Manatee / Trip to the extractive reserve / Hazards / Layman kills the cayman

Early start today. I got up at 7pm, took shower (one sweats here rather much during nights (and days) and the need to take showers is rather dear). Nice breakfast with Ruby, my host, and off I went by an old Volkswagen Kleinbus driven by the funny driver, Leonicio, who kept on telling me stories about the places we saw in Portuguese. To my great surprise, I could sometimes understand what he meant. This is the natural method to learn any language: just like kids. Sometimes it would be embarassing, but today I had fun.

We intended to go tree-spotting, because Amazonas is one of the best places to see great trees. And here there are some great trees in the nearby Floresta Nacional do Tapajos. There is one 70 meter tall sumamura or something like this. But it turned out that the tree is 14 km away from the nearest road and that the forest is full of kobra periculosa and they did not let me to take the walk with shorts and sandals. Not that I would be insane enough.

There was still plenty to see. First, we saw the town of Belterra, which was build in the 1930s by the Ford Motor Company in its desperate effort to established a fully integrated vertical company (see e.g. "The machine that changed the world" for more information) by producing its own rubber in Amazonas. Belterra was the second trial: the first one, Fordlandia, failed even faster. Belterra is bizarre: it is rather exact copy of model American small town of that era and quite many of the buildings are still standing. Ford was not successful with this plantation eihter and abandoned it in 1945. Nowadays, Belterra has some soya-plantations, which in my opinion looked rather desperate. The Amazonian soil does not contain so much humus etc: everything (or atleast 99%) of necessary nutrition is in the plants itself. The soil is just sand and clay, and once the trees and plants are gone, there is nothing anymore.

This problem of poor soil combined with desperate need for economical growth has already now turned quite vast expanses of Amazonia into wasteland. Since this is, honestly, in nobody´s long-term interests, there has been several different proposals for both protecting the forest and getting some economical value out of it. First there are the national parks, but guarding them has turned out to be rather difficult. Another idea, invented by Chico Mendes, the assassinated leader of rubber tappers, and others in 80s, is to establish extractive reserves (later ER). The idea is that the best way to protect the forest is to have people living in the forest and getting their income in a sustainable manner from the forest. There are several sustainable things to try: rubber tapping, honey, plant oils, fruits, ecoturism. To cut the long story short. The reason why I am here is that my friend Mika is working for Projeto Puxirum, which is supporting one such ER here. The ER is called Reserva Extravista Tapajos-Arapiuns, located between the rives of Tapajos and Arapiuns. It has an area of about 700000 hectares and some 20000 people live there. The project is financed (partly) by the Foreign Ministry of Finland, which is why Mika works here. I visited the ER and will write more later. I visited already the project offices here in Alter de Chao, and will tell you more about them later, too.

Back to today. Since we could not visit the great trees, my drive took me to some small villages in the National Park. The roads are terrible: narrow dirt-road, with either hard-baked clay of soft sand. Not so fun to drive there, but we managed. Some other vehicles had got stuck in the sand. We visited the village of Maguary, where there is a rubber bag factory. They tap the rubber from the trees, turn the raw latex into sheet of rubber, and then make nice bags from the rubber. I bought one as a souvenir for S. I hope she likes it. They are also making a collection of the bags for some French shop. Nice ones. The other part of the village had solar-energy and even internet. Internet was a surpise, even though I know that by using microwawe links it is rather simple to extablish even remote sites. Still it was a surprise.

After getting back from my little journey, I had lunch with Ruby at the house of Juan-Carlos, who has been working for the Puxirum for long time. Juan-Carlos is from Chile and has with his wife two kids. I have met him in Sao Paolo and here is really funny man. Speaking of Chile, one meets immigrants (of several generation) here in Brazil. The family of Oswaldo, the rubberfactory manager, has come from Italy. Juan-Carlos is from Chile. In Belem, I talked to one guy, whose father was from Japan, and who could still speak Japan. In Santarem, one Jorge, of whom more later, is running a eco-turism agency: he is from Argentina. And so on. You cannot recognize a Brazilian, since there is no prototype Brazilian ( if one does not count the few remaining Indian as Brazilians).

