12 Miles (or so) North of Cuba

6 December 2012

After an especially rough, mostly sleepless night Monday, with glasses falling off shelves and wine bottles tipping, the captain decided to divert from the planned course and seek calmer waters. When we passed the east coast of Puerto Rico, instead of continuing on a northwesterly course straight for Ft. Lauderdale, we made a sharp left, paralleling, first, the Puerto Rican coast then the coast of Hispanola: the Domincan Republic and Haiti. Since yesterday, we’ve been skimming along the north coast of Cuba, often well within sight of the island’s eastern mountains, but, I assume, outside the 12-mile buffer zone that is recognized as national waters. If we weren’t outside that zone, I’m guessing we’d have met a greeting party; we may even have met Fidel. But so far, no interception by Cuban authorities.

To the north, I can see some large buildups, so I’m sure we’re avoiding storms between us and the Bahamas—the straight-line course to port. We’re all grateful. The waters for the past couple of days have been fairly calm—maybe 2-foot swells at worst—and the weather has been generally sunny and warm. I’m savoring these last few days of my extended summer, spending as much time as possible on my small balcony, which is where I am now.

All papers are graded, all final exams are done, semester grades went in to UVA yesterday, and I’m packed. Now, our final full day on board is a good time to catch up on this blog. And I have some time to cover. I’ll try to be brief.

Manaus and the Amazon

We arrived in Manaus, Brazil, on Thanksgiving Day, the morning after our onboard celebration of the holiday. Ambassador Thomas Shannon, US ambassador to Brazil, had joined us in Macapa, where we first entered the Amazon. And he and his party sat at the head table for Thanksgiving dinner Wednesday evening.

Three years ago, our MV Explorer Thanksgiving dinner consisted of turkey roll, mashed potatoes, and the usual: steamed vegetables, pasta, iceberg lettuce, under-ripe tomatoes, and rolls. No gravy! No stuffing! So my expectations weren’t high. But having a VIP on board does make a difference, and this Thanksgiving dinner included stuffing and gravy. No mashed potatoes, but with stuffing, who cares? It wasn’t exactly like home, but it was, to a certain extent, a family gathering.

I spent Thanksgiving Day morning walking around the port area of Manaus. The city sits on the north bank of the Rio Negra just west of where the Negra joins the Amazon. As the name implies, the Rio Negra’s water is very dark—black, in fact. The color comes from the tannins floating downstream from the millions of acres of rainforest that line the river from its origin in the Andes to the point where it joins the Amazon. The color may not be inviting, but mosquitoes can’t lay eggs in the high-acidic water. So bugs weren’t a problem in Manaus.

The other notable characteristic of the Rio Negra is what happens when its black water joins the brown, muddy water of the Amazon. At this “meeting of the waters,” the two rivers flow along, side-by-side, as if getting acquainted before taking the full plunge into union. The result is a line in the water, an invisible wall that separates brown from black for several miles downstream. The new river is genuinely two-toned, just like those two-toned cars my parents used to drive in the 50s and 60s. It’s a very interesting phenomenon to see.

I joined Jim and Shamim for lunch at a Manaus seafood restaurant, where we shared a terrific meal of Amazon fish and Brazilian beers. After lunch, I returned to the ship, packed a few items, and caught a taxi to Manaus’s #1-rated hotel: The Holiday Inn. The fact the Holiday Inn—it looks exactly like a Holiday Inn you’d find in Des Moines or Davenport—is the top-rated place to stay says a lot about hotel selection in Manaus. But I was there for the internet. Thanksgiving was daughter Julie’s 40^th birthday, and I hoped a good internet connection would allow me to call her—Skype, even—as she celebrated both auspicious days with family at brother Marty’s house in Henderson NV. Unfortunately, the Skype call didn’t go through—maybe the sound of glasses clinking drowned out the ringing of Skype—but at least I was able to leave a musical message.

I did manage to get through to youngest-daughter Corey via Skype, so all wasn’t lost.

Thursday night, I joined a large group from the ship at a concert performance by the Amazonia Philharmonic, the local professional symphony orchestra. I didn’t have high expectations. How can they attract high-quality musicians to the heart of the hot, muggy, buggy Amazon? Well, as I discovered, it’s not as buggy as expected, and the Amazonia Philharmonic is excellent.

