wading or nesting or flying with a slow, deliberate grace, unperturbed by our presence, going about their gentle existence as if we were invisible.

For all its wildness and beauty, the Amazon is not without her people. Many families live in isolation, eking a small existence from the water and forest. Because of the enormous rise and fall of the river, even homes on stilts are impractical. So the ingenious natives build their homes to float, creating pontoons out of a unique wood that is able to support the entire home on the surface of the water.

Animal pens also float and gardens are often planted in canoes. For families fortunate enough to possess a bit of dry land, the jungle is slashed and burned to create a small space for bananas, other fruits and manioc - a root that is ground and dried in enormous wok-like pans over a hot fire. The manioc requires constant stirring with a huge wooden paddle by some poor soul who is inevitably drenched in sweat.

Mo with the Horned Screamer perched on his cooler

One moonless night, Mo and his driver set out in a canoe. Having no idea where they were going, I joined them. We quickly plunged into absolute darkness, the quiet sounds of the forest muffled by our motor. The water around us was glass and the reflection so pure, the stars were strewn at our feet. It was only by the break of trees at the river's edge that water could be distinguished from sky.

As my eyes adjusted, the thick carpet of stars surprisingly provided enough light to see. Mo spotted a small Cayman – a type of alligator – in the tall grasses ahead and snatched it bare handed from the water. Like the myriad piranha and other fish we had caught, he shoved it under the grate at our feet. I thought to myself, the piranha can't crawl back out but the Cayman can! I covered one bare foot with the other, but within moments, I forgot about the Cayman as we pulled up to an isolated, floating house.

As Mo asked and received permission to disembark, the household cat slipped onto the canoe to steal one of our fish, running to the far reaches of the porch with its still-wriggling prize. Having seen numerous starving animals in the few towns we had seen, I knew it was every animal for itself out here.

Hands reached down to help me out of the canoe and we were led into the simple home. The only furniture was a long bench which was offered to Mo, a stool for me. The children politely perched next to Mo as their parents, with nowhere else to sit, leaned against the wall. Every home we had visited in the Amazon was immaculate and this one was no different. The floor was pristine beneath my feet and the copper pots hanging on the wall glistened in the candlelight.

Harpy Eagle in Manacapuru

I was touched by the graciousness of these isolated people who welcomed us, and for a brief moment, gave us a glimpse into their lives. My high-school Spanish wasn't enough to catch the drift of Portuguese, but as their gentle voices washed over me, I was struck by a sense of utter serenity and rightness with the world.

In the course of the conversation, Mo discovered the man had an injury that had refused to heal. He offered to take him back to the boat for some much-needed antibiotics. I quickly found myself huddled with a whole passel of children as the journey to the boat proved too exciting for them to miss.

As we reached the boat, one of the children tapped me and pointed. Sure enough, the Cayman had crawled out from under the grate and was clinging to the bench in front of us. I've never been so glad to get out of a canoe in my life!

Injury is a serious concern in the Amazon and medical care is hard to come by, usually in the form of a medical boat that makes its way up and down the river on some kind of haphazard schedule. In one village, the headman mistook us for the medical boat and families paddled their sick and injured out to us. Gene, a generous-hearted doctor from Laguna Beach, spent the morning holding clinic, the crew translating between patients and doctor.

One girl of fifteen, living in isolation with her husband, had gotten her hands on infant formula and begun mixing it with river water for her newborn, somehow believing it was better for her baby than breast milk. By the time the infant got to us, it was gravely ill with dysentery. There was little Gene could do but tell the girl to breastfeed it in the hopes the baby might recover. In all, the clinic was a success. Wounds were tended, the ill were comforted and the headman apologized profusely for the mistake.

One of my great joys was to watch the interaction of the Caboclos, as the river people are called, and my fellow travelers - Gene with his patients, Bård and José, one of our guides, playing pick-up soccer in the tiny river towns, Bård and Mike taking pictures with their video cameras and playing it back to the delight of the children.

In one small village, we stopped at the local school which had no books and no paper, only one chalk board, one smiling teacher and a roomful of students who enthusiastically sang us verse after verse of "Happy Birthday" in Portuguese. We sang back in English. To the stunned amazement of our audience, there was only one verse. We were so embarrassed, we began to wonder if we should sing the same verse over and over. Someone rescued us with a video camera, playing back the children's rendition of the song which left them in heaps of laughter.

Our guide, myself and my father on the Amazon

In another town, a drunken man broke free from his friends and wrapped his arm around my father, initiating an intense conversation which neither my father nor I understood. Too polite to break free, my father tried telling him in Spanish he didn't understand, but the man's Spanish was no better than our Portuguese. Finally, I said the only words I knew: E meu pei – He is my father. The man and his friends looked at me and let out a shout in Portuguese, "Ah, he is your father!" and clapped my father on the back, chattering happily at him.

In still another town, I was caught in a torrential downpour with two cameras and no way to protect them. I ducked under the nearest awning. The shopkeeper beckoned me to come in. In the middle of nowhere, this small shop had a satellite dish and a T.V. with World Cup soccer on. Every little while another local would slip in out of the rain to catch the game, the rain on the corrugated roof sounding like a thousand soccer fans pounding in the stands. Not once did the shopkeeper try to sell me anything – she was content to have rescued me from the rain. When it came time for me to leave, she sent me on my way with a smile and a wave.

I never once felt a sense of culture clash. The locals seemed to delight in meeting us as much as we delighted in meeting them. Everyone reached out across language and cultural differences to find ways to communicate. It was hard to leave this amazing place which had so quickly stolen its way into our hearts.

I thought again of what Emerson had said about our insatiable desire to forget ourselves and to do something without knowing how or why. I could see in the faces of my fellow travelers that for a brief moment in time we had forgotten ourselves, abandoning ourselves to the magic and wonder of the Amazon.

Questions?
If you want more information about this area you can email the author or check out our South America Insiders page.