Now I am sipping some martini. Ruby is taking a nap: the heat is quite hard for her, since she is now 2 monts due to give birth. Which means, that (Mika being in Finland) I have had an opportunity to relax here. At least there has not been any pressure by the hosts on me to run around and drink too much alcohol. Enough anyway.

Manatee

A manatee is a relative of sea cows. One of the manatees live here in Amazonas, but there are not many left anymore. I first saw one in the Bosque Rodrigo Alves botanical garden in Belem. A manatee is quite a strange animal to see for the first time. It is like a giant seal, but it has really large tail flipper. It has almost no hair and it has a face resembling more an elephant than a seal. From the tail, it looks like a giant fish, but otherwise it looks like a mammal. Really excotic animal. The locals here call it peixe-boi. The Puxirum-project is taking care of several peixe-bois, and when I visited the project, I was shown a baby one. It was so cute! I cannot even describe how cute. Check for yourself by using Google.com. Many people here love peixe-boi, but I assume that many have been hunting them in the past.

Trip to the extractive reserve

I was lucky to arrive here on Wednesday, since on Thursday morning, Jorge, the travel-agency owner (an Argentinian photographer, who used to live and work in Grenada, Spain, but fell in love with Alter de Chao on a photo-trip 8 years ago, bought an island, on which he now lives with his wife, Alessandra, and their two small kids, without electricity), Frederico (Jorge´s childhood friend, who by accident came here and met Jorge, came again to stay for a few months and to help Jorge with his ecoturism initiatives), and Gil, the captain, hunter, fisher, guide, and all-around nice guy, were about to travel by Jorge´s boat to Mariba, a village in the extractive reserve. The purpose of the trip was to check some trekking paths, to meet local people, to discuss on the building of a house for accomodating ecotourist, and also just to have fun. So, we left Alter de Chao on Jorge's small boat (Mae Natureze or something). She can take 10 people and goes quite nicely with her 10 horsepower 2-stroke diesel engine. She is leaking quite a bit, but there is a handpump ready for emptying her. It took 1h15 minutes to cross the 15 kilometer wide river, Rio de Tapajos. Quite a river, with clear, drinkable they say, acid water, which means no mosqitos, she joins the light brown Amazonas near Santarem, a little downriver from here. Nice ride, quite a strong tailwind gave us exciting surf: the waves were about 1.5 meters, just like on ocean. It is the dry season now: the water is some 4 meters down, which means that there are endless white-sand beaches everywhere here. As they say in MIT: IHTFP. Check the net.

At first, we took it easy, just to make sure I would not turn into a boiled crab. Later, I found out that even the others find the sun too all-mighty during the early afternoon. At 4pm, Jorge left to meet some people in the community, we others walked 2 kilometers on the beach, reached a waterfall, swam for a while, took a canoa, Gil paddling and sailed (?) upstram to a lake. By the lake, we visited a place where the locals prepare farinja, which is their staple food. It is cassava or manioc, first soaked in the lake for one day, then ground fine with the mill, let dry in a large vat, pushed trough a coarse sieve, then through a finer sieve, and finally roasted. The resulting stuff is yellow, coarse pellets, about 1.5 mm diameter. It is hard work, and even eating farinja is quite hard. It is really hard, makes your teeth hurt, finally breaks them down ( almost everyone in ER, over 40 years, have no teeth left). Farinja is used in countless ways: eaten raw, sprinkled on top of any dish, baked into cookies, etc. The local people associate quite a lot of magical powers with farinja: by eating it one gains a lot of strength etc. In truth, it is just carbohydrate, without any vitamins etc, so not so healthy after all. But it is popular, grows in the poor soils and it is traditional. And if one is really into making money, one can produce farinja for sale. A man, at whose house we had dinner and lunch, prepares biweekly 150 kg of farinja and sell it for 80 reais, which is about 22 euros. 80 reias for two weeks hard work may not sound much, but by working in contructions the ER-people get some 5 reais per day (plus food), working for the Puxirum-project they get 10 reais per day, the local minimun salary here in Amazonas in 260 reais per month, and many people in ER do not have money at all: they live in subsistence economy. Anyway, farinja rules, and I have now had my share of it. No more for me, thank you.