The concert was performed in Manaus’s 100-year-old opera house, a beautiful, classic performance venue with 6 to 7 layers of gilded balconies enclosing the main seating area, and a magnificent, classical mural encircling a massive crystal chandelier hanging overhead. The concert fit the venue: three pieces by Brazilian composers, including a wonderful Villa-Lobos piano concerto (yes, performed on a Steinway concert grand) and two other very entertaining selections by composers I hadn’t heard of. All this for the not-so-grand price of US$10 . . . for a reserved orchestra-level seat. And, once again, Ambassador Shannon joined us, so it had some of the trappings of a royal performance.

The orchestra is, as I said, excellent: superb strings, decent winds (though I’ve been spoiled by the Chicago Symphony’s incredible, majestic brass section), and a fine young conductor. A great evening.

The next day, I returned to the ship early and joined Jim, Shamim, and Kay Slaughter for a 2-day venture into the rain forest. This trip, again, was set up by colleague Sergio Carvalho, the Brazilian professor of international business at the University of Manitoba. A friend of Sergio, Maia, a youngish fellow who has parleyed his knowledge of the region into a thriving tourist business, picked us up at the ship and drove us to a small port close to the junction of the Negra and the Amazon. There, we climbed aboard a high-speed boat and sped across the river junction—stopping long enough for photos of the two-toned stream—before continuing south to a busy landing on the south bank of the Amazon. From there, we piled into a van, joined by a young Dutch couple, and rode about an hour along paved and unpaved roads until arriving at a jungle port on a main Amazon tributary whose name I never learned.

We boarded another high speed boat and, for the next 45 minutes, we sped up the tributary, cut through a large lake, entered a small black-water stream, and penetrated deeper and deeper into the rain forest, with the river gradually becoming narrower, the bends more pronounced, and the forest closing in on us. We were in a Joseph Conrad novel.

Finally, we rounded a bend and saw, perched on a peninsula formed by what was now a narrow, dark stream, a thatched-roof structure flanked by smaller cottages sitting high on the bluff above the water. This was the Amazon Turtle Lodge, owned by Sergio’s friend, Maia.

We were greeted by lodge staff, who offered us some excellent tropical punch, then we trudged up the 60-or-so stairs to the lodge area. The compound’s structures, like most houses along the Amazon rivers, sit on bluffs. In addition, most houses closer to the water are constructed on stilts. During the dry season—generally our fall and winter—the rivers drain, levels fall, and great rivers and lakes become small streams and ponds. But in the wet season—generally our summer—the torrential rains cause the entire Amazon basin to fill, with water rising as much as 20 meters. That’s about 70 feet of vertical water, enough to cover an 8-story building. So the Amazon Turtle Lodge in late November sits atop a 60-foot bluff overlooking a small winding stream. In July, the compound sits on the water’s edge surrounded by more lake than river. The dock where we enjoyed our tropical punch rises and falls on huge floating logs, like a fisherman’s bobber.

We spent the next 24 hours on several boat and hiking trips through the Amazon rain forest. Saw lots of birds—lots and lots of birds: tucans, hawks, parakeets (yes, wild parakeets), egrets, on and on. Kay Slaughter is a birder, so we had an expert along who could help out our guide. It was like being in the bird house at the National Zoo. But no cages. We also saw dolphins feeding at another stream-river intersection (fresh-water dolphins evolved from some lost Pacific-ocean dolphins a couple million years ago); several caymans, which are small alligators that can grow as long as 15 to 20 feet, according to our guide; poisonous tree frogs, termite mounds, and lots of tropical flora that, according to our guide, can cure everything from the common cold to Montezuma’s revenge.

Several students on a different trip into the rain forest enjoyed swimming in the rivers, eating the local vegetation, and drinking the Amazon water. They later could have used some of those jungle remedies.

The sleeping accommodations at the lodge were very comfortable, including, to our great surprise, air conditioning. That was a very good thing because our most vivid memory of the Amazon will be the heat and humidity. It was Mississippi in late July. Except, according to locals, the heat and humidity are present year-‘round.

We returned to Manaus by 4:30 (16:30) Saturday afternoon and sailed that evening at 20:00 (8pm). It seemed to take longer to sail down the Amazon than it had a week earlier to sail the 900 miles against the current, perhaps because the river looks exactly the same the entire stretch, whether coming or going. But we finally exited the river Tuesday morning and by later that afternoon were back in the deep-blue waters of the tropical Atlantic.

To have sailed up the Amazon, ventured into the world’s largest rain forest, listened to the constant cacophony of tropical birds, hiked through the jungle, and watched a sunrise over the black waters of a hidden stream was a wonderful experience. But I’m not ready yet to book a return flight.