My journey into Amazon Forests (4)

A tour in the “Capital of Rubber.”

In the Opera House, Indian Museum

Indian guide taking me to his Tribe

The Amazon is a forest overflowing with water, and the means of transportation in it is by boat, but roaming it on foot is fraught with dangers

In the "Tropical Hotel", as in Manaus Airport, nothing reminds you of the Amazon forest except for a small zoo that houses some jungle animals and birds and a pond where several giant water lilies grow.

After I took a cold shower to remove the sticky moisture sticking to my body, I lay on the bed for a short break in the air-conditioned room and felt a bit of recovery. Then I went down to the reception hall and spoke to Silvia, responsible for receiving guests, and reminded her that I had requested, within my reservation, to arrange a guide who accompanies me to the forest. She said she knew this and would set it for me this evening. So I sat down at the hotel bar, ordered a cold beer, and began reading my book on the Amazon until it was time for dinner.

Silvia called me into my room on the phone and told me that she had arranged for me to accompany a young Amazonian of English speaking named Vargo, who would meet me at the hotel tomorrow morning at half past eight.

My Indian Guide

I was having breakfast in the hotel restaurant when Sylvia came with my Indian guide. A young man in his thirties with a distinctly Amazonian complexion and open face. After exchanging greetings, Sylvia left us, and Fargo asked me how long I had been in Brazil and why I had come to this country. I explained that I worked for a london based newspaper and came to cover the Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro, which ended before yesterday; he laughed, saying: “So we were together at the conference.“ He said he graduated from Manaus University, works with non-governmental organisations as an environmental activist, and works as a tour guide for those who visit the forest to support his family consisting of his wife and two children, a boy and a girl. I felt very confident in Fargo and happy that my guide is a young man from indignant forest inhabitants in that lonely and frightening jungle. It seemed that he had a good education and human feeling that prompted him to engage in civil works to serve the environment and defend his people.

Manaus .. capital of Amazon

**The city of Manaus.. and in the foreground of the picture is the opera house “Teatro Amazonas”**

We talked about the trip program and the financial arrangements related to him personally, the boat owner who would take us into the forest and the materials we would take with us. He asked me how long I wanted to spend inside the jungle; I told him that I had hardly persuaded the editor-in-chief of my newspaper to extend my stay in Brazil by one week, but I think that he does not mind if I am a day or two or even later in my return as long as I write my observations for my newspaper. He said this meant that we would be in the jungle for five or six days if we considered that you needed one day to return to Rio de Janeiro to take the plane from there to London. He said that he appreciated my interest in the forest and its inhabitants. I said my motive was nothing other than curiosity about how these people live. But I feel I have nothing to offer them in return but to write about their living conditions.

Brazil is much more than enjoying the sun, the sea, the samba dances and the most famous soccer team in the world. It is home to the most incredible rainforests, the most extensive river system in the world, and the most prominent waterfalls by volume. But more than its abundance of natural wonders is the extraordinary diversity and richness of its population. He added that you would see that the Indians, the indigenous inhabitants of the forest, are good and peaceful people struggling to survive after their tribes were subjected to great massacres that reached the point of extermination.

I asked him if he was from one of these tribes and where his tribe was. He replied: Yes, I am from the Tupi Guarani tribe. They were the first settlers of the Amazon rainforest. A crucial ethnic group of indigenous peoples in Brazil. They lived on almost all of the Brazilian coast when the Portuguese arrived. In 1500, their population was estimated to be 1 million people. We will spend a night or two with them and talk about them then. I felt a sense of security that the Indians whom we would meet and sleep in their huts were from the ones Vargo belonged to after this issue was a source of fear and anxiety for me.

He said that he would go to the city of Manaus to find the owner of our boat, so if you wanted to accompany me there to take a look at some of the city's landmarks, especially the Opera House, it is a vast building and one of the most important signs of the city's extravagant golden age.

On our way to Manaus, Fargo explained that the Amazon region, or the Amazon Basin, is located in the territory of nine countries: Brazil, Venezuela, Colombia, Ecuador, Peru, Bolivia, Guyana, French Guiana and Suriname, and covers an area of six million square kilometres. But Brazil alone embraces 70 per cent of those countries' total area of the Amazon basin. And this area in Brazil is covered with dense forests made up of giant trees with thick branches that block sunlight from below, and only two per cent of the sun reaches the forest floor. Hence, it is impossible to photograph in this area in broad daylight without using the "flash" light.

I felt quite happy with Fargo, and also a deep gratitude to the hotel employee, Silvia, for choosing this young man as my guide into the jungle wilderness. I wished her a happy life.

End of Rubber boom

However, the golden days of rubber soon passed. Another area of rubber appeared, competing with the Amazon, which broke Brazil's monopoly on the trade of this material, and thus eliminated the commercial importance of Manaus, an Englishman named Henry Wickham, who bought in the year 1876 seventy thousand seeds of the rubber tree at a price not exceeding one thousand pounds and succeeded in smuggling them from the port of Pelam On the Atlantic oblivious to the customs officials and claiming that they are specimens of clematis he takes to Queen Victoria. In London, the seeds were subjected to careful examinations in the Kew Garden laboratories and sterilisation operations were carried out on them; then, they were sent to Malay and planted there. Thus, Wickham eliminated Brazil's monopoly on the rubber trade after Malay appeared as a competitive producer and exporter in the world markets.

Emulsification of the rubber tree by inflicting wounds on its trunk

As for today, Manaus lives on the aid of the federal government. Besides collecting forest products and exporting them, there are no critical economic activities besides being a city free from customs duties. Therefore, it attracted some manufacturing industries, the most important of which are Japanese electronic products that employ cheap labour, primarily from Indians. The Amazons, whose miserable residential communities are noticeable on the city's outskirts, are neighbourhoods similar to the favelas in Rio de Janeiro but are poorer and more tragic than that.

My feelings were the same with the customs house and the lighthouse in the port on the Rio Negro. Its structure was brought piece by piece from England. They were built on a base floating above the water to suit the nature of the river, which reaches a difference in its water level of forty feet during and after the flood season.

**A schoolgirl at the Museum of the Amazonas**

Amazon Indians Museum

After that, I visited the Indian Museum, a modest old building with a local character that you feel familiar with. It is in harmony with what surrounds it architecturally and environmentally. Still, its content is miserable, nothing more than some daily necessities used by the Indians of the Amazon. It is a folklore museum. You feel that its establishment aims not to provide an accurate ethnographic picture of the region's people as much as it is to attract tourists and satisfy their exoticism. As you leave the building, you feel a deep sense of melancholy because the tragedy of the Amazon Indians is evident in the museum's contents, not for its richness and success in instilling this impression on you but for its poverty and failure in this role. What gives the most honest impression of the Amazon and its inhabitants is the luxurious port and the surrounding slum

Wild forest bounties

A world of movement, sound and smell is the central market of Manaus near the port. It explodes with the warm and varied colours of the forest products of plants, birds and animals. In it, you find the fruits of the forest along with the roots of its strange plants and leaves hanging from the ceilings and piled in dishes stacked in front of the shops, and cages that include birds of weird colours, animals of strange shapes, in addition to the various types of fish arrayed and displayed. In the port, you see the wooden boats emerging from the bowels of the forest loaded with bunches of giant green bananas, papaya fruits, yellow mangoes, and other types of fruits that you will only see there as they unload their cargo to the large ships that will take them to all parts of the world. The critical location of Manaus made it one of the most important ports of the Amazon, as it is located at the junction of two important tributaries of the Amazon, the Rio Negro and Solomons, so it is easy to bring products from vast parts of the jungle to it.

**Forest Bounties of fruits and vegetables in Manaus Central Market**

As you wander the streets of Manaus and its neighbourhoods, you feel that the birth and growth of this city were not natural. It is like giving birth to a fetus prematurely and then growing it on tonic drugs that maintain its health for some time, after which it relapses and does not return to its normal development. As a result, the city turned its back on the past, or rather the prosperous past turned its back on it more than three-quarters of a century ago. The city's prosperity was based mainly on the rubber trade at the beginning of the century.

The plantations of this tree were discovered by the Omagua Indians, attracting European adventurers’ attention in the nineteenth century. The invention of the car, then the story of the inflatable tire by Dunlop in 1888, were the main turning points in the city's history, but rather the entire region. As adventurers and merchants of opportunity rushed there and began to establish rubber colonies, the price of this material rose fantastically. With it, its production increased from 156 metric tons in 1830 to 21 thousand metric tons in 1830.1897 until today; as you cruise by boat in the small tributary of the Rio Negro and solimos River, you see the marks of the wounds inflicted by the rubber collectors on the trunks of the giant trees to emulsify them.

Fargo told me we shall meet tomorrow morning at 7:00 am in the cafe beside the bridge at the Harbour where our boat waiting to take us into the forest.