Later in the evening, we had dinner with a local family (the family of the farinja-man). We had brought our own food, which they had cooked for us. Yes, we brought more than we ate. For dinner we had the quite normal selection: potatoes, spagetti, farinha, salad, rice, and chicken. Nothing special, but good anyway. One strange thing was that the mother of the family joined us in the table, joined the discussions (which I did not do due to my lacking skills in Portuguese), but did not eat anything. Since I have only eaten with this one family, I cannot say whether this is a common habit. Maybe she had eaten already when cooking. Anyway, one sees similar behaviour in Finland, too. At least in my family, it is common for the mother not to join the table, but sit separately (with the pretext of being able to serve the quests better), but this happens only during big festivals. It would be nice to know how things are here. I have to ask someone later.

It was nice to visit a local house. The local houses are simple: built of hardwood (the frame) and palmleaves (most of the walls, roofs, which by the way requires 1800 leaves, and you can get only one leaf from each palm. You need to find some palm every four years the roof lasts in the rain and sun). The houses have, usually, three parts: a kitchen, an open area with the dining table and living rooms, with hammocks, TV (in the richer houses, powered by car battery, which is recharged in Alter de Chao, since there is no electricity in the ER). In addition, most households have their own farinja-workshop and some storage buildings. The whole village takes part in building the houses: one day per week is devoted to community work, which is called puxirum. It is a system quite close to the traditional "talkoot" in Finland, even in the sense that there is some alcohol, dancing etc in the puxirum evening.

Families are quite large in the ER, or here in Amazonas in general. Our hosts had 3 daughters, all married and living in Alter de Chao, and 2 sons, still living at home and going to the community school (which seemed to operate only in the evenings, so that the kids can help at home in the morning). Jorge told me that it is quite common for girls to get pregnant really young, 15 years old or so, since there is no education about contraception or fertility. When a girl gets pregnant, the father-to-be may or may not take responsibility to take care of the child. If he decides not to, it is no problem. There will be another baby and father in few years time, and, besides, there are the grandparents anyway.

The night was windy, which made our sleeping in our hammocks in the not-so-ready ecotourism house (no walls) rather shallow. But the night was nice: sky full of stars, monkeys shouting, insects making great noise, and it was warm despite the strong wind. The next day, we took off quite early and had a 3-hour walk in the forest just to check the trek for bigger groups to come. The forest was really dry, and it was secondary forest, so no big trees. But it was a nice walk. I got to know some new plants and animals, got to see many cashew-trees, the acai-palm, of which one makes really good juice (like chocklate, but better), the tree from which one make antiroba (an oil for keeping insects away - there are some nasty insects, which want to climb all the way to men´s tecticles and cause terrible itching. Using antiroba oil on legs etc before going to the forest prevents this. We used it a lot and had no problems), some nice termitehills etc. We also visited several houses and families in the forest and drank coffee with them. Local coffee, selfmade and delicious. Later, we came back over the river, in head wind, with 1.5 meter wawes, fun. And had some beers at Jorge´s agency.

Hazards

In addition to drunken drivers, heat stroke and hangover, there are some natural hazards here. Before going any further, one must point out that there is no malaria, nor dengua, nor river blindness here. Which is great, since one can sleep without mosquitonets, swim in the rivers etc. Furthermore, piranjas are not that common either, and they say that one can even swim in lakes in which there are many piranjas. But stingrays are common, and they are nasty. During the night (and sometime also during the day) they come the the shallow water in the beaches, cover themselves in sand, and just stay there. If one steps on one, the stingray will whip its tail and cause a terrible pain and nasty wound, which gets infected very easily. The local wisdom says that making love, swimming, drinking alcohol or milk, running and tanning are bad after being whipped by a stingray. Rather funny list of issues, which increase the likelyhood of bad infection. Then there are also some snakes around. But in general, it is not that dangerous here.

Layman kills the cayman

The farinja-man had killed a 3-meter cayman a few years ago. He still had the skull and it was really a big one. The caymans, local alligators, are rather common here, but they do not attack humans. They eat fish, small mammals etc. One had stalked Jorge´s dog for a week, but the dog was clever enough not to go deep in the water and the cayman is slow in shallow water. The dog still lives.

Alun perin julkaistu kuukausikoosteessa "Blogs November 2004".