Sunset on the Amazon (Wikimedia Commons public domain image)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\u00a0<\/p>\n
After church services, we boarded a medium-sized motorboat and headed out onto the Itaya River, soon joining the Amazon River itself (or, as it is apparently sometimes still called at this point, with the Mara\u00f1\u00f3n River).\u00a0 The place where they join is easy to recognize, because the Itaya is blue while the Amazon is distinctly brown, roughly the color of coffee with cream.<\/p>\n
\u00a0<\/p>\n
Although I\u2019ve been to Peru once before \u2014 and also, very briefly, to Brazil \u2014 I\u2019ve never before been to the Amazon.\u00a0 It was fun, though, to muse that I\u2019ve now sailed on both the Nile and the Amazon within roughly the past month.<\/p>\n
\u00a0<\/p>\n
The scenery was exactly as I had always pictured it.\u00a0 The river is vast here, though smaller than it will become, and it is lined on both shores with jungle that is punctuated by the occasional small hut.\u00a0 I saw almost no people, except those on other boats.<\/p>\n
\u00a0<\/p>\n
We traveled for the better part of an hour, about twenty-five miles, downstream.\u00a0 Headed, in other words for Brazil.\u00a0 From Iquitos to the mouth of the Amazon, where the river empties into the Atlantic Ocean, is something on the order of 2300 miles.\u00a0 That would be a fun cruise to take!<\/p>\n
\u00a0<\/p>\n
We finally got off on the north bank, at a kind of resort or lodge called Ceiba Tops.\u00a0 It consists of clusters of individual or duplex cabins around a central eating facility, reception area, and swimming pool.\u00a0 It\u2019s in the midst of dense jungle forest and is quite beautiful.<\/p>\n
\u00a0<\/p>\n
I\u2019m looking forward to meeting the resident tapir, whose name is Cynthia.\u00a0 She is apparently very friendly and, since some critics, in their confusion, have pronounced me \u201cTapir Dan,\u201d I need to greet her and see whether she\u2019ll consent to have her picture taken with me.\u00a0 (Out here in the jungle as she is, she may not care about the social disgrace that such a photograph will inevitably bring upon her.)<\/p>\n
\u00a0<\/p>\n
This afternoon, we took a two-hour nature walk around the Ceiba Tops area with our local guide, whose knowledge combines having been raised in a tribal village roughly 125 miles upriver from Iquitos with, he says, a lot of time spent around scientists.\u00a0 Anyway, although the humidity was unspeakable, it was fascinating to walk through the rainforest with someone who can read the jungle like a book.\u00a0 We even saw the frogs and ants who provide two of the main ingredients for curare, the poison that certain tribes use on the darts of their blowguns.\u00a0 Given my notoriously vicious personality, such knowledge may prove useful not only for message board interactions but in future engagements with children, puppies, and bunny rabbits.<\/p>\n
\u00a0<\/p>\n
Incidentally, while I\u2019m thinking of it, I need to mention that one of those in our group is a retired member of the music faculty at BYU, a historian of music and a percussionist.\u00a0 So it was fun, in the museum of indigenous peoples in Iquitos yesterday, when he had the opportunity to play a set of the Amazonian drums that they have on display there.<\/p>\n
\u00a0<\/p>\n
Posted from Ceiba Tops Lodge on the Amazon River, Peru<\/p>\n
\u00a0<\/p>\n
\u00a0<\/p>\n<\/body><\/html>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
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<\/